Day of Diagnosis

At this point it had been a scant few weeks since I first found the lump. I had my biopsy done and was just sitting around, icing my boob, and waiting for results. I wasn’t to terribly concerned since everything I had heard to this point was, “no big deal, don’t worry about it, blah blah blah blah blah”. I spent a whole extra weekend then I was supposed to just waiting in the dark. My mom and Kris’s parents were both convinced that not hearing anything was actually a good sign. If it was bad news they would have acted on it faster and I would have heard something. Taking all of this advice, and keeping a steady intake of anti anxiety medication, I was hanging in pretty well. Plus I was so young there was no way that I could conceivably have anything wrong. It was just a funny lump that was all.

After the weekend that stretched on forever, I finally got a hold of someone at my doctor’s office. I was informed that my results were in, I had an appointment that evening to tell me said results, and I was told to bring a friend or family member with me to the appointment. As soon as the lady informed me to bring someone along, I felt like my stomach dropped out of my butt and I possibly blacked out for a few minutes. Thank god I wrote down the appointment time before she said that because I don’t remember a single thing after she said the words “bring someone with you”. The whole rest of the day was a huge blur. I’m not sure what I did in class, I don’t know who I talked to or how I got to the doctor’s office. It was just like I was on a little island in the middle of a huge swirling wind storm. Things just blew past me and I was just in a haze.

That afternoon, I met Kris and my dad at the doctor’s office. Now in case you didn’t know, my preferred way for dealing with most anything in life is by laughing at it. Luckily my two companions for the appointment fully understand this fact very well and we were able to make light of the majority of this situation. I can clearly remember sitting in the exam room, cracking jokes about my dad ruining Kris’s family’s thanksgiving, when the doctor walked in. I was laughing on the exam table. My FNP made a joke about missing the harry potter costume, everyone was stifling some laughter, and it was everything seemed okay. Without missing a beat, she sat down in front of me, she put her hand on my knee, and told me,

“You have cancer.”

Never in my entire life did I think I would ever hear those words, especially about myself. It was so crazy abstract thing that people had in shitty lifetime movies. It was an afterthought in women’s health commercials. I knew that my supervising teacher had battled with it 2 times and my friend’s mom had cancer but that was the extent of it. It was something I knew was real, but was never going to be real to me. It was just a thing, I knew it was bad, but it was never going to be a part of my life. It just wasn’t possible. Everything that I had done to this point was just simply to confirm what I already knew, this was nothing, I was okay, no big deal.

I don’t know what happened after she told me I have cancer. I guess I shed a few tears, at some point Kris came over to hold my hand. My dad asked some questions, I honestly have no idea what was said. It was like I had fallen into some fake world. Everything around me was the same but somehow completely different. I had no clue what anything meant, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me next. Was I going to die? Was I going to spend years in a hospital with a bald head and tubes sticking out of my body? For about 2 seconds I remember thinking, hoping, that they had read the results wrong, and that this was just a mistake. That passed as quickly as it entered my mind. It was real and this was my life now.

It kind of felt like a slow motion version of a camera shot you see in shows sometimes. It’s when a camera pulls away from a person while zooming in on them at the same time. I have no idea what its technically called but it gives this cool effect of things moving and changing when in fact nothing in the shot is moving at all. When I found out my diagnosis, nothing move but it felt like everything was suddenly different. It’s crazy to try and explain but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

The only other thing I can remember is walking back to the car, looking at Kris, and just saying “well shit….” I had no idea what to say about it then and honestly right now I still don’t know what more to say about it. Sure I have more medical and procedural knowledge I can draw from, and that’s how I tend to steer my conversations when people ask me how I’m doing. Honestly how I’m doing though? I’m still not sure how to answer that. Sometimes I’m okay, sometimes I’m sad, sometimes I’m just pissed off that this is happening to me and I don’t understand why or what I did to make this happen. I will probably never know the answers to those questions, but that’s how life is sometimes.

I’m feel like with talking to various doctors, fellow survivors, and loving well wishers I’m doing alright. I still laugh, in fact I’ve made more inappropriate jokes since I was diagnosed then I have in a long time. I’m still moving and functioning well, and there is absolutely no point of me going into the fetal position and just crying all the time. I’m still confused, and I’m still learning a lot about my diagnosis and what it means for me. But it is absolutely incredible how far I have come in just over a week.

