How I discovered I was growing cancer in my breast, part 1

I found it accidently.  It was a total fluke and I can only think it was a gift from God that lead my hand to brush one of the lumps when it did.

I had just gotten back from a spur of the moment fabulous vacation to Colonial Williamsburg with my daughter--my husband and I decided she and I should take the opportunity to do this because time moves so fast and in a few years she would be in high school and a few after that she'd be out the door.  We were thinking about needing to take the opportunity to spend time together while we could.

Who knew that would be so prophetic?

On our last evening at Williamsburg my daughter danced in the rain.

So there I was changing clothes, and for whatever reason my hand just brushed against this lump.  I don't have any history of breast cancer or even much history of other cancer in my family, so it didn't really occur to me to panic.  My entire thought process was more like, "What the hell is that?"

So felt the lump and around the lump and felt another lump on another part of the same breast.  I thought it was weird, but I wasn't worried, because I was healthy and young and had had a clean mammogram 6 months before (my very first (and last) screening mammogram ever, I was just 41 so I was just at the start of my recommended mammo age)--besides what were the odds?

I googled it and decided I should probably wait until after my next period to see what happened, apparently cysts come and go with hormones that way.   But 2 weeks later the lumps were still there.

So, at my husbands urging I made an appointment with the nurse practitioner at my gyn's office.  I really wasn't that concerned--as my mother-in-law would say, I was too green to burn.  I actually thought about putting it off and seeing what the lumps did--I'd recently had a work up for ovarian  pain that turned up nothing (although after my cancer diagnosis I found out what was really causing that pain--a singularly massive kidney stone, but that's another story for another day), and I wasn't eager to continue feeling like I was always worrying about things that didn't show up anywhere.

The nurse practitioner felt the lumps and said she didn't think they were anything to worry about but scheduled me for a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound a couple of days later, to be sure.

Still I was thinking no big deal.  I was unhappy to have to get another mammogram, and felt like I was probably wasting a lot of people's time, and, as Alfred E. Neuman would say, "What? Me worry?"

Yep, I was definitely too green to burn.