Dear friends, here is a note to tell you about a strange new part of my life on earth.

Late last year, several people I am close to emotionally and/or adjacent to physically received cancer diagnoses.  That was hard. And what made it harder was my mother’s injuries, which caused her to enter a graduated care facility. My siblings began the process of selling the house I thought of as home. I felt like I had lost my main support system all at once, and I spent a week watching old movies like The Sound of Music (in my mind the uber story of family and acceptance) and eating fried things. But I still thought of these horrible things as happening to other people.

This week, however, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which in the screenplay of my life feels like bad writing. Like some hack writer somewhere has just given up and is recycling the same device over and over again. On Monday, March 14, I went for a routine mammogram—overdue, as it turns out, but maybe just well timed. The tech saw the mass immediately and was able to flag the film and get it to a doctor. By 2 pm I had received a call from a lovely person whose actual title is breast navigator–not the dream job it sounds like, gentlemen friends! By Wednesday I had an ultrasound, which revealed “spiculated edges,”which aren’t the good kind of edges.  By Thursday I had a biopsy surrounded by a posse of dear friends who entertained the waiting room arguing about which Golden Girls they were. By Friday I had a diagnosis, with just the basics—2.5 cm invasive ductile carcinoma (that’s the most common manifestation of breast cancer). 2.5 cm means stage two. So the mass has been hanging around a while, waiting for the right moment to ope its ponderous and marble jaws.

I started the process of telling my family, and spent the weekend pacing, watching Star Trek reruns, huddled with my dogs, with a weird unreal scream in my head.  What anyone knows who has lived through something like this is the paradox of not wanting to be alone and not being able to stand talking, especially because of the litany of things I didn’t know and still don’t know. I know it’s going to be really, really expensive. But I don’t know a billion details about this cancer that I will learn soon. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know the timeline. I don’t know what decisions I’ll need to make about another billion things, like my job, or my dogs, or what parts they let me lop off. I haven’t spoken to a single doctor, just the awesome breast navigator who is apparently paid so that doctors can shrug and look at each other funny and then hand you her card. I am so grateful for the love behind the questions, but I can’t answer them. So, inspired by some other friends’ examples, I made this blog to keep you up to date.

Today I learned about cancer grade, which has to do with number of tubule cells in the mass (many is good) and rate of mitosis (slow is good). I have a grade 2 cancer at the posterior wall of my breast (it’s 3 o’clock or 9 o’clock—not so good with the clocks). Tomorrow, I hope to learn how receptive my cancer is to hormones like estrogen and progesterone (receptive is good), and I get to meet with a surgeon. From a weekend poring over support blogs, academic journals, and health sites, I’m learning what I only distantly understood before: once it’s part of your life, it knows the way to your house, like a creepy colleague, and could pop back up when you think it’s gone, like one of those awful songs by the Captain and Tennille–I’m talking about you, Muskrat Susie! So welcome, cancer, to the rest of my life. And to those of you who live with it, I’m sorry I just didn’t get that before. Empathy takes forever to keep learning.

But I’ve heard this, too: If you have to have cancer, this is a good one to have. Lots of people get it, and they have lots of ways to go after it. It’s going to be okay.  And apparently I have some good friends. I’m single, and my family lives far away, so I’m going to need help. Lots of it. I’ve already been humbled by the offers of help, and I know I will keep being humbled. So thanks, in advance, for helping.