Denial?

I wonder if I am in denial. I am not really programmed for denial. I have always looked for the worst possible outcomes of most life experiences. I have a couple of nicknames that celebrate this trait:  "Eeyore" and "Amy Little" (as in Chicken).

I've been waiting since I was 24 years old to get breast cancer. I was prepared. There were times when I was so anxiety ridden about getting breast cancer that I couldn't eat or sleep for weeks. Those were days in my mid to late twenties. Then I moved on to AIDS. During the early 80's I took my temperature so often, looking for that "low grade fever" I kept reading about, that work colleagues would sometimes walk into my office and catch me in the act. So humiliating. Every cough, nose dribble or sore throat were significant harbingers of impending doom. I was a study in health anxiety disorder.

I remember the morning I found the tiny lump in my breast that would change my world, sort of. It was shortly after the holidays. I had had a very busy couple of months working hard to enjoy the newly emptied nest. I was busy with work, dates with my husband, socializing, and traveling. Our Christmas holiday was an especially festive time that included lots of eating and drinking that made me feel guilty about how I had treated my body. I frequently prided myself on eating healthfully, exercising regularly and treating my body with respect. So, as kind of a punishment for bad behavior, I decided that I deserved a really thorough breast exam, no short cuts. There it was, a little pea slipping around near my nipple. I knew it was not a familiar lump. A week later the tests began and here we are.

I think I behave better handling a disaster than I do anticipating it. I remember the night my husband and I dropped our five-week old son during a weary late night hand off gone wrong. At the time we were on an island off the coast of Maine. We hired a private plane to take my son and me to the nearest hospital on the mainland. My husband, an optimistic, emotionally consistent sort of person, stayed behind to take care of our two-year old daughter. During our telephone conversations that night, an inadequate connection between me at the brightly lit hospital and him at the quiet, dark island house, I was shocked to sense that I felt completely confident that our baby would be fine  while he seemed less certain.

I usually feel pretty confident about my coming out of this predicament alive. But then I start reading other peoples' blogs, written by women who had similar or better prognoses than I have. I read about their recurrences, their renewed anguish over a revised diagnosis, an ever more toxic treatment regimen and the amplified threat to life. I feel the need to check these blogs every day to make sure these people keep posting. If they live and blog, I reason unreasonably, so will I. I am sure that some of you may do this with my URL too. It's okay. Maybe it works both ways. You keep checking. I'll keep blogging.

P.S. More info on the RSS feed business. Many thanks to Robert and Kimberly! xoxoxox

Turns out you CAN create an RSS feed for this site. Simply add: herpositive.blogspot.com/rss.xml  to your RSS reader (browser or email program). 

Or, if you use Google Reader, you may subscribe to this blog through that service, which will automically issue notice of updates.

Thank you for reading.