a pit in my stomach, my inner chaos

Voila!  My journal finally recognizes me as who I am.  I got some unloading to do.

It's been too long in between my mammogram and the biopsy.  All last week I was googling my symptoms and re-visiting all my breast cancer websites that I had weaned myself from, making lists of pros and cons and having heartfelt conversations with my DH - being a nervous nelly in general.  The past 3 days have been alright.  But today, I get my mammogram results in the mail.  Yep.  They still mail it out even though I KNOW what the results are.  But it still hurts to see that "abnormal mammogram" box checked.  And now my stomach hurts.  (which isn't helped by the fact that I've been eating horribly - saw that letter and ran to the Triscuits and cheese).

My biopsy isn't until Friday.  Gary is taking me.  Men.  Get this, he had taken off Thursday last week for when I was scheduled to get my nip made.  Even though I told him he didn't need to, it's an easy procedure that'll take less than an hour and no anesthesia yadda, yadda.  Since that was cancelled, he went to work, but he didn't take off for Friday for my biopsy.  I asked him why and he said that it was just a few needle sticks.  Hello?  Don't worry.  I gave him a graphic description of these so-called "needle sticks" that he won't soon forget.  Needless to say, he's taking me on Friday.  I'll let him sit in the waiting room for 2 hours with those images running through his brain... Is that cruel? <bwah-hahahaha>

I really can't fault him though.  I think he was sheltered too much from the gravity of the situation and the depth of emotions I experienced last time.  My parents were here through most of it, so I expressed a lot to them, and here online and privately to God.  Plus he's great at denial.  I am too.

My life is reflecting the inner chaos.  I've not been a good housekeeper.  Well, I'm not a good housekeeper, I'm just worse now.  I'm behind in my Bible reading - which is probably the most devastating because I need this time more than ever.  I'm staying up WAY too late.  Like I already said, my eating is horrible.  I've just about finished up all the leftover pinata candy.  I have some other obligations that I've let fall to the side.  I'm just doing the bare minimum to get along.  I feel like life is in limbo.  I need to get answers NOW so I can get on with it.  I wonder how long it will take to get the pathology report.

Oh, I guess I haven't voiced yet my deepest concerns.  I can feel two lumps in the areas that they are concerned about.  One feels like a small frozen pea and the other feels like a frozen blueberry.  I say frozen to refer to how hard they are.  Hardness scares me.  Yes, I know already they are solid, so therefore they would feel hard, but you know, they are not the soft hard.  Yes, total paranoia here.  The pea one concerns me the most.  You know how they have those breast models that you can do a practice feel on and they have the good lumps and the bad lumps.  Yeh, I feel the bad lumps on me.  Again, it could be paranoia.  I hope it is. 

One of the popular DCIS statistics is that if there is a recurrence within 5 years, it's 50% likely to be invasive.  Now this wouldn't be a recurrence, because they removed that breast so this would be classified a new occurance if it is cancer.  I think even if it's DCIS again (which I doubt since this is such a different experience), that would move me from stage 0 to stage 1 automatically.  I'm not sure, I'll have to google that one.  Anyway, it's just a number, but ugh, it's not the safe place I've been.

So now you know what's going on in my head.  I hate cancer.

I'm sitting here putting together my Komen team and in the back of my brain I'm thinking that I could possibly be starting some form of treatment by the time the race happens.  Meanwhile I've thought of a cute little slogan to put on our team t-shirts.  How's that for a facade?  Life goes on, I gotta go on too.

Here's my shirt idea.  I thought up the phrase "freshly squeezed" (in reference to mammograms and/or self exams).  Okay, after looking at cafe press, it's not terribly original - but kinda original from the BC standpoint.  I thought about making the word squeezed big on the ends and narrow in the middle, like it's being squozed. (I know that's not a word) And then putting an orange on the end with a little pink ribbon on top.  There COULD be two strategically placed oranges, but that would be tacky (hilarious but tacky) and I'd have to explain it to my boys.  So I wanna keep it somewhat innocent.  But I don't have appropriate software to design this thing, nor do I have the creativity and know-how.  It will probably be another brilliant idea that never comes to fruition - I have a lot of those in a pile somewhere.  (similar to the Komen team link I was going to put on the side of this journal, but again, I don't have the know-how)

It helps to have gotten some of this stuff off my chest.