As They Say, A Bit of Personal News

Buckle up, it ain't great.

A Happy Place

The Year of Our Lord 2020 was the worst year of my life. My dad died in February that year. The pandemic hit in March, and health problem after health problem cropped up for me. Some, like the six weeks I had diverticulitis, were quite painful, and others, like frontal fibrosing alopecia complete with a receding hairline, were quite distressing. The medicine I take for a minor heart arrhythmia went sideways at the same time and sent me into actual depression, helped along I’m sure by all the other stuff that was going on. It was a crap year all around, but I switched out the heart meds which took care of the depression in a few weeks, found the secret sauce to getting my hair to grow back, put the rest behind me, and moved on to feeling like myself again in 2021.

Not to be outdone, 2022 stepped up and said, “Hold my beer.”

The long and short of it friends is I have been diagnosed with breast cancer. We’ve caught it very early, it’s very small, and doctors are confident it is likely Stage 1 and confined locally. Of course, we won’t know until after surgery whether any lymph nodes are involved on the microscopic level, but according to what they can see via ultrasound of the nearby lymph nodes, everything looks fine.

The past few weeks have been something, and not something I ever want to do again. BUT I’m OK now. In fact, I’m more than OK now. I know the size and scope of the problem and have something of a plan in place for the first stage of treatment—aka the surgery. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have a serious illness, but I’m also incredibly grateful for modern medicine and sensitive screening tools that can detect these things early enough to knock them out before they do too much damage.

My cancer was found during a routine mammogram screening, something I’m careful to do every year since breast cancer runs on both sides of my family. I followed all the rules:

·       Don’t smoke (check)

·       Drink alcohol in moderation (check)

·       Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables (check)

·       Maintain a healthy weight (check)

·       Exercise regularly (check)

And cancer came for me anyway. Turns out I could have lived a sedentary life of culinary debauchery and ended up in the same spot. I’m trying not to be mad about all the biscuits and gravy I didn’t eat. But despite the fact that I did what I could to reduce my risk through things I could control, I have several risk factors that I couldn’t, and they caught up to me. <Lecture Warning> That’s why it’s important to keep up with your cancer screenings even if you are as smug as I was about “living right.”

(I don’t know if I have any of the “breast cancer genes” yet, but I qualified for genetic testing. If you are related to me and therefore swimming in the same gene pool, as many of you are, I’ll be glad to share those results with you offline when I get them.)

I’m a planner by temperament, so the not knowing what is coming is the worst part. I can’t put a surgery date on the calendar until initial testing—MRI, genetic testing, etc.—is completed. I don’t know what post-surgery treatment with the oncologist is going to look like until after surgery is complete and all the biopsy results are in. I have no idea if I will need chemo and won’t know until I meet with the oncologist, which can’t happen until after the surgery I haven’t been able to put on the calendar yet. I’m putting fun things on the calendar for the summer and have no idea if I will be able to do any of them, which is exceedingly frustrating. We can’t do any long-range planning because we can’t plan the next step until we get through the step we are on. As a person who goes through life leaning on a color-coded Google calendar on my smartphone to keep up with things, I’m about to go bonkers. Also, I currently have the schedule of a 90-year-old woman—doctors’ appointments all the way down.

I’m learning to let go a little while I focus on controlling the things I can. In one of life’s little ironies, one of the things that distressed me most about the prospect of losing my hair to alopecia was people thinking I was a cancer patient. And now, well, I’m a cancer patient looking at the prospect of losing my hair for real if chemo gets put on the docket. And you know what? I’m OK with it. I’ve had a couple of years to wrap my brain around what life without hair might look like, and it doesn’t scare me, plus I’ve already bought some really cute hats.

I’m not looking forward to the next few months of recovering from surgery and whatever treatment comes after, but I’m going get through it, come out on the other side, and get on with living my life.

As far as Sweet Tea goes, this is not going to turn into a cancer blog. It’s bad enough I have to live it; the last thing I want to do is write about it. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I started Sweet Tea as a bit of therapy for myself as I was climbing out of the pit that was 2020. It helps a lot to have fun, positive things to focus on, and I’ll continue writing about things I love about the South and Southern culture and books and whatnot. Maybe not so much about food, but we’ll see how the chemo hits if it comes. I might give a health update from time to time as things change, but it will not be the focus of this newsletter. Other than telling people about my diagnosis, I’m planning to keep a lot of the details private. I may not get a newsletter out every week, but I’ll keep writing as I can. I’m working on a larger writing project that has been bumping around in my brain for a couple of years, so a lot of effort will be going towards that during my recovery time. I’ve also set the goal of finishing Daniel’s baby book before he graduates from high school in May.

Everyone always asks what they can do when this sort of thing happens, and really and truly the best thing you can do is pray for me and my family or send happy, healing thoughts my way as your worldview dictates. Keep reading, keep chatting with me in the comments or IRL (that’s In Real Life), send me lists of so-bad-they’re-good tv shows to watch. I love to hear what y’all think about whatever it is we are talking about. We are (I am) staying focused on the positive and the good news we got in the midst of the not great news. We have caught this very early, and it is very small. We have known about this diagnosis for a month now, and we really are at peace with it while steeling ourselves for the unpleasantness to come. I am going to be OK.

(Stephen and I have a call and response thing where I say, “I’m going to be OK,” and he responds, “You are going to be OK.” It’s sort of like “May the Lord be with you…And also with you,” but just for me personally.)

This is a crappy bump in the road, but I’m going to get through it with the help of the great medical team I am assembling and love already and the support of my people. I don’t want to do this thing, but it appears that I must, and when all is said and done, I’m going to be OK.

Until next time,
Karla

Another Happy Place