I noticed in August a painful spot in my breast, and I emailed my doctor about it to see if I could get in to be checked out...but of course, being as awesome as he is, he didn't have anything available for months. So, I figured I had my annual exam 5 weeks from then and decided to wait (I won't wait next time, y'all). Well, then I had to reschedule the appointment because of a work travel extravaganza that took me away, intermittently, for 4 weeks. So, I finally saw my doc last Thursday. And he felt the lump too. I have all kinds of scary cancer in my family, but breast cancer isn't one of them. Since I know breast cancer is in the spectrum of things related to ovarian cancer (which my mother died from at age 51) I have been on birth control pills for more than 15 years of my adult life, and the rest of the time I was pregnant or nursing. The theory is that if you don't ovulate, you don't have fluctuations in hormone levels that result in your body screwing up and mass producing flawed cells. So, I wasn't too worried about the mass initially, and I assume it went away, or stopped hurting, because I didn't think about it again until the past two weeks when it started to hurt. Then I was dying to see my doc.
I definitely had Googleitis-the not-so-loving term people in the medical establishment have for people who self-diagnose by surfing the internet. But what I found suggested that my lump was probably ok. It was smooth and shaped like an oval, and pretty mobile. It wasn't hard, immobile, and didn't feel like the surface of a golfball (pocked). I went to my beloved doctor and he checked me out. He felt it too. And he hesitated and told me it "doesn't FEEL scary, but, with your history..." and he recommended an ultrasound of the mass (which tells you if the mass has a cohesion of new blood vessels (scary-that is the case with tumors), or if it is a fluid filled cyst (not scary), or if it is solid (scary-tumor)). So, now totally freaked out, I called to make my appt for followup. I couldn't be seen for FIVE VERY LONG DAYS. Time to try to put all the panic-driven monkey chatter out of my head.
Tuesday morning came. I had made myself physically ill from the worry of it all. Silly, I know, but fear is not based in reason...all my intellectual rationalizing helped not one bit in this situation (or any other when I perceive my life is in peril-like terrifying flights with LOTS of turbulence). It took an agonizingly long time to get in there (they told me they "no longer do just ultrasounds", and had to wait for the clinic to open to get authorization for a mammogram). I was in a private sitting area (there were a few of these, mostly separated by walls. but there was an open walkway between them by the windows) waiting, after taking off everything above the waist...and the windows faced the sunrise. There was a lady next to me just standing at the window, looking out at the sunrise, arms clasped behind her back...I wondered if she was thinking about how desperately she wanted to watch her children grow up too...or how she would manage to continue to take care of her family when she was being treated with chemotherapy, or how she would work being sick, or if she would die after fighting so.hard. and if her kids would be permanently, deeply impacted from watching it all unfold. I know it sounds silly to let these thoughts run free when there is no reason to think them, but you pray and you pray and you beg and negotiate with God in darker moments. Fear is completely irrational and overrides everything sometimes.
The mammogram was everything I heard-awkward, uncomfortable, and completely logistically illogical. How many angles can you breast flesh be stretched to take pictures of them? Especially when you don't have much left after nursing babies for nearly 3 years of your life? I also wonder-if you know people are predisposed to breast cancer-does it make sense to dose them with radiation every year after a certain age (all it takes is a trigger to get those bad cell to proliferate-and my thought is "let's provide fewer triggers"...)? I remind myself again of being convinced that we will look back at the way we diagnose and treat cancer as completely barbaric one day. I look forward to that day.
I waited, for what felt like eternities, while the tech ran the mammogram images past the radiologist. After forever and 15 days, she came back in and told me his opinion was that the mass looked like normal breast tissue. (WHEW!) She also said, to make sure they weren't missing anything, I needed to have the ultrasound I originally came for. So, I did. And it looked exactly like a lunar landscape, like it should. I couldn't help think about the fact that the last time I had an ultrasound, it was joyful-to see the baby growing inside that became my Adelaide. I couldn't help but think how things can turn on a dime, and those associations can become so negative, and how much harder it is to turn a negative perception back to the light after something ulgy stains it. I love that I can still think about ultrasounds with wonder and peace after Tuesday. I hope I always can.
