I Have To Get This Off My Chest

Yesterday I went to an MD for a follow up breast exam. No big deal right? Apparently no big deal medically. But I was nevertheless told that I should come back every six months to be examined (undoubtedly at a higher specialist rate) and should come back in 2 weeks for genetic counseling for being high risk for breast cancer and consider expensive gene testing that would not be covered by insurance. Huh?

The more I think about it, the more I think that all this practice wants to do is maximize the amount of money they can make off of me. My feelings of dis-ease with this practice began right when I was shown to the examining room. While the nurse who checked me in meant no offense, I was nontheless offended by her comment that "if I had to pick a kind of cancer to get, it would be a breast cancer." She espoused about how it was a really treatable disease and people are surviving it, though she quickly added, "not that I am saying it is a walk in the park."

One would think that an individual in the field of breast care would be better informed of the actual statistics surrounding breast cancer. Newsflash: women are still dying of breast cancer. Beyond that, after watching my sister suffer through diagnosis, waiting, waiting, waiting, surgery and a long and grueling treatment, I would never say that I would "pick" breast cancer.

I would like to think that this is an isolated incident, but I fear that breast cancer and the fear/risk of breast cancer is a very lucrative business. While I will go for mammograms and breast MRIs as dictated by my risk factors, I will not be returning to this practice. Sure, this has to do with my breasts, but I am going with my gut on this.

Girl Gone

For some reason, my gym teacher likes to refer to biceps as "guns." She also likes to refer to breasts as "girls." Lately, I have been thinking of what my older sister has been through, now that one of her "girls" is gone. It is really hard to believe what we as a family have gone through emotionally, and my sister, emotionally and physically, since February when we first learned that her surgeon suspected breast cancer.

The thing that has kept us going I think through the emotional roller coaster of her initial (worse) misdiagnosis, and her stroke, her long awaited mastectomy and lymph node surgery, has been a serious sense of humor. Breast cancer doesn't seem like a very funny topic, but we managed to make it that way anyway, so that we could laugh together and share that emotion, instead of the more traditional emotions of fear, grief and shock.

At the beginning of this journey, I would joke with her that she needed to keep me abreast of any developments, that she could talk to me anytime if she had something to get off of her chest. When it became apparent that she was in this for the longhaul, surgery, chemo et al, in came the chemo jokes. Whenever she forgot something we would accuse her of having chemo brain before she actually got chemotherapy.

In her state of shock, she let her roomie and I do all the research about her initial diagnosis and immerse ourselves into the language of breast cancer. Her initial diagnosis, was inflammatory breast cancer, the worst possible type of breast cancer. For almost a month, we were lead to believe that her cancer was IBC. One day she was on the phone with a friend or family member and she paused to ask me what IBC stood for. Without hesitation, I replied "idiot with breast cancer." It sounds really harsh as I write this, but she got the joke and laughed with me. Cancer and all its tons of information, drugs and darkness, had rendered her numb and unable to think. The only thing to do was to acknowledge this with a dose of humor and move on.

When she was held in limbo at Memorial Sloan Kettering for one month with delayed appointments and finally a last minute refusal to perform her surgery, we joked that we would do the surgery ourselves armed with a steak knife and a bottle of brandy. She would need to bring her own drink, the brandy was for the "surgeon."

Now with the surgery finally behind her and chemo half over, we have naturally moved on to the Kojak jokes in honor of her hair loss. "Who loves you baby?" Is our new motto. We also make a point of watching funny movies together.

Not every conversation is laced with humor of course, but we try to make the conversations as titillating as possible. We don't want to run out of jokes, because we decided that the person who can't see through to the humor in this is, well, just a boob.