My therapist at the Cancer Center said that anger is more energizing than sorrow, so I’m embracing my anger today.
It’s been seven years and two-ish months since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s been about three years since my last breast MRI. I had been doing them yearly, along with yearly mammograms so that I was getting screened every six months, but the last one I had was denied by insurance, who claimed that, even for a breast cancer survivor with astoundingly dense breast tissue, they were “experimental” and we were stuck with a $4700 bill for it. So, no more breast MRI’s for this gal.
Until last week.
I can’t even remember quite how long it’s been since I first felt two tiny little lumps in my noncancerous breast, my right side, but I do remember messaging my doctor, her scheduling an ultrasound, and nothing concerning showing up. And I want to say, we maybe even did a second ultrasound a year later, but those two little lumps, along with pain and heaviness, like I experienced on my left side for years during my misdiagnosis, and the most insane itching in my breast and armpit prompted the radiologist to order a breast MRI after my mammogram and ultrasound a few weeks ago. Neither of those tests showed anything concerning, but because, as she, the mammogram technician, and two ultrasound technicians all remarked with such amazement it shocked me, my breast tissue is so astoundingly dense that those tests could be missing something, and I was “symptomatic”, the radiologist wanted to follow up with an MRI.
On Tuesday I got the MRI results and I cannot get the words “suspicion for malignancy” out of my head.
I have a biopsy in two places next Tuesday and I have relived the trauma of my diagnosis seven years ago with each parallel experience these last few days. I have played every possible wonderful or terrible scenario of how this could go in my head.
On Wednesday I think I got all of my crying out of the way.
The last couple of days I often find myself raging.
Had insurance stayed in their freaking lane and covered the annual MRI’s the last three years like my oncologist had recommended in the first place, would this have been detected earlier? Why does the insurance company get to overrule my doctor and radiologist, who emphatically dispute their claims of the experimental state of a breast MRI for a cancer survivor? Why do I have to go through this terror and fear and agonizing and waiting again? When will we get a break?
It does feel a bit energizing to rage.
I’m hoping and praying that this ends up being nothing, but as my therapist affirmed, it is not only unrealistic, but unreasonable to try not to think about this and try not to feel like this.
I hope it ends up being nothing.
But even if it ends up being nothing, for the next week until I know for sure, I am terrified, overwhelmed, angry, and cannot turn my brain off to the unknown and the what-ifs, bracing myself for another round of fighting cancer again, with so much more to fight for this time.
I will update once I know. Until then, I ask for prayers and positive energy to hold me through this next long, stressful week of waiting.