i chose the name the shit storm when i dropped off my daughter, emma, one day at school. she was asking me about the treatments i'd be going through and i just said, "it's going to be a shit storm". we looked at each other and started laughing. but it is. going to be a shit storm.

since being diagnosed, everything i've learned and have been told continues to pile up and seem worse and worse. and i'm not even a worst case scenario.

my tumor was found on an annual mammogram. thinking it would be an uneventful one, i'd scheduled my mammogram sept. 4th, the friday before labor day. i was planning to meet my husband, howard, for a boozy lunch at locanda verde as a good way to start the holiday weekend. it wasn't until they'd pulled me in for the 8th time for another view that i realized that all was not going as planned. the technician said that the radiologist wanted to do an ultrasound and that she'd be in shortly to explain why.

the radiologist came in and apologized for making me wait so long but that she'd pulled all my films from 1998 and that she was seeing something that she'd never seen before and that she wanted to get a closer look at it. was i ok with that? are you ever ok with that?

she proceeded to locate the spot / tumor on the ultrasound and showed it to me. it was dark and dense. again, she gently told me this was a lump that oftentimes turned out to be nothing but that when it was dark like this that it sometimes was an indication that something was not right. she measured it and said that she'd like to schedule me for a core biopsy. because of my timing, she couldn't schedule it until wednesday of the following week.

if there's anything to be learned from this i would advise women to schedule their mammograms early in the week, so if there is a problem, they can get it looked at before the weekend. my timing sucked as i now had a 3 day weekend to get through, knowing that there was something that they were looking at. funny how sometimes you have a feeling that all is not right but you don't want to give into that fear. i kept telling myself that lots of women have to have biopsies and that for most, it's nothing. it didn't help matters for me that they'd been following micro-calcifications for the past 2 years and that this mass that they saw was right next to them. this year was (of course) the year that i'd actually gone a year between mammograms. up unitl then, they'd been watching it every 6 months.