The big news

So much has happened since my last post - where to begin?

Steven found employment! After 7 months unemployed, he was hired by ITT Tech as a "representative" (salesman in disguise) for prospective students. He's having to learn a lot and will be in training for a while longer, but it pays better than the job he'd had, and so far the people are not jerks to him. Also, the other rep who was hired the same time as him is Jewish, so for once he is not the only Jew. I think he'll do well at this job.

The other big news, which came 5 days after the job success, is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. How far along is it, what "stage" am I, has it spread to other areas... these are things we are trying to determine. I had a chest x-ray, blood work and a bone scan done Thursday, and this coming Thursday I go for an MRI of my breast and a ct scan of my liver. Then I don't see my surgeon until April 7th.

I'm not sure how to feel about my surgeon. Her name is Anne Wallace, she is very nice & empathetic, informative and patient. She seems like she knows what she's doing, but then again I have nothing to compare her to. I think I need to get a second opinion at least. I do not like all the delays there seems to be, though part of it is that the MRI had to wait until 2 weeks after Clare weaned in order to get a good picture of what's going on.

Yes, that's right, at 5 years old she was doing what all normal primates do at this stage of development. And she was showing no signs of wanting to quit. So now at bedtime instead of laying down and nursing her, I give her a bottle of warm almond milk and a massage. The bottle feels very strange to me, since I never did give her one as a baby (other than the medicine she needed as a newborn). But she has a need to suck and had no desire to suck on herself. Also, she was used to a bit of warm milk (human milk, not almond milk) as she drifted off to sleep, so I've tried to make it as similar to her old routine as possible.

I try to keep from dwelling on the idea that I have this awful thing growing in me that could cause my death. After all, aren't we all dying to one degree or another?

The hard part is when everyone's gone to sleep. If I'm not really really tired, I have a hard time getting to sleep some nights. Fortunately these are rare. It's 11:23 PM and I just took some calms, which should help.

It's scary, but I can't be scared. I have Clare an Steven who need me. They need me in so many ways.

And to fret & worry about the "what if"s doesn't make a lot of sense. because there's always the "what if" that's the opposite of what you're worrying about. What if everything turns out great? then you've just wasted all that time worrying when you could have been living joyfully. And my being freaked out or worried just brings the whole family down.

I want to be happy. So I am.