Many people call this a journey. To me a journey sounds fun, like a vacation, or new destination. This diagnosis is not a journey. It is a battle, a fight, I am declaring war against this evil. This is not a fight I expected at age 40.
It's amazing how drastically things can change in a month... your outlook, your priorities, your attitude. In mid-December, I realized I still needed to tackle my yearly mammogram. I went (as I did every year) without a care. Just get it over with until next year. Surprised does not even begin to cover what I felt when I got a call two days later asking me to come back in for more testing. Friends reassured me, this happens all the time. Those machines have limitations. I hoped that's all it was. I was wrong. two days later was the biopsy. I was told they would know results in two more days and would put a rush on it since it was right before Christmas. Two days turned into four days and I hit full blown panic mode.
Then it came. The phone call that would change my life. "I'm afraid the spots we looked at came back with cancerous cells. It is breast cancer. Triple Negative Breast Cancer to be exact. It is in the breast tissue and the lymph node. The cells are Grade 3, meaning they are actively dividing." The phone call from hell that just kept getting worse and worse. That was a Friday. Monday was Christmas Eve, they scheduled my first appointment for the day after Christmas. Merry Christmas to me.
The next week and a half would be a whirlwind of appointments with Dr's I had never heard of, procedures I never dreamed I would have, a plan of action that was foreign to me, and more love and support from family, friends, and coworkers than I could ever imagine.
So here I sit, a month and three days from that terrible phone call, anticipating the first phase of treatment. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy. Since the tumors are aggressive, the treatment has to be just as aggressive. 2 cycles of chemo, surgery, radiation, then maybe chemo again. This is definitely not a journey. This is a knock out, drag down fight. I am not on a journey, I am preparing for battle. I am adding another title to my life. Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister, Friend, Teacher, WARRIOR.
