![]() Covered in white sheets, it sits like an invited but bothersome guest in the center of my living room. ![]() Then, I’m on my “raft,” the borrowed recliner I’ve been sleeping in since my surgery. Friends who have had cancer told me to expect this, and once I experienced it, my childhood pal’s words came rushing back, like that river’s current she described all those years ago. I remember the first time I felt it I was having an MRI-guided biopsy not long after the initial diagnosis last spring, and while there were several people in the room - the very kind nurse keeping a warm and steady hand on my back, the technicians positioning me and calibrating their machines, the radiologist waiting with her probe - I felt it, the unique loneliness of a cancer diagnosis, people’s words and actions being heard and felt from a distance, through a scrim. Now that I’m a month out from surgery and visits have slowed and my husband and sons are back to their routines, I spend long stretches of alone time at home. Second, mine is an early form of a highly treatable disease.īut in these last several weeks since my surgery, a bilateral mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction, I’ve felt that sense of being on the raft alone. First, of course, it’s a quarter-century of cancer advancement later. My cancer - invasive lobular carcinoma in my right breast, possible sneaky lymph node involvement on that side (more on that in a second) - is nothing like my friend’s. But you’re alone, borne away by the current. She described having cancer as (I’m paraphrasing) being on a raft in a rushing river, while everyone you love is shouting at you to paddle back to shore. A metaphor from a long piece she wrote for Glamour magazine sticks with me all this time. In the short time between diagnosis and demise, she wrote - a lot. Unlike me, she found her voice far earlier than I did. Hers, which first appeared as a mysterious swelling in a muscle in her lower back, was either diagnosed too late or was too aggressive for the treatment available at the time. Now, more than 25 years later, it is often treated successfully. Her malignancy, Ewing’s sarcoma, is more typical, albeit still rare in children and adolescents, and vanishingly uncommon in grown women. When I was 30 years old, one of my closest friends - we met when we were 12, the day I switched from my Catholic elementary school to the local public junior high - was diagnosed with cancer.
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