I pray and pray that I have my dad's genes (acute, fatal heart disease) more than my mother's/brother's (long, drawn out, miserable cancer). Is that weird? I want to finish raising these girls of mine. Life is so fragile and precious.
Sean and I saw that Matt Damon movie about the woman who was in the Tsunami and nearly died and had a near-death experience (more lovingly, "NDE" in that subculture), and the filmmakers based her visions during her "death" on what they gleaned from researching NDEs (and it was interesting to see how people who have these experiences are perceived by the mainstream-mostly as new-agey nutjobs). It profoundly affected me because I remember a dream the 7th night after my mother died (the first and only dream I had of her after her death) and I asked her what it was like to be dead-what she showed me looked exactly like the place the woman in the movie saw as she was dying. It freaked me out for days-I always thought of my dream as a dream, not as being shown a parallel reality where she was existing, which is what I believe it was now. I hadn't thought about that for more than 16 years. In the dream, she didn't actually say anything, but I felt her tell me that the other side is "slow and sweet-like a dream at twilight". It was so beautiful there-all muted and shadowy and shades of soft blue. And I never worried about her again. She had returned home. That movie made me want to read more about that near death experiences, and I hadn't thought about it until I was faced with my own mortality, so I found some NDE stories to read. They are mind-bending to say the least, and seem to indicate that NOTHING that happens here is by chance...for example, I love what this guy says about the usefulness of disasters and how they corral us to common purpose. How beautiful. And it's amazing how similar these stories tend to be.
So, I don't cling to life because I am afraid of death. I think most of us cling to life because we feel like others depend on us so acutely that their lives will be diminished without ours. I suppose most of us have some fear about the manner in which we will die. Sean's grandfather had a beautiful death-a massive heart attack while kneeling next to his bed in prayer in his late 70s. Joan's father-in-law passed over while he was surrounded by family and friends holding hands and singing him off to Amazing Grace. He died from cancer too. My brother showed me how much staying has to do with willpower, and he stayed here far longer than he should until his wife finally gave him permission to go (5 minutes after she told him they would be ok, and that he could go, he left this world). His death was slow, and painful, and he just lingered for months and months and months, waiting to be told he could leave.
What the truth is seems to be based a lot on our perceptions, but I love the recurring theme in these stories and wisdom people seem to glean from their "hereafter guides" that we are here perfecting our souls (whether you believe that happens once or over and over is subjective). Not a new theme. The Buddhists and Hindus have been on to this for thousands of years...seems we are proving them right all the time with science and quantum mechanics and particle theory...that we are all part of God-little bits of the divinity dust that makes up everything that exists everywhere we are conscious of...what exists-and even the spaces in between what exists. Mike Dooley has based his whole business of public speaking and inspirational books on this very thing-that we manifest our own realities. We create what happens to us, knowingly, or unknowingly. I know this to be true in my own life-ask the right and honest question, and the answer rebounds out of the vortex completely. It is remarkable how that happens, but completely predictable if you are open to it. If I decide on an outcome, one way or another, that outcome comes to be. There are no accidents or mistakes. This is what defines our free will. Christians often say that God always answers our questions, but often in unexpected ways. I guess the goal is to become conscious of how we affect our manifested reality and focus our efforts on learning what we came to learn.
I passed a lady who looked like she was from Tibet the other day. She was in traditional garb, and she was very old. I passed her, and I looked into her face, and the second felt like days, and then her eyes crinkled up with her smile and she said to me, "Namaste", hands together at the top of her chest. Namaste, in our western translation, means "The divinity in me honors the divinity in you". It was a message from the Other Universes. These synchronicities happen all the time...if we are open. And sometimes when we aren't, we are slapped awake by tiny, elderly sages at a Rogers Park bus stop on our way home from work.. or with a life-threatening illness, or with some other shouting signal from the other side of here.
Namaste.
