Cancer is for Other Girls

Learning something I can learn in no other way

To read my story, you MUST click first on “Into the Whirlwind” (about my diagnosis & exile from Normalsville) and then go to “Setting the Stage” chemo?)  I am currently updating Section 9 in which I go from fab to . . . BALD + FAB.

This is just the intro page for people who don’t know why I’m not supposed to get CANCER.

I just got my life all perfect . . . I finished my PhD in 2007 and taught American History for a few years after grad school, but took a job writing grants for an environmental engineering firm to pay the bills.  I bought a lovely house in a neighborhood I call “Pleasantville”

and I finally found my Prince Charming.  I’d gone to meet his mum & dad in England and had decided to keep each other forever . . .

I’d elected to have a hysterectomy in March 2010 because some pre-cancerous HPV lesions refused to clear — even after clean cone biopsies — and I made what I thought was a tough decision to be PRO ACTIVE about mitigating any cancer risk.  And 6 weeks later, I found a lump in my breast which is malignant.  I’d never ONCE thought I’d get breast cancer:  I was chose to be totally unaware that my grandmother was currently battling it, and I’d breastfed for FOUR YEARS — not because I’m militant breastfeeder, but to MITIGATE any cancer risk!  I eat right (mostly) & exercize 5 – 7 days a week & had maintained a 20 pound weight loss for 18 months thus far.  Sheesh.

My children are 13, 11 & 6 and I want them to know that I will fight this thing — to the death (preferably its death) — for them.

Isaac, Mara & Reesa

Click on a category on the right to read about how by “holding cats by the tails” one “learns something” one “can learn in no other way” (to paraphrase my favorite American, Mark Twain).