Last spring I had a health scare.
So many of us do if we are lucky enough to live past our 30’s, and so many of us have robust support networks (many through this gift of a place we call work) that we can filter our stress and news and questions through.
So many of us find comfort in the stories this sharing solicits: “This happened to me/my friend/my mom . . . and all was well.”
Well my most recent confrontation with my mortality came as many women’s do: with my first mammogram. (I promise not to talk about my boobs on this blog. Well not too much anyway.)
I got the call-back for the second visit and had such certainty it was nothing (I had been warned at my first visit that this was common for first-timers . . . they needed to get a lay of the land, a map of the territory) that I delayed for a few months until I got a call back from the office: “have you scheduled your follow up yet?”
The morning of the follow up, I had a tight but doable schedule; 8am appointment and my first meeting was at 10am. Surely that was plenty of time. However, the quick second mammogram turned into a quick ultrasound check with a tech and then after the second radiologist entered the room for a consult (yes, both radiologists were most definitely SA moms) I began to get a sinking feeling I wouldn’t quite make my 10am. My matter-of-fact radiologist that clearly had the most seniority looked at me kindly: “You know what, I don’t like the look of this and I’d like to go ahead and do the biopsy now. Do you have time? Let’s just go ahead and get it over with.”
I was the type of deer-in-headlights one can only be when your right breast has been seen/inspected by ten strangers in one morning. I kept looking around the room and seeing the word “Cancer”, like literally on a poster, on their name tags, etc. They should really do something about that. I stammered: “Do you think I can still make it to my 11:30?” and they said, “sure, if you feel like it.” She was right: a shot of heart-rate-inducing lidocaine with epi, a vacuum assisted suck of tissue, and voila! “Julie, it’s either cancer or a complex sclerosing lesion. We will find out in 5 business days or so. Try not to worry until we know more.”
I drove without thinking to work where I dumped the day’s events on Rev. Annie and headed off to a lunch meeting.
It is a gift to work at a place that feels safe in the middle of a storm.
I got the call that Friday morning, 3 days after the biopsy and was immediately overcome with gratitude for not having to wait for the weekend. It was the good one: NOT cancer, but a complex sclerosing lesion. She still wanted to get it out. It was considered high risk, and she wanted to test the entire thing to make sure it was entirely benign. I balked. The biopsy was benign! This seemed like overkill. I fought my husband about it. I compiled a lit review using medical journals I found on google scholar. See?! Some suggest that women have too much surgery for this particular lesion, and it is common to show up when you are in your 40’s. I just had my first mammogram too young! Can’t we just watch that spot rather than take it out?
The problem was that every person with actual medical knowledge in the field I talked to said to just get it “cleaned out.” I am an excellent google scholar navigator. But not that excellent.
I reached out to a surgeon that was in my insurance and the moment I mentioned a family history of having a grandmother that died at 48 of ovarian cancer, I was whisked away to genetic testing. A few weeks later with the magic of science I was blessedly reassured that I don’t have any of the problematic genes that worries doctors the most. I was told my risk category now went down dramatically. Still, there was the matter of that surgery, which I, true to form, put off. I didn’t want it to ruin the end of the year. I didn’t want it to ruin swimming in June. I didn’t want it to ruin my 20th anniversary. I didn’t want it to ruin our epic vacation hiking in the Canadian Rockies. When I ran out of things to ruin, I finally settled on July 15th, as the perfect nothing date: not too close to the start of the year to mess things up but also close enough to have lots to do on my computer while recovering a few days at home.
I don’t know if this comes as a shock to anyone, but I am literally the world’s worst patient. I am simultaneously overly dramatic (I am going to most definitely die b/c I’ll randomly be allergic to anesthesia), overly confident (see google scholar search above), overly dismissive of advice (pain meds/shmain meds), and overly impatient (no WAY can I rest for a week before going back to the gym.)
