A Path Through

I have talked a lot about the compassionate and caring voice that I keep encountering as I move from appointment to appointment. I actually have started to truly appreciate this voice as it has made each step easier to take when the messages are delivered with sensitivity and acknowledgement of the impact. Oddly, I have also found myself questioning why you need to be in a situation like mine in order for someone to speak to you in a compassionate manner…..but that question is for another day.

However, there is another voice that played a role in where I am now. It has been one that I have been hearing for years (relax, you are not reading the blog of a crazy woman). The voice I am talking about is one we are all familiar with. Basically, it is the voice you hear when you drop your underwear (or socks, shirt, towel, drips of coffee…and so on) on the floor and suddenly the voice POPS into your head telling you to bend over and pick up the item as it will sit there until you do. You know the voice, come on….admit it, you have one…we all do!

To be honest, I hear my voice so often that I actually named it! Yup, please allow me to introduce you to Jiminy, my nagging head voice. Why did I name it Jiminy? Well, it is really hard to hate that nagging voice when it is named after a cute little top hat wearing bug from the most magical place in the world….right? On a side note, I am also pretty sure that my kids have named their head voices “mom”.

It is this voice that can take some of the credit for bringing me to the start of the path I am on.

I was getting showered on a mid December morning and felt an odd pain with a burning sensation in my breast. As I am someone who does the “soapy shower check” of the girls, I did a quick check and noticed that there was an odd lump on the upper section of the right side. So I dried off and did what I thought made total sense…. I called my husband and invited him to have a feel, you know…a second opinion.

As we poked away we agreed something felt odd. He thought it felt like a pulled muscle and of course I agreed because it makes TOTAL sense that my breasts (unlike the rest of me) were pure muscle. Yes, you can feel free to insert the words “in denial” anywhere you would like in THAT statement. He also gently suggested that I make an appointment to have the situation looked into. On a somewhat related note, I have to share that we were poking away at an area that was 2.5 inches ABOVE the tumor and not actually associated with the situation at any way (thinking there is a reason that both of us are in NON-clinical jobs).

As Christmas was in full swing, gifts needed to be bought, things needed to be done, and I had a cold (because we all know that this is a deciding factor for anything right now); I had convinced myself that all was good and could wait for a better time to deal with this. Apparently, this is when good ole Jiminy decided it was time to speak up.

With each jolt of nerve pain I would tell myself all was good only to be followed by the familiar chirping voice in my head loudly saying “No, it’s not!”. Each burning tinge heightened my awareness and anxiety and caused Jiminy to get louder, urging me to “book a mammogram”.

It is probably important to share that I am, what might be called, “strong willed” (not certain if you all can hear my husband rolling his eyes and sighing at that statement). This trait may have played a role in deciding that no matter what Jiminy had to say, I was going to step over not just one pair of underwear, I was going to step over a PILE of underwear and throw on a sock and shirt! Yup, ignore the issue and all will be fine because that is the mature thing to do (nailed it). However, the issue was that the voice in my head knew better than I did and there was no way Jiminy would allow any laundry to sit on my floor.

On January 5th, as I was working away in my office my husband came up the stairs, looked directly at me and said “You need to get things looked at”. This is a man still recovering from our pre-wedding discussion 17 years ago regarding the word OBEY in my vows. He is very aware of the strong woman he married, but on this day he was willing to take me on because he knew this was important. Yup, Jiminy played dirty and recruited an new voice; one that knew how to speak to me so I would listen.

Moments later, I submitted the online request for a mammogram and a quick 24 hours later I got the call to book an appointment. It was at this point that Jiminy had one final chance to set things in motion. The clerk offered me a choice of appointments. I could go that day (I didn’t have the time to get there), the 13th (they just had a cancellation), or wait until May. I scanned my work calendar and as expected, the 13th was full of meetings. As I was about to say “what do you have in May”, Jiminy stood up, slapped me in the back of the head with a 2×4 and screamed “TAKE THE 13th!!” With that gentle nudge (I still have the headache), I booked the January 13th appointment at 8:30am. Yup, I did it, I bent over and picked up the underwear and Jiminy could finally relax.

As I write this, I will admit that I have asked myself some hard questions over the past several weeks including what would have happened if I had waited until May? And if I had, would there have even been a possibility of finding a path through?…….I think I need to buy Jiminy some flowers to say thanks.