I am a marked woman. Inside my right breast is a titanium clip the size of a sesame seed that doctors deposited after a recent biopsy. It’s there to show doctors what area was tested after a mammogram came back showing a tiny speck that shouldn’t have been there. But I like to think of it as what links me to the many other women—and we are legion—who have had to go through the same procedure.
My body dislikes the clip. I am sensitive enough to feel something foreign and inorganic is there, taking up space, irritating soft tissue and causing phantom pain all around the breast and even into my armpit. And because it’s close to the surface, my fingertips can just detect it. But one day soon that clip will be removed along with the abnormality and the strange itchiness I feel will cease.
Then I will join another group of women who identify themselves with banners, badges, t-shirts and ribbons done in a color I detest almost as much as the clip. It’s one that reminds me of the impossibly proportioned Barbie and her disease-immune, nipple-free hard plastic breast cones rather than the power of collective female strength. Contrarian to the core, I am and will always be the big-boned blue-green girl, but one grateful to join forces with that sisterhood regardless of how it identifies itself.
The diagnosis I received that gained me entry into that group is one I never expected. I am a vegetarian who exercises regularly, doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and goes to bed early as a monk. I’m prone to stress, but even that is something I constantly work to mitigate on a daily basis with meditation, occasional yoga and very physical activities like swimming, biking or hiking. Indeed, there’s no history of any other such diagnosis in my family: I am the unicorn.
What I do know I’ve always had—an eternal issue with estrogen dominance—is perhaps what caused the abnormality. Too much estrogen has caused other conditions, like the severe endometriosis that plagued me through most of my reproductive years. But I don’t think too much about that these days. A fellow sister of the Barbiehood warned me to not go tearing down rabbit holes for answers I’d never find. What I have can happen randomly. Which is part of why the condition in general causes so much fear. Unless there is a definite genetic connection—and in my case there was not— there will never be complete certainty why abnormalities happen, especially in otherwise healthy people.
There’s one small speculation I do allow myself. if I had not been as careful as I am, had not avoided processed foods and drinks, had not rid my diet of excess sugar a year-and-a-half ago—would the tiny bloom doctors saw on my mammograms have turned into something more insidious than the tiny in situ thing that it is? My suspicion is yes: the sugar I love but no longer eat in quantities larger than a few teaspoonfuls a day and only in its most natural forms, produces fat cells…which produce estrogen.
I try not to speculate. It’s much easier to just work on preparing my body for the journey ahead. Fortunately, there won’t be too many lifestyle changes I’ll have to make apart from those that are necessary for treatment…which, much as I don’t want it to, will simply take up time: first to heal from surgery, then to rest from any prophylactic therapy I receive. But from here forward, I’ll not have the luxury of thinking that 2 + 2 always equals 4 just because it always has.
The body has its own rhythms, its own logic, its own reasons. It will do as it will, even when we believe we are giving it the best care. Besides which my particular body is older. The vitality and vigor are still there most of the time. But this vessel of mine has long passed the age when I can simply leave it to its own devices and expect all will function well and without occasional intervention. Many—if not most—women who actually get the disease are over 55 and/or post-menopausal. Check and check.
A clean family medical history had lulled me into complacency. I almost decided to skip the mammogram that caught the abnormality, especially since my blood panel had come back cleaner than it had in years. I hated all the tests and wanted to run screaming from the radiologist after the biopsy. I am very wary of doctors and the medical profession in general, both of which tend to treat symptoms (the more drugs the merrier) rather than try holistic approaches (which take more time) first.
Sometimes, though…sometimes they actually get it right. And sometimes, they actually do care. When I didn’t immediately respond to the request for a follow-up—the denial was intense, this can’t be real, surely there must be some mistake—the radiology lab tracked me down like a target. With phone calls first, then letters. There was wrongness in my mammogram, a wrongness that took me almost two months and a distance of an out-of-town trip to finally acknowledge.
They saved me, not from the dark bloom in my breast but from my own damn self with the hard medicine of truth I didn’t want to swallow. Early detection means less demanding and life-disruptive treatments. I was marked, yes, and by a tiny dot of the unthinkable. But I will be able to get back to normal sooner and with less worry of recurrence than might otherwise have been the case…and live to tell the tale.