Anxiety keeps sneaking up and slapping me in the face when I least expect it. Most of the time I feel somewhat normal. Brave, even. And then a little bit of the reality pokes through the denial veil I wear, and it occurs to me that they are cutting off the front half of my breast, and I don't know how to process that. I tried making a joke about the horizontal scar I will have on one side, telling my kids that I'm going to look like the winky-face emoji with my shirt off. At other times, usually when I'm alone, I totally freak out and have to work hard not to cry in fear. I've had plenty of surgeries--more than my share, really. All of those involved removal of things on the inside. The scars on the outside were tiny. Laparoscopic incisions are about a centimeter, and they heal nicely, both physically and emotionally. I'm not going to be able to hide from this and forget what I'm missing. I will be aware of it at every moment for the rest of my life. I'm honestly terrified of this.
When it's possible to distract myself, I do. I spent a week crocheting a pink bag to keep my notebooks in, and I finished that late tonight while watching season one of Game of Thrones yet one more time. It was nice keeping my hands busy, but now I need to find a new outlet for nervous energy. It has to be something I can stop and start with impunity, when I find myself staring out into space, trying to quash the rising panic. I need to make a fabric liner for the purse, so that the binders don't stretch it out, but that won't take very long. I have weeks to fill with something other than screaming.
Most of the time I'm fine, I think. I've convinced myself it is so, primarily because the doctors made it sound like it's all good, caught early, no chemo, yadda yadda. I just never gave myself enough time to get used to this idea. I knew for a year that I probably had skin cancer on the side of my nose before I was willing to have it biopsied and then removed. I never had time to think about breast cancer. It never occurred to me that I was at risk. I have no idea what made me imagine I was impervious. Did I think God would only give me a stack of autoimmune disorders, diverticulitis, arthritis, and reproductive system malfunctions, and surely that would be it? There couldn't possibly be more, right? Oh, was I wrong. I thought I learned this lesson a decade ago, when our military assignments got more and more remote, to crappier and crappier locations: Never, ever, ever ask out loud "How much worse can it get?" Fate takes that as a challenge.
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