I Praise You In This Storm

My mom had been sick for years with a birth defect of her heart. It was stressful watching her life, it was a rollercoaster. One day she was doing well the next thing you knew they were telling you she might not make it another week. Work was crazy; I had been promoted and was running the company I had been with for over 20 years. With the promotion came a new level of stress, managing people, purchasing, paper work and really late nights. With the sorrow I felt for my sick mother I buried my head in my work and there I stayed.
On August 27, 2007 my mother went home to be with the Lord. I retreated into a shell and stayed for the next year….
On November 30th 2008 due to the economy they closed the door on the business I poured my heart and soul into. Now what?

Life Goes On

On a summer night in 2006 I had went to the YMCA an attended a swim aerobic class, feeling refreshed but exhausted I quickly smeared lotion on my entire body, as I touched my right breast I felt something strange and different. Some type of familiar but indescribable fear shot through my soul. Not again?
Next morning I called the Breast Diagnostic center to make an appointment, I quickly let her know my concerns and she assured me that if I felt pain in the area it was most likely just a hormone thing. And after all was done that was exactly what it was. My breast had fibroids in them, harmless rubbery lumps that would swell and shrink around the different times of the month. So life went on.

Pink

My favorite color was pink and I hated it that everything that promoted breast cancer was pink! I had this sense that if I stayed away from anything that had to do with breast cancer awareness that I would not be affected by the disease. Don’t ask me why, just some silly thought I kept. So if I stayed away from pink, I started menstruating at 12 years old, had my babies young and breast feed each one of them, I had done everything right to put me in a low risk category for getting breast cancer. Besides breast cancer doesn’t run in my family, no one as far back as I knew had ever had to deal with breast cancer.

Lumpy Boobs

It was 1985 when I had a routine physical exam that sent me to the mammogram machine. That was a joke; twenty five year olds don’t need mammograms. Well the doctor decided it would be a good idea because my breasts were dense and lumpy whatever that meant? Nothing came of it and I went about my life. For some reason that mammogram haunted me, but why.
As the years went by I started having my yearly routine mammogram and every time they would scare the crap out of me! They could never just do the test and send me on my way, they always had to do an ultra sound or have the doctor look at the results to see if we needed to biopsy one of these lumps that had been there forever. No one really ever talked to me much about why they always had a concern and I always just wrote it off to lumpy boobs that they weren’t sure of.

My Story

I started blogging when I returned to school. I had no idea what I was doing and had to create a short blog for a grade. I still know little about what I'm doing, but I will learn as I go. I'm now going into the fifth month of my cancer and have had quite a rough ride. I'm tired of the TV, my Kindle, and staring at the ceiling. I haven't felt like doing much more, don't get me wrong I have had a few good hours and even a couple good days. So, for my friends and family, I decided to put it in writing!