How Many Times A Day?

How Many times a day do you touch your breast? If you are like me, the answer is probably seldom or never. It had to have been a long time since I touched the particular spot where my lump has made its home. Yet here it is. Big as a walnut. How long did it take for it to get that big? Why did my ob-gyn oncologist miss it when she gave me a breast exam just a few weeks ago? Why after all this time of not knowing it was there do I find myself checking to see if it is still there?

My fingers know exactly where it is now. They go straight to it like the tongue exploring the place where a tooth once was. I check to see if it’s growing or changing. Is it more or less dense? Even if it disappears altogether, I will know it is because all the cancer cells leaked out of the pin prick holes left by the needle biopsies and even now they are spreading throughout my body. That is probably extremely unlikely and not how cancer spreads but the image persists. Those cells have been there for a long time but the difference is that now I know they are there.

Cancer can be so tricky and insidious. It can grow at a snail’s pace or run amok like a shipload of sailors set free after months at sea. I’m fairly sure mine would be of the running amok variety. Now I will have to imagine my tumor as a tight little brig holding those restless sailors inside until the surgeon can cut the nasty little bugger out with a full complement of sailor cells intact. Then they can run amok in a nice little petri dish in some lab. They won’t be feasting on me after all.

So the lesson here is this: Touch them, feel them, get to know then well. Examine your breasts as closely as you check out those crow’s feet around your eyes. Early detection is the best defense against breast cancer.

Now I’ll put my soapbox away for today.

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