This is why God chose to teach me a lesson I’m pretty sure the day of my surgery, which began with a bang of waiting two hours in a tiny holding cell in a hospital gown because the radiologist performing part 1 of the procedure (inserting a wire to guide the surgeon) was unexpectedly busy. I can handle one hour of waiting with absolutely no communication. After that I think a random nurse heard me pacing the tiny area and asked if she should call my support person. “YES!” I shouted. Poor Justin. He enjoyed listening to me rant about best practices in medical care and how ridiculous it is that doctors are treated as god-like deities and patients are cattle in a barn meant to wait and bow down at the feet of these all-awesome PhD’s. I had visions of the radiologist simply sleeping in, or having a leisurely breakfast with her other rich doctor friends at Primos. (This, I’m sure .. . I think, was unfair.) And what was UP with the lack of communication from the nurses in the unit? Couldn’t they give me an update of some kind? An apology? A reassurance? My speech was punctuated with my loud stomach rumbling because, after all, now it was 9:30am and HOW IN THE WORLD do people skip breakfast every day?!
The benefit of all this waiting was that by the time the ultrasound tech came to get me a lot of my anxiety was replaced with anger and “let’s just get this show on the road” and I audibly shouted “YAY” a few decibels too loud. I received lovely compassionate care from the aforementioned villains, and while getting a wire inserted in your breast may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, I did get a good chuckle when both the nurse and the machine got accidentally sprayed with blue die by the radiologist. (Sorry guys.) I did try to convince the radiologist to give me a second-third opinion that the surgery wasn’t needed. “I would be happy to cancel the surgery right now!” Alas, she wasn’t helpful.
A few mammogram images and I was off (wheelchair-bound) to the surgical wing of the hospital, where I managed a much cheerier disposition as I waited two more hours for my surgery, thanks to a window with sunshine and access to food network, which of course my stomach growled in rhythm with Chopped, etc. Fun fact: they always do a pregnancy test right before even if you promise there is no way a baby is living in there. Also fun fact: I have like the worst veins ever and felt a tad scolded when my vein “blew”. Ughhh. Nevertheless, I remained more cheery. After all, the wire was in there. I couldn’t get out of it. When the nurse came in for final prep and I shouted “Wheee” as she moved my bed up higher, she said “this is your first surgery isn’t it honey” and then audibly gasped when I told her we had three kids and my last surgery was a C-section with my 16 year old. I could tell this was a judgment, not on my youthful exterior, but on my general immaturity, which she had caught me in an array of silliness as she burst into my room several times.
Then, at approximately 2pm, nearly 7 hours after arriving at the hospital, it was GO TIME. They put these weird compression things on my legs and the last thing I remember thinking is “uh oh only one of them is working, should I tell—-” The next thing I knew I was waking up, entiretantlly clear of mind. My other fear was that I would wake up super disoriented or scared, but no, in turns out general anesthesia is MUCH better than the lighter sedation that I’ve received for other procedures. I felt like my alarm went off at 3am for an early flight, but all of my wits were intact. I felt the sudden competitive urge to impress my recovery nurse with how quickly I woke up, so I started chattering uncontrollably about the metallic taste in my mouth, I asked questions about how many people were in the room, I asked if I had a tube down my throat (yes), and most importantly, “was I slow or quick to wake up and be conscious?” The news we will all be glad to know is that I was on the “fast side of average.” I felt strangely vindicated.
I then spent the final 45 minutes in the hospital trying to impress both my second recovery nurse and my husband of my remarkable lucidity. No loopiness here! I also downed two bottles of water, despite feeling a bit weirdly bloated in my stomach, Apparently over a liter of IV liquids will do that to you. I was a tad humbled once they had me sit up; OH there’s the lightheadedness, but felt well enough to chat it up with the young and delightful nurse wheeling me to my car, who knew the Wares well from church. 🙂
Of course, nothing says post-surgery like a poke bowl, so I begged Justin to drive me there. I insisted on walking in to order it myself, and then fairly instantly regretted that decision. THe menu was readable, but also a tad incomprehensible. Rather than making a million substitutions and asking twelve questions like normal, I just ordered the first thing I saw and sat down.
