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Still Too Soon?

KimR5413
KimR5413 CSN Member Posts: 8 Member
in Breast Cancer #1

I think it was someone at Sally Jobe who officially delivered the news. The biopsy had come back positive (not in a good way), and I was headed to a surgeon and a couple other folks to get things under way.

As I’ve mentioned, J and I joke about everything. It’s something we learned from our parents. We warned each other about it. I warned him that I would be doing the same with this. I had no desire to dance around the subject, and we were going to hit this head on. He agreed.

By the time I left the office, I had already texted him that we were going boob shopping. “TOO SOON?” The way I saw it, I was going to have a mandatory boob job and we’d better decide what size and shape we wanted going forward. As I soon learned—by going on the internet, you know, because everything is RIGHT there—mastectomies were not that simple. I had no idea!! I always just thought there was a simple line between what was muscle and meat and what was the fat that made up our breasts. I had no idea of the complexities of the lymphatic system and how it could be affected. No idea that the reconstruction would take almost a year or that my tumor was resting on the muscle. What a pain in the ****! 

Then again, I had also received good news. This cancer was NOT in my lymph nodes. It was staying put so far. I also had a less than four percent chance of occurrence in the other breast. Also good news in the grand scheme of things.

I was getting ready to go out the door for work when a commercial came on. 

“When Jennifer Hudson wanted to lose weight, she went to Jenny Craig.” 

Without missing a beat, I spun around and said to J, “Well, that’s where I f-cked up. I went to Sally Jobe. …Too soon?”

We laughed too loud and too long and decided we were not right in the head. A hug and a kiss and I skipped out the door. I was off to work and was going to keep doing that as long as I could. I still really had no idea what was to come.


Lesson: Humor is good medicine. Just make sure you’re in front of the right audience.

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