The "C" Word

You call it a lot of things to avoid the "c" word.  I told Daniel we should call it Lucille.  That sounds funny and innocuous, right?  Tonight, though, it felt like a big black dog that accompanies me everywhere I go.  Like Harry Potter's Grim, except minus the forecast of doom and death, I hope.

But it is what it is: cancer.  To be more specific, it is invasive ductal carcinoma.  It's the most common type of breast cancer there is, affecting 80% of the 180,000 women each year who are told that Lucille has parked her unwelcome Buick in one of your precious baby-feeders.

In some respects I am lucky.  I am lucky because I found it in the first place.  It did not raise its ugly head on my mammogram in February, or even on the diagnostic one I had just over a week ago.  I simply found something "that didn't feel right" before we left for vacation, made the (difficult) decision to wait until we got back to check it out, and up until the last minute, received assurances from every doctor involved that it "was probably nothing."  A biopsy was performed under low suspicion of abnormality, and only then did the dog lope into view.

We are at the very beginning of this journey.  Pathology reports are valuable commodities and hoarded as they become available like treasure maps.  Knowledge and a clear path are what we crave more than anything, but for those we must wait.  Waiting is always the hardest part.

At the advice of some really good friends who have lived with the Grim, we will update this blog with any news as it becomes available.  We love all of you and want you to know what is happening, but it will sometimes be exhausting for us to keep everyone informed.  Forgive us when we tell you too much; forgive us even more when we need to pull away and regroup as a family.

Thanks, and love to all,
Kristen