Trigger Warning: This isn’t exactly about cancer but in the vicinity of. And there are some medical / bodily details mentioned which you maybe rather avoid reading about.
At the beginning of March, I was just two days away from the end of an appointment- and deadline-riddled period, looking forward to getting more unplanned time on my hands, to relax, to get things sorted and to prepare for the upcoming summer term.
And then I received a call. It was the unsympathetic, superficially friendly, gaslighting doctor at the breast center where I had just been for a mammogram.
When I started this blog/newsletter in 2022, I wrote,
The loss I was referring to was the removal of the inside of my right breast because a grade 3 carcinoma had spread there. One of the good aspects of this situation was that I technically wasn’t diagnosed with cancer because there were no known signs that the malignancy had travelled to other parts of my body, meaning I was dealing with a so-called carcinoma in situ. And, thankfully, my surgeon was an experienced, dedicated woman who did anything she could to make sure that I would suffer as little as possible, that the reconstructed breast she built using a prosthetic inlay would look relatively natural, and that the nipple was checked for cancer cells during the surgery and sewn on again.
In any case, this medical history is the reason why I have to have a mammogram every year, along with other regular preventive measures.
So now, only about 18 months later, I was being told that there was something suspicious on the pictures that had been taken, and I should come in for a biopsy.
What trauma does is that it throws you into a triggered state within a microsecond. And I flew into the first two stages of grief, denial and anger, at once.
I didn't believe what I was told, especially not by this untrustworthy person who had criticized me in every previous encounter for not having received radiation treatment, which according to official guidelines was not necessary for my kind of illness while radiation treatments happen to be how his breast center generates most of its revenue.
I first sought the help of my gynecologist in the hope that she could refute the threatening news. She reviewed the pictures together with another colleague but confirmed there was a half inch of micro calcifications just above the prosthesis, that is, in what little was left of my right breast. Such micro calcifications may or may not be caused by cancer cells. My previous carcinoma had produced them and this is how it was noticed. The problem with a biopsy, however, is that it could damage the implant. To be on the safe side, you would have to have another surgery, and I have already had a total of four of them on this breast. I could achieve a somewhat false security by having the nipple and the surrounding tissue removed. Then there would be no milk ducts left for cancer cells to settle in, right? But there are still plenty of other body parts left that could potentially become affected. And do I want to be turned through the medical meat grinder for the rest of my life?
It has dawned on me that as sure as I will die someday and in some way, there is and never will be safety from cancer. I also will never know what exactly caused my last and maybe new carcinoma. But there are some things I can do to at least improve the odds. I can steadily reduce known causes or contributors to cancer from my life and include known protective factors which as far as I know all fall into these four categories:
Nutrition
Exercise
Rest
Love & Joy
A major risk factor is my nervous system which is nearly always in a state of alarm. I have successfully started to calm it down with Vervain (Verbena officinalis as tea, homeopathic tincture and Bach flower). It took a while, but I am increasingly having good nights of sleep.
Of course, I am still seeking to get more information about my prognosis and my options, as well as an appointment with an onco-psychologist in the hopefully near future.
For now, I am doing ok. The summer term has started. I am focusing on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings on education, by which he more or less means something we today would call self-development, and next week my husband and I will be visiting Prague, which I am very much looking forward to.
“When our body breaks down, there is a strong, clear message that we cannot live as we have in the past. Therefore the health challenge becomes an initiation. We can seek creative healing or we can allow the disease to run its course. Either way we have to move through a threshold, toward disease or toward health.” Farida Sharan in Herbs of Grace: Becoming Independently Healthy.
Have a wonderful visit to Prague! I so appreciate how you continue to choose curiosity in your journeys of health and self-discovery