I try to be a logical, rational decision maker. I reason my way through an issue, sometimes drawing a timeline or decision tree on paper to help me visualize a logical conclusion. It is important to me to make good decisions and I can drive myself nuts trying to do so.
It's hard to make a logical decision with breast cancer. The question before us is to have a bilateral mastectomy or to do the chemo and rad, get mammograms every three months, and hope for the best.
I'm lucky enough to carry a gene that gifts me with a possibility of up to 75% (depending on what you read...) of cancer recurrence. That would seem to tip the scales, no?
On the other side of the line, I also have a tumor on my ovary, so having a hysterectomy soon. If I have a mastectomy AND a hysterectomy, they'll be cutting out every thing that makes me a girl. Or will they?
What makes us girls? I'm smart enough to know it's more than boobs and ovaries, and those things are just the physical. If only the matter were so simple, though.
You know what scares me about all this? It's not the fact that my 42DDs will be no more or that I won't be able to have more children. I don't want any more children, having the first one completely cured me.
It's the anticipation of the surgeries and recoveries. Really? Am I really that much of a coward that I am more worried about a little discomfort than of learning to live with a flat chest? 'Fraid so.
Dig a little deeper. The real fear? It's the fear of not finding the courage to do this. I'm afraid I really am a coward.
A friend pointed out the upside the other day....if I have reconstruction (yet ANOTHER decision that must be made), I can request perky 20-something boobs rather than the tried and true ones I have now.
Now there's a thought...
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