cancer door?

is there a cancer door?  and if there is, can you open it?  i've wondered.  and the women i've talked with about this have wondered it too.

we're not scientists, only women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer.  some are ten years out.  more than ten years.  five years.  though it remains in their psyche, as if it were yesterday. even though they try and put it behind them.  

everyone i've talked with about this has said the same thing.  'my diagnosis came after the most stressful year of my life.'


everyone has stress.  it's a kind of low grade constant, in varying degrees, at different junctures.  it's almost like a stress symphony, a kind of sound track in the background of your daily living. it's so a part of the everything, that unless you tend to focus on it, you don't always realize it's there.  

i can say a couple months before the mammogram there were some heightened things going on in my universe, which like most lives, is pretty typical. always the bitter and the sweet.

but this was different.

when i'd try to go to sleep at night, and things were quieting down in my body and mind, i'd notice a kind of current, electrical, in the right breast, where the cancer was later detected.  

it felt like a dull, low budget fireworks display on the 4th of july. it wasn't significant enough at the time for me to nudge the godfather and say hey.  i feel fireworks going off in my right breast.  he'd have said oh katy.  give it a rest.

but current is what it felt like.  i could trace it if i wanted to, as it was actually happening. at the time, it never occurred to me to think hey, this must be cancer. why would i have thought that, when forever, in my rookie mind,  i'd always thought cancer equaled a lump, and yet there wasn't one?

 you know those fireworks that shoot up in the sky, that leave a lit trail as it's rising, before exploding into it's ultimate 'destiny'?  that's what it felt like.

marcia said she felt this too.  she didn't have a lump either.

they say you can't feel cancer.  it's only a jumble of cells run amok.   but before they called it cancer, once they finally did, i called it current, electrical, exactly, almost exactly, like the 4th of july.

if we're supposed to 'listen to our bodies,' then are we also  supposed to make an appt. and tell our doctors we have fireworks going of in our breasts?  

tough call.  

paging the umpire.

xx katy