All I know for sure is I’m going to kick cancer’s ass. I might go bald, I might lose my breasts, I might be sick for a while, but this isn’t going to be forever and I’ll be damned if I will let it consume my life.

How did this happen? (time before my diagnosis)

In the continual conversations with all sorts of medical staff, the most common thing I hear is some mixture of sad sounds and the phrase “but you’re so young”, but there’s not a lot I can say about that other then “thank you?” and a thumbs up if my hands are free.

The second most common occurrence is the phrase “how did you find out?” This is how.

The end of October (2013) I was finally home from a long day of work. Now I don’t know about you, but after running around chasing children all day I love just coming home, throwing on yoga pants, and just sitting on my butt with my dog for a little bit. The absolute best part of this whole experience is the moment that you can finally take your bra off. I have tried to explain this phenomenon to guys before but I think unless you have breasts, it’s impossible to understand. So I popped my bra off and was just moving the girls around a little bit when I felt something weird. On the outside of my left boob, it felt like there was a weird small marble just hanging out with the rest of my breast tissue. Being the foremost expert the way my boobs feel, I knew that this was not a regular occurrence, but I filed it away as “oh that’s weird” and kept on with my day.
The next day, I checked again and it was still there, and it still felt weird. It began to bother me a little at that point, but not enough to want do anything about it. It wasn’t until that evening that I even mentioned it to anyone. Poor Kris thought we were just getting Subway, and out of nowhere I shouted out “I FOUND A LUMP IN MY BREAST AND I THINK ITS NOTHING BUT ITS FREAKING ME OUT AND I’M COOL” After some silence a hug, Kris just asked that I make an appointment for the next week to have a doctor check it out. All I wanted to do was just ignore that it was even a thing, but he was right so I took the first available appointment to get my breast checked out.

It was Halloween

I had my first beast exam done while I was dressed as Harry Potter.'

I regret nothing.

My FNP (family nurse practitioner) checked me out, and really all she could say was that it was not normal and she didn’t know what it was. Being the wonderful woman she is, she got me an appointment the next day to get an ultrasound, a prescription for Xanax, and some kind words to not freak out since it’s probably nothing. At this point I finally told my mom about what I found. She immediately drove up from Bandon to come with me to the ultrasound.

The ultrasound is a pretty uneventful process. If you don’t know, it’s the exact same thing they do to pregnant ladies to see their babies growing. In my case, I just got to see the inside of my boob for the first time (it would not be the last). It was just grey and white lumps until she rolled over the bump. It’s a pretty ominous thing to see a huge black mass in the middle of your boob show up on a screen. Even thought it was a little spooky for me, she didn’t seem too concerned. After I was done and had wiped all the goo off myself (they do not joke around with that gel, it was everywhere!) the doctor finally let me know what was up. He said he didn’t know what it was. It was such a relief to get that new info. He told me that it’s most likely nothing. That because of my age, the smoothness of the node, and my good health, it’s probably nothing, and I have two options. I can either wait around for 6 months to see if anything changes, or if I want to be cautious and know for sure, I can have a biopsy done. Given the option of having a needle take chunks out of my body or just hanging out for 6 months, obviously I chose the needle. I can get really anxious not knowing what’s happening and feeling like I’m not in control of my life, so it seemed like a good idea to go ahead and just have the procedure done.

One week later I was back at Salem Radiology, in the same ultrasound room, once again hanging out without a shirt on. The doctor was running late so I spent about 30 minutes in the dimly lit room, just lying on my side waiting around to be jabbed with a needle. He finally arrived and gave me a quick overview of what he was about to do, and then pretty much just jumped right in.

The procedure is pretty straight forward. The ultrasound technician keeps her little wand thing right on top of where the lump is. You seriously have a front row view of everything happening and the picture is surprisingly clear. The doctor uses the image to place a larger guide needle into the mass. They then use that guide as a pathway to getting the biopsy needle into different places of the mass without having to pierce the skin in multiple areas. Once the doctor has the biopsy needle in place, it makes the crazy loud sound like a mousetrap snapping shut to take the sample. It takes two samples from each place making that noise every time. They take samples from multiple sites of the lump. No big deal, right?

