A Girl in the Curl is back in school
well, I opted to not have the mastectomy. It would have been too traumatic to be breastless (as much as I don’t really care about breasts, it was traumatic beyond belief to lose my hair, and I wasn’t expecting it to be a big deal, and hair grows back, so I thought—I’d better err on the side of caution, here)
I am undergoing six weeks of radiation therapy to the left breast.
It’s terrible—mentally.
I’m scared to death about the radiation. There’s a small chance I could end up with a cancer worse than breast cancer (sarcoma) and there are side effects on the way that will be terrible.
Still, this is the price one pays to stay intact, I suppose. My mother did not have the option to keep her breast. Her cancer was more advanced and more aggressive so she had to have a radical mastectomy (including muscle tissue) and radiation treatments too.
She never recovered from the self-image of losing a breast, and underwent reconstruction surgery to have her own piece of mind.
In my head, I kept hearing her talking me out of mastectomy. “it’s so radical, so severe” I kept hearing her say.
Yeah, removing both breasts and going around with no reconstruction would have been tough—but better than the thought of Silicone inside me, or the disfiguring reconstruction they’d have to do.
So, this is the middle road, I guess.
I have 5 more weeks after today.
