Thursday, October 23, 2014

Wish I could talk to myself a year ago...

I wish I could reach over and tell myself a year ago that everything would be okay.

It was confirmed that it was cancer a year ago yesterday. The next day, I was called in to get a chest X-ray and an ultrasound of my abdomen. Of course they were looking for mets... Such a scary thought. I was crying so much in the waiting room that they put me in the back, feeling sorry for me. October 23rd was a very scary day for me!

The problem is that early staged cancers, well, we don't know what's ahead. We can't know at diagnosis. I had to wait for the pathology. People say "You didn't need a mastectomy because your tumors were so small" but I correct them. They're only half right. Some really small tumors can contain some very aggressive cancers. The HER2 alone will justify chemo. I was HER2 negative but I'd find that out later.

But I just didn't know. I just felt snowed under and like it was out of control, out of my hands. Dealing with something scary in a foreign language, far from friends and family who could help. 

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