Disbelief, Betrayal

I couldn’t believe at first that I had cancer. I kept expecting it to be a wrong diagnosis. I thought that for about a month and a half. I worked at a place where doctors read pap smears all the time. A lot of time they would get a not-normal diagnosis and the advice would be to get retested in three to six months. That’s what I expected. But, that rug got pulled out from under me, and within 2 months, I was in surgery, my first major surgery of my life.

I felt betrayed, a little by my body, but more by the medical community and a bit by my family. I knew that my mother had gynecological problems when she was around 40, but she refused to talk about it with my sisters, and everything I heard was from my sisters until my diagnosis. Once I was diagnosed, I got my family history. My mother had gynecological problems. So did my aunt, my other aunt, my grandmother, and my other grandmother. All the women of my family for two generations and on both sides had gynecological problems, but I didn’t know this until after I got cancer. First thing I did after getting that information was tell my sisters so that they could tell their doctors. It’s now in my medical file. I wish it had been years ago. As I read up on my cancer, I learned that one of the possible contributing factors was long-term birth control pill use. Well, gee, I’d been using birth control pills for years, and no one mentioned that to me. No my primary care physician, not anyone I saw back in college, not the gynecologist I saw, not the gynecologist-oncologist I saw, none of the nurses. I had to learn that on my own. You think that maybe, just maybe, someone would have mentioned that after reviewing my multi-year history of birth control pill use. But, no. Had I known, I would have switched to a different method long before I got diagnosed.

But, no matter how much I didn’t want to believe, and no matter who I wanted to blame, I had to face the fact that I had cancer. And nothing that anyone else had done or that I thought would change that. I had to accept that before I could move forward. Where you are now, what reality is right now, is something you’ll have to face in order to create your Future.