“Falling into Focus”
Wedding planning with attention deficit had me whirling in all directions – but a health scare forced me to concentrate on a matter even more urgent.
Just when everything was going so right, everything has started to go so wrong. The lump is back. I found it in early April this time in the upper corner of what could be breast or chest. The position was debatable but close enough to the original cancer spot where it was breast, and it’s not going anywhere. Not again. Such dumb luck. WTF.
I’ve never been the sort of girl to win anything, bingo, slot machines, raffles, drawings, I’ve come out with nil. The best thing I’ve won in my 38 years has been a glass Corning plate, then last spring there was the discovery of lump number one a diagnosis of early stage breast cancer. As one of the 40 and under ladies, I am a member of the five percent.
ADHD took a back seat for a while as the new disease became front stage and center. I spent a season on hiatus holed up in Cancerland, and thought I had licked it. And now this new discovery of the lump. Amidst wedding planning and dreaming of a normal life, a husband and – who knows, if I was really lucky, perhaps motherhood – the lump just had to reappear.
At first I thought it was imagined. I poked and poked at it repeatedly. When I awoke each day and it was still there, stationary as a sphinx, I shook my head. This was starting to feel like a cruel joke. April was defined by the occasional snow shower – yes, let’s pretend it just didn’t happen – and now a whirlwind trip to see an endless round of doctors, the oncologist, two radiologists, being tossed from technician to waiting room, and the breast surgeon next.
After a 3D mammogram and an ultrasound, the doctors’ conclusion was that at the very best it was a benign tumor, at the very worst a reoccurring cancer. The reality takes my breath away. There was the biopsy and now the long wait, and for the first time in a while my life once again feels a lot more organized.
For the ADHD me, life had started to feel increasingly disorganized prior to the discovery. The wedding planning might as well be called wedding unplanning. The fiancé and I fought, disagreeing about whether tasks were significant or insignificant. (Who cares about the flowers at the altar?) I came close to hiring a wedding planner right along with a life coach and a shrink, but the lump stopped us in our tracks. Now what was critical morphed from gray area into black and white. Life came back into focus.
