The Frightfully Exclusive Club I Never Wanted to Join (But Did Anyway)
Some Things in Life Aren't by Choice
(NOTE: Please forgive my absence last week. It’s been a difficult month, to say the least. I usually love October with all its autumn glory ending in Halloween fun, but this year is different. Things are finally getting back on track for November, and I’ll continue my ‘Intriguing Stuff to See in Cleveland’ piece next week. But let me explain further with today’s post about why this is an October I’ll never forget.)
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to get a cancer diagnosis?
I sure have. I’ve known many people over the years who received this terrifying news, and each time I wondered, “My God, what must that feel like?”
I don’t have to wonder anymore.
Well, that’s not true; let me back up a bit. I had skin cancer in 2017, probably due to excessive sunbathing. In my day, lying out in the sun to develop a dark tan was a thing. The darker, the better. We’d slather on the Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil, which smelled deliciously of coconuts and crank up our boomboxes pretending to be in St. Tropez versus small-town USA.
The adverse effects of prolonged sun exposure weren’t yet known. But I’m not gonna blame anyone else. Once the risks became public knowledge, I continued my sunbathing ways, although using sunscreen to ward off potential sunburns.
When I reached my 50s, I suddenly developed a teeny tiny grouping of three ‘freckles’ that formed a pyramid on my inner cheek. It was quite small, and I chalked it up to the tanning bed I began to visit before the summer season started. (Gotta get that base tan, so I don’t burn!)
At a later visit to the dermatologist for a different reason, I inquired about having the mark on my cheek removed. She zoomed in with a light and asked how long I’d had the ‘lesion.’
“About five years,” I responded, surprised to hear her call it that.
“And how long has that dark spot been there?” she questioned.
I’d noticed an even smaller dot in the freckles a few months earlier and related that info.
Much to my surprise, she said it needed to be biopsied. And to my greater surprise, it came back as melanoma, the most dangerous of the four types of skin cancer. Fortunately, mine was in situ, which means it was only in the epidermis (top layer) and hadn’t spread any deeper.
Still, for an itty-bitty spot no bigger than the size of the period ending the previous sentence, my incision looked like this:
So much for ‘healthy’ tanned skin.
They told me immediately that it was in situ, would be excised in office, and wouldn’t need any follow up treatment. I would recover fully, so I never got scared or worried.
Fast forward to the past month and what I’ve experienced is far different.
The autumn is typically when I do my annual medical screenings, so I had a mammogram in September. I received a letter afterward saying they needed additional photos and scheduled me for another appointment.
A mammogram looks like an x-ray: white, black, and gray tones.
Breast tissue is composed of:
Milk glands
Milk ducts
Supportive tissue (dense breast tissue)
Fatty tissue (nondense breast tissue).
When viewed on a mammogram, fatty tissue appears black or gray, while dense breast tissue (and cancer) appear white.
This photo illustrates the four categories of breast density. Groups C & D are considered dense, accounting for 43% of women over 40.
Unfortunately, the higher the density, the more white they appear, which more easily camouflages cancer. Some years ago, I was called back for a repeat mammogram (I’m a dense kind of girl) and luckily found nothing. I don’t know if the first images were poor quality, but I escaped unscathed.
Not so this time around. I received a letter saying that additional imaging was necessary, and I returned on October 6th for an ultrasound. They confirmed what showed up on the initial mammogram: enlarged lymph nodes in the axillary (armpit) region. A biopsy was scheduled for the following week.
The word ‘biopsy’ carries a certain heaviness, at least in my vocabulary. Needless to say, I was terrified. Several lymph nodes on each side of my clavicles had been enlarged for a while, but I thought it was due to psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that popped up in my later years. Because I hadn’t had any flares of this pesky skin rash, I assumed my body was fighting hard, hence the swollen lymph nodes.
Lesson for today: don’t assume anything.
I underwent the biopsy on October 13th and learned five days later that I have something called Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia/Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma.
That’s the bad news.
The better news is that as one of the four most common types of blood cancers, it progresses slowly, and symptoms requiring treatment often don’t appear for years.
I had my first appointment in Pittsburgh, opting to travel outside my small town for what I hope is the best care possible. Teaching and research hospitals are always up on the latest science.
My doctor tells me there are multiple types of treatments available, and one targeted specifically for this type of blood cancer.
“Side effects?” I queried.
“None,” he responded with a smile. “You may never need treatment at all.”
This leukemia strikes the 55+ crowd. I suppose he said that to let me know that some people go as long as twenty years and end up dying of other causes.
“But, if and when you do need treatment, we can manage it,” he reassured me.
I have a few destinations on my bucket list, but this wasn’t one of them. Obviously, I’ll write more about this new journey (I didn’t want to take) as the story unfolds.
I posted a photo of my newly cleaned-out pantry because it’s one of the first things I did after getting the news. I’ve meant to do this for a long time: ditch outdated products, wipe down shelves, reorganize items, etc.
I suppose it has to do with our human need to manage all aspects of our lives. What do we do when we suddenly find things spiraling out of control?
We look for those things within our world that we can regulate and govern. It gives us an ordered sense of security and makes things feel possible rather than improbable.
For me, at that moment, it was the pantry. Who knows what else I might accomplish and learn in this process?
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Thank you for sharing this. Stay strong.
Oh gosh. Sending strength. Amazing post.