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.