As far as pain goes, it is pretty unpleasant. They numb you up with local anesthetic so you don’t feel the needle going in, but you can feel the pressure and movement happening inside your body. They are piercing and squishing and mashing your boob around and it is not fun. I was hanging in there alright until things got underway with the biopsy needle. For some reason I decided it was a good idea to be watching the monitor as the needle was going into my body. I’ve always had a pretty strong constitution for medical stuff. I’ve watched surgeries, I’ve treated weird injuries on children at camp, and I’ve handled a lot of gross stuff in my time. None of that means shit when you realize this is your own body and that needle you are seeing is going into your own skin. I instantly felt like I was going to pass out. I just closed my eyes and tried not to think about the awful feeling of a needle poking around inside me. Oh god and that snapping sound it makes when it takes the sample just makes me queasy to think about even now. It also didn’t help that the position I was in had my arm above my head and my head was leveled above my heart so all of my blood was draining out of it. It was not an ideal situation.

I made it until just after the second set of samples was taken. At that point it was just too much for me. According to my mom, I quietly muttered something like “I’m gonna throw up”. Things went black for me for a few moments. I was told that my face went white as a ghost and my pulse got really faint for a bit. My next recollection was having the tech putting a cold washcloth on my forehead and just thinking “shit, I still have 6 more samples to give, this is the worst”. As soon as my pulse and color went back to normal, the doctor decided to only take 4 more samples (woo, best news ever) and I decided to just suck it up and think about breathing for a while. It was a wholly unpleasant experience and I thought I was going to vomit on the doctor a few times, but I made it through. As soon as the needle was out, I curled into a ball and just wanted to sleep for a few hours. The doctor offered me the few kind parting words of “you realize this was just being really cautious and that you probably have nothing wrong.” Thanks sir. It took about 20 minutes and my mom’s help to get up and dressed, it was kind of a struggle. I know I’ve heard plenty of people who have had a biopsy done and just dance off to work later that day, no big deal. I am NOT one of them and spent the next two hours sleeping on the couch with Rory. From there it was a nice combination of icepacks and pain killers for a few days.

I had the operation done on a Tuesday, and was told I would have results on Thursday, Friday at the latest. I spent a whole week waiting for them to come back. During that time it was just like a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind, but I was so convince that I’d be fine. Everyone I had talked to said there was almost no chance of me having cancer. My results were taking longer because there was no urgency since there was no chance something was wrong. I just never thought that even with finding a lump it could actually be cancer. Obviously I was very wrong. I’ll go more into the big moment on the next post, but it was an awful awful day.

This rambling post went on a lot longer than I was expecting, thanks for hanging in there with me. If you saw the length and said “screw this I’m scrolling to the end”, here’s the short version

Found a Lump

Got an ultrasound

Got a biopsy

Got very bad news.

Welcome to the cancer blog!

Well, I threatened to do it, and here it is. I have created a blog for updates with my cancer treatments. I'm assuming that if you've found your way here you know who I am already, but in case some poor soul is looking for solace on the internet and has stumbled here, allow me to (briefly) reintroduce myself.

My name is Amelia. I am 28 years old and I teach kindergarten at an awesome elementary school in Salem Oregon. I have a very loving and supportive boyfriend named Kris, and a slightly neurotic but loveable dog named Rory Calhoun. I'm a runner, slightly obsessed with nail polish and nail art, love shiny glittery gold things, and like playing the piano and guitar. I spend my summers working at the greatest summer camps in the world and have made the best friends in the world there. I have considered my life to be pretty normal until about a month ago when I found something weird, but i'll get into that more in the next post.

My hope for this blog is to be a place to let people know what I know about this disease. I will be sharing way too much about doctors appointments, personal feelings, fears, hopes, good things and bad. I apologize if anything is too much or an over share, but this blog is just as much to help me make sense of this mess as it is to let people know whats happening.

If you ever have any questions on anything, I am an extremely open book. I would also just like to state for the record that I do not have any sort of medical degree (aside from my hard earned 1st aid / CPR certification) and hope that anyone would contact a medical professional instead of letting anything I say sway their opinion of certain procedures or practices.

This is just me, and my incredible journey of battling the tumor that stole Christmas! (that was another brilliant suggestion for the name of this blog by the way)

(This is Kris and I lost in a forest, typical)