Aftermath
I’m not one to invest much energy in how I look. Stephanie Garriga, perhaps the Queen of impeccable style and being put-together at all times, has reminded me, “I just LOVE this thing about you, Julie, how you don’t try at all!”
I can’t argue with her. She’s right. There are just too many other things that consume my attention, near the top including “how I feel” (did I get enough sleep? Did I eat good food? Do I have enough endorphins from my morning run?) as well as my very Type A “what did I produce today” (did I answer those emails, write enough words, strategize enough strategery, help enough in general.)
So it struck me as very strange that when I looked in the mirror the morning after my surgery and saw an unrecognizable shape of a right breast, I burst out crying.
I’ve read about this phenomenon, particularly women that have to have full or partial mastectomies. We have strange relationships with these lumps of fat, perhaps especially by the time we enter middle age. What began as objects of curiosity and even (for some, ha!) sexual power, metamorphosed into magical feeding/nourishing machines that nurtured-soothed-quieted three humans from infant to toddler. To be quite honest, since my kids passed nursing stage, I haven’t thought much about my breasts, except for the occasional amazement that some women actually want to have surgery to make them larger. They were simply parts of me that I had to strap down so they wouldn’t annoy me on my morning run. I’ve never had the kind of body to make people swoon from my amazing curves, and if I’m giving an honest assessment of my boobs, they never were all that impressive.
But in that moment, I stared unremittingly in the mirror at my right breast, the purple-orange bruise along the side and the deftly-made incision beneath, and I saw a stranger on my body. She was kind of jaunty on one side and also smaller than I remembered on the other. Sure, I knew less than 24 hours out I was certainly also seeing the effects of swelling, but there was definitely both something missing and something . . . off. I mean it was still a breast, but it wasn’t MY breast. I cursed my insecurity through my tears and texted my husband: “do you promise to still love me if . . .?”
When he got home that evening he took my hand and laughed as we strolled uncharacteristically slowly around the neighborhood on our nightly family walk. “That wasn’t like you to be insecure about your body.” “Ha ha,” I said, turning around to try to explain my emotional outburst to Lucy.
The thing is that in all of my emotional energy about this surgery, all of the putting off and all of the expenditure of “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS the initial biopsy was BENIGN” and all of my google scholar searches and lit review compilation and all of my insistence that this was too-much-too-soon-overkill I had forgotten that I was having what is the equivalent of a lumpectomy, except that it isn’t cancer, so it’s called an open surgical excision. I had forgotten that the tissue being taken out, even if it wasn’t cancer, would still alter the appearance of my body.
I think we do this a lot in life- assume that just because the pain doesn’t hurt as much as it could, just because the worst has not happened, the things that happen to us mean nothing at all.
I do not pretend to have learned something valuable from all of this. I still argue with my husband that my lit review was right, that the surgery was the wrong move. I kind of regret the fact that I had the mammogram in the first place. I wonder if the newer machine they were using led to a chain of very expensive, annoying events.
Still, I learned a few weeks post-surgery that my breast tissue was decidedly not pre-cancerous (and apparently composed of lots of milk ducts, thank you very much to my three children that nursed me like a cow). Now I have genetic testing in hand that says I’m less likely to get breast cancer than I am likely to get it. I know now that I can indeed survive general anesthesia and that it actually affected me way less than I thought it would. I can go a few weeks without running and I don’t die. So there’s that.
Maybe most importantly, when I run into someone at work and they have a stressed or hollowed-out look in their eyes, I have more imagination to think that there may be a host of things going on about which I know nothing. We are professionals, sure. We are colleagues. We are teachers and administrators and business office folks and maintenance workers and chefs and so on.
But we are bodies too.
