3 months later

This month will be my 3-month visit to the oncologist. While I'm not entirely sure what the appointment involves, I do know they draw some blood to check my white cell count and to check for cancer "markers". My job will be to not get much nuttier than I am already while I wait for the results of these tests. This is also my chance to ask the oncologist about all of the lovely side effects I've gotten from the Tamoxifen. Today, I've just about given up hope that I'll ever be able to regulate my own temperature again! In the throes of PMS I feel like I dress and undress 10-20 times a day as I add and subtract layers in between bouts of sweating and freezing.

I'm not the only one going through the 3-month checkup this month. My friend, Kathryn, also has her appointments. This week, she will be seeing my radiologist for her first post-treatment mammogram. The only reason I'm writing about this is because I said I'd go with her. I just couldn't imagine letting her go by herself after everything she's been through. But now, a few days before the appointment, I'm worried I won't be as supportive as I want to be because I'll be having my own post-traumatic stress issues in that office. This is the same radiologist who found my breast cancer, and who placed the j-wires for my first biopsy, and who did my second biopsy, and who gave me the advice to seriously consider the double-mastectomy because a clean biopsy would not mean no cancer was present and he'd have to perform more biopsies on my left side in the coming years to try to catch the cancer as early as possible.

I am grateful to him for all of that, and I know he was the best doctor I could have had, and I am so happy that Kathryn will see him from now on. It's just I feel weird going there now that I have no reason to go there. No breasts=Nothing to mammogram. I don't want to feel like a cautionary tale for some poor woman there for her first-ever mammogram that, in all likelihood, will be just fine.

But, what I do want to offer to my friend is a hand to hold and someone to talk it through with who does understand, truly, how scary this can be...I can do that.