A breast cancer saga unfolds…
So It’s October 14, 2024. I’m 38 years old and have just been diagnosed with breast cancer. My gynecologist is hugging me and crying, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” she keeps saying. I can hear her, but I can’t process what she’s saying over my shock. How could this be? I’m healthy. I take care of myself. I do yoga. I meditate. I have spent my whole life working on improving my physical and mental health since I exited my childhood and left home. I quit smoking. I don’t do drugs. I spent 7 years in a 12-step program. I go to therapy. I do Reiki. I’ve been to all the healers. I have stocked my brain with knowledge about alternative healing methods. I did the candida cleanse. I’ve taken ayahuasca and had revelations. I drink green juice, and I wear yoga pants to the grocery store. This isn’t my brand. What the hell is happening???
I begin to zoom back into the room from the tunnel of shock and enter the vortex of medical jargon being slung at me and paperwork detailing next steps. I can’t even deal with the fact that I’ve been having symptoms for years, and in spite of all my reporting of it, and all the imaging scans and tests… they never found anything until now, and what they did find was a LOT of cancer in my breast. Not a little, A LOT. I walk out of there bewildered and in disbelief.
The pathology report called it ER/PR+, Invasive Lobular Carcinoma, with a Ki-67 at 97, making this cancer aggressive with a high likelihood of recurrence. I didn’t know in that moment what that particular diagnosis meant or how it would come to haunt my life and make the journey I was about to embark on exceedingly complicated. But I would later discover that Lobular Breast cancer is a less common type of breast cancer, which has unique and troubling characteristics that make it hard to detect. It’s less responsive to chemotherapy and more likely to be diagnosed at more advanced stages because they can’t see it in imaging scans as easily as other types of breast cancer.
So I met with doctors, oncologists, surgeons, and radiologists at three different hospitals. There were some differences, but generally, they all said the same things. I had to get insured. I had to have a double mastectomy. I needed chemo. I needed radiation. I would have to take two months off work. I was fucking horrified. My body! My poor body, which had already been through so much in this life. The body I had finally come to accept and been working so hard to heal and clean up after growing up in a family that subsisted on processed food, religion, drugs, and trauma. My BOOBS! What about breast-feeding my future babies!?! OMG, what about babies? Can I even still have babies? And CHEMO? WHAT THE FUCK?!?! Isn’t that poison? Shockingly, I didn’t seem to care much about my hair, which still surprises me. I was more worried about damaging my body, which had become the focus and proof of my life’s healing work. How is this happening to me? I was really struggling to come to terms with this development, and I was having an even harder time integrating it with the life philosophy I had developed through all of my practices, which amounted to me being the primal opposite of someone who relies on western doctors, and the healthiest person I knew, and who ever exited my family of origin. I thought I had a sparklingly healthy body that would never get sick or age.
I will not lie to you, this was extremely emotionally and psychologically painful for me. It was really hard. I felt that everything I had worked for had been for not. I felt cursed. I felt victimized. I was scared, and I was deeply, deeply confused. I wanted to run away screaming. I was resisting the reality of the situation by throwing myself into research about this condition and trying to get insurance. It took me 3 months to get myself insured through emergency Medi-Cal with a plan that was accepted at any reputable cancer hospital. The first plan they assigned me to, sent me to a methadone clinic on Lincoln Blvd in Venice that didn’t have any electronic systems and used snail mail to get insurance approvals. I had to make an appeal to the CA state Ombudsman to get that plan removed before the standard 30-day waiting period, just so I could have surgery. It was a nightmarish time, and it was insane. I was so exhausted just jumping through all the hoops that by the time I got to the surgery date, all I could think about was just getting it over with.
I ended up going with USC in Downtown LA because they gave me the soonest surgery date. Another decision I would come to regret.