Over twenty years as an Air Force spouse, offering up my home and talents to an ever-evolving cadre of fellow travelers, I have collected an enormous variety of entertaining paraphernalia. I have more than a dozen platters, scores of fancy bowls in every shape and size, cheese boards and knives, wine glasses, beer glasses, whisky glasses, and more specialty utensils than I could ever count. Most of them have a story for me. I don’t want to ditch them, not by any means. But they take up storage space, and I start to question my economic choices when they sit around in the cabinets doing nothing. It takes a lot of metaphorical spoons to make a big dinner for our group every Wednesday night, and while I’m really good at budgeting, it does add up to real money once in a while. Some nights I encourage pot luck, sometimes I let one of the kids run the show. Then nights like this come along where I choose a low-energy, high-cost menu that sends me digging out all those fancy platters and cute side bowls and cheese knives and honey dippers.... “Cooking” was easy. I had to chop and pour and carry plates downstairs over five or six trips, and that was it. Other than the stairs, this was one of the easiest meals, while also being among the fanciest with the best variety for every taste. Charcuterie night for the win.
The meal was planned for weeks, but it felt like a spontaneous celebration. I got great news this morning. I was graduated past yet another milestone in my breast cancer journey. For the second time this week, I was in the cancer center for follow ups. My surgeon has just ported her practice over to the cancer center, so not only was it a little weird to see her for the first time since May, but also to see her in the exam room covered in the artwork of the oncologist’s young children. She looked over my chart to see what had happened since she worked her magic on me, asked why it took so long for radiation (they said chemo first, duh), and then she checked to see how my half-breast had healed. She was sympathetic when I said I was uncomfortable with how the scar had formed corners on my breast, and she agreed that when the plastic surgeon gets ahold of me, he will be able to put a prettier shape on things, and to create a faux nipple to replace the one that was removed. They will then reduce the right side to match. The surgeon and the nurse-advocate I spoke with repeated what I’ve heard from multiple people: I will never regret having a reduction. I can’t wait (although I will need to wait at least until March). I’m looking forward to better posture, a chance at less back pain, and to feel comfortable and confident going braless for the first time since college. There wasn’t much of a chance that the surgeon was going to tell me I wasn’t a candidate for reconstruction, but it was still a non-zero chance. I am so relieved and happy to have this one last puzzle piece in place. The journey was hard, but it was not nearly as rough as it could have been, and I am on the very last lap, I think. What a good day to hear such news.
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