My D-Day

My first step on my walk with breast cancer, well, starts at the beginning: I go to my gyno’s office for a routine appointment. When she feels my breast, she says, “You have a lump. Have you felt it before?”

I reach down and feel it. Yep, there’s a lump an inch above my right nipple. It’s small, hard. Why didn’t I feel it before?

That afternoon I have a mammogram, soon followed by an ultrasound. It doesn’t look good. The nurse takes a long look at the monitor.  She hesitates then says it doesn’t look like a cyst, which would be smooth.  It looks irregular. The radiologist comes into the room and looks at the ultrasound. His brow creases with some concern. He runs the ultrasound wand over my right breast, armpit, and up to my collarbone. Wasn’t sure at first why he went up to my collarbone…apparently there are lymph nodes there as well.

He asks if we can biopsy my right breast and the armpit lymph nodes. Worry took hold of me, seeing how quickly he wanted to get this done. “Sure,” I said, not knowing how a biopsy would feel. I tell him to talk me through it. It always makes me more comfortable when I know what to expect. First, he sticks me with some numbing stuff. Then, like the sound of a staple gun, he marks the areas where he’s taken pieces of me, six to be exact: three from my breast and three from my armpit. I return to the mammogram machine to take more pictures.

He suspects it’s cancer but I would have to wait. Turns out, the lab is closed for Independence Day! It’s an excruciatingly  L-O-N-G three-day weekend.

It’s surreal. I spend three days held captive by my new tormentors: shock, panic, and denial.