After a long Saturday of moving into a new house I spent Father's Day unpacking boxes and getting settled into the new place. I wanted to devote the evening to spending some time with Alex to show him how much I appreciate how much he does for the girls. The little ones are in Virginia with their Dad so it was just going to be me, Alex and Celeste. So I jumped in the shower to freshen up, that's when I noticed a difference in my appearance. I noticed that my left nipple had collapsed, it wasn't just a little, it was completely collapsed and I had never noticed it before. I'm not sure if it had been that way and I just hadn't noticed, it had been a very busy couple of weeks with my Grandpa's passing and funeral services. I know I had been living in fast forward during all of that so it is possible that it wasn't new, but Father's Day was the first day I noticed it. I did a self check on my left breast and definitely felt something hard and round in there. I did the same on my right and could tell an immediate difference from the left. Then I did the self check again. Then again. And again...kind of hoping it wasn't really there, kind of trying to validate that it was there. I even had Alex check when I got out and he could see and feel the difference. I felt scared right away, it was Sunday so I couldn't call for an appointment so my anxiety was in overdrive. Alex is a very calm and logical man, he told me not to freak out until we know it's something to be concerned about. Men are so good at compartmentalizing, I'm terrible at it! I obsessed over it all night, read WAY too much garbage on the internet and didn't sleep well at all. First thing Monday I called for an appointment with my primary, I've been going to Dr. Granato for years and absolutely love her. She practices out of the Scott & White Clinic in Leander, that's a decent hike from my house but well worth the trip because she is incredible. Being that she is so incredible...she didn't have an opening until the Friday of the following week and I knew there was NO WAY I could wait that long. So I accepted a Wednesday appointment with a doctor I had never met. I knew that it would be an anxious couple of days for me, especially because I couldn't see Dr. Granato but at that point there was nothing to do but wait.
I will say this. Last September I saw Dr. Granato for my well woman appointment and at that time she scheduled a mammogram for January 2018. I turned 40 in December of 2017 and she wanted me to have the mammo after that, it would have been my first. I have always been the kind of person that thought things like cancer won't wouldn't touch me, my line of thinking (and I'm not proud of this) was always something like, "ehh I don't need all those tests, I feel fine, things like cancer don't happen to me". I am so mad at myself for being so naive and just dumb. I never went to the scheduled mammogram in January. I think about that a lot now. How would this all look if I had gone? Was the tumor already there? Would they have seen an abnormality and been able to treat it less invasively? I know it's not productive to think those things but it is damn near impossible not to. If you are close to 40, recently turned 40, or even if you are younger than 40 with breast cancer history in your family, please talk to your doctor about your mammogram and be a more compliant patient than I was. It was one of my biggest mistakes and is one of my biggest regrets. I am going to teach my oldest daughter Celeste, she's 17, how to do a self breast exam. Do these ladies, do them. Do them in the shower, do them in bed at night, or first thing in the morning, just do them. Cancer is real, it doesn't discriminate, it doesn't spare moms with young kids, it doesn't give a shit. It hit me and my family like a fucking freight train and I carry some weight for that by not being proactive and responsible for my health. MOMS -- it's not ok for us just to take care of everyone else. It's SO easy to get consumed with the kids and everything that comes with parenting. But what an injustice I've done to the people I love the most by not taking care of myself. I beat myself up pretty good for that but I am trying to move past the beating and on to the "lesson learned" phase. I won't make this mistake again, I'm basically obsessed with boobs now LOL! I'm making light of it, but honestly, I am. My girls are now higher risk of having breast cancer because of my age and I will not let them make the same naive mistake I did. I am not a medical professional, infact I haven't had much of a medical history at all so I'm not in a position of giving medical advice at all...but telling everyone in my life to do the self checks, I think I am qualified to do that.
In closing for this section, I remember when I went in for the mammogram a few weeks ago there was a poster on the wall with a huge bra in the middle that was covered in Dum Dum lollipops and it said "Don't be a dum dum, do your self checks and have your mammograms". I thought it was clever and has stuck with me since, I was a dum dum. Don't be a dum dum, I say that with so much love, xoxoxo
Here's a link to a guide on how to perform the self check and an image of a dum dum bra, not the actual poster from the cancer center but the bra itself looks pretty similar:
https://www.maurerfoundation.org/about-breast-cancer-breast-health/how-to-do-a-bse-breast-self-exam/
