So out I go and more as kind of a "Oh yuck! This tastes AWFUL! Here, taste it!!" kinna thing, I’m really needing someone else to feel and "Well I'll be!" with me. The mother-in-law was the lucky candidate so I guided her hand and asked if she could feel it. Yup, and then we got into discussion about how this person had a cyst and that person had some kind of fibrous mass...all totally harmless BUT it's definitely something to check out just to make sure. And the boobie talk reminded me, "Oh speaking of...how's Aunt Blank's breast cancer? How's she doing?" And on and on the discussion went, as we flowed from discussion topic to the next and the bump and all breastie discussion was soon forgotten.
Now...hubby overheard bits of our discussion but was fairly busy catching up with his dad. However; a few days later, "Hey babe, did you have that bump checked yet?" Nope...I've been biz. With two kids and projects, strep season getting into full swing, my lil Etsy shop sales picking up with the earliest Christmas shoppers getting warmed up, and laundry, dust, dishes, football games for the male child, a sick animal to the vet here and there, and, well...LIFE...I sure hadn't.
By early November, the same question had been asked multiple times so I'd finally grown tired enough of the lecture that followed my "No, not yet" that I made an appointment with my OB/Gyn. I was a wee bit late for my yearly anyway so what they hey. Because of my "real" doc not having any openings for several weeks, I scheduled with a nurse practioner.
Let me preface this next part by disclosing that I'm a full blown Googlologist...if there was a degree for that, I'd have **multiples** under my belt. So I googled and was pretty satisfied with my self-diagnosis. (In my defense, so often, I'm right on with my Google assisted self-diagnosis, and am usually pretty satisfied with myself after a doc comes to the same conclusion.) I'd decided that I had a harmless cyst. It was tender and everything I'd read confirmed that pain or discomfort was good, as cancer is painless. Annnnd it seemed to be movable, to some degree. And it seems as if statistics were in my favor and something like 80% of all lumps are nothing. I don’t have a family history of breast cancer, I’m young compared to the average 50-60 age group, and to be honest…it was one of those “that kinna thing happens to OTHER people…like *I’d* have cancer.” Yup, a cyst it must be.
So I shared my hunch about the bump being a cyst and the nurse practioner seemed to agree. "It moves and feels like an oval, and most cysts are oval, so those are both good signs. And it your breasts look symmetrical and neither has any dimpling," blah blah blah. "I think you might be right...it DOES seem to have very cyst-like qualities. Let's set you up with a mammogram to make sure it’s nothing to worry about. So fine...some quick lil pokin around and I felt like I'd done my job. Now...did I go back after the radiologist had looked over the mammo to see what the first DOCTOR in the equation thought? Nope. Again...BUSY.
I made and canceled that next step FOUR times. Something more pressing kept getting in the way. Besides, in my mind, I'd long ago decided that it was a pesky cyst and, through my Google research, I'd discovered that the solutions for those are 1. a change diet/decrease caffeine and see if it goes down on its own, 2. use a needle to remove fluid to reduce its size, or 3. the worst case scenario...surgically remove the sucker. No rush on THAT, geez! I wasn’t even *bothering* me!
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