Another fresh hell

I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 39 years old, when I went in for my baseline mammogram. At that point in time, the recommendation was to start getting mammograms at 40, and who knows what told me to go a few months before that. It was a pretty out-of-character move not to delay something so unpleasant, but then again I didn’t know how truly unpleasant mammograms were just yet.

What the doctor found was a tiny bit of cancer, really just a speck, but definitely cancer nevertheless. Though most of the malignancy had been removed during the biopsy, I’d still have surgery—a lumpectomy, to catch anything that had might been left behind in the margins, and removal of some lymph nodes, to make sure it hadn’t spread. And then seven weeks of radiation after that. My close friend Lexi had been diagnosed with a more aggressive breast cancer than mine just months before me. She went through surgery and chemo, and did radiation too, all the while planning her funeral in her head (she is very happily still with us). I knew I was lucky to get off comparatively easily, but lucky is not what I was feeling.