Superstition

 In October of 2008, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a scary time because there was no way of knowing how it would work out. People die from breast cancer. Would I be one of them? I  remember an early morning appointment, where 4 women sat together talking about cancer, but still somehow finding plenty to laugh about, and that laughter was, I think, encouraging to all of us. 

Treatment ends, and you ring that bell and walk out of the cancer center, and I guess that I expected to feel something. Triumph. Relief. A hallelujah moment. But I didn't.

For the next 6 or so years, what I felt was as if I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. My cancer, I was told, was the kind of cancer that had the tendency to break away and travel, metastasizing in other areas of the body. The brain, lungs, liver, or bones was the most likely areas for those secondary cancers, a 1 in 3 chance.

So...there are the mammograms, and I learned a new word: scanxiety. It is a cute word but a real situation. The mammogram dredged up old ghosts and fears. The no evidence of disease (NED) from the doctor wasn't much of a comfort either. I wasn't expecting it to show up there...I was more worried about my brains, bones, liver, and lungs.

There was the day I realized that of the four women in the waiting room that morning, years back were all dead now. I was the last surviver. 

All these things worked together for a few years to keep me anxious, but then a truly Debby-thing happened. I was climbing an extension ladder. It was my own carelessness. I should have checked. It was not properly set, and as I reached out for the roof, the ladder suddenly 'unextended' and fell over leaving me hanging off the edge of the roof by one arm, the other hand still clutching at the collapsing ladder. The young man on the ground grabbed the ladder. The husband on the roof grabbed on to the seat of my pants and hauled my ass to safety. 

It was a terrifying moment, not just for me but everyone there. Thinking about it though, I got a case of the giggles. I mean, really...I was so worried about cancer but I could just as easily die by falling off the roof, or getting hit by a car, and the more I thought about it the more ridiculously funny it seemed to me.

(Side note: when you have scared the mess out of your husband, bursting into laughter is going to make him mad. And when you can't stop laughing, it is going to make even the quietest man yell his head off at some point.)

Anyways, at some point, I simply stopped worrying about it. To be honest, I stopped being a stickler about the mammograms, even. When Tim was having his own issues there were a couple years that I didn't get around to having it done.

There is a woman. She and I had cancer about the same time. Her husband hauled two dump truck loads of gravel to the new driveway last spring. He and Tim talked a while. After all these years, her cancer has returned. He said, 'Yeah. She's not doing well.'

Today was my mammogram. After all these years, 18+ of them, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I found myself feeling superstitious. 

LATE EDIT: It was letting my fears take over. I received my phone call. All looks as it should.