The Big C

I had a spot on my shoulder. It had been there for years but definitely looked sketchy. I really hadn’t thought a lot about it. I woke up every morning for a week immediately thinking “I should get this spot removed”. I don’t know why it was such an intrusive thought at this time, but eventually I gave in. My childhood doctor retired a few years ago, and I just never did the adult thing of finding a new one. I live in a very small town so my options were limited but I decided to see a nurse practitioner whom I know from church and my job. She removed the spot from my shoulder during my first appointment. She didn’t seemed concerned by it, and clearly I wasn’t because I had it for years and just let it hang out.

About a week later I get a phone call from her office letting me know they had the results from my biopsy and wanted to schedule a time for me to come in and meet with my NP. We all know you don’t have to go to the office unless it’s bad news. After hanging up the phone, they called me back to ask me to bring my husband with me. At this point, I’m convinced I’m already dead.

After the longest 40 minutes (or at the time was the longest 40 minutes) of my life, I was called back to see my nurse practitioner. She informed us that the sample had tested positive for sarcoma. All I could think about in that moment was my kids. Part of my postpartum anxiety that I’m still coping with daily is an irrational fear that I will die while my kids are young and I had just been handed an actual possibility that these fears could come true. All I could do in that moment was cry “my babies” and for several days this continued in random spurts.

The rest of the day was spent breaking people’s hearts. Telling your parents you have cancer is hard. Watching my dad cry, seeing my mom hold it all together was hard. Hearing stories from others who have survived it gave my glimmers of hope. 

My brain ran for days. Nonstop fear. Every single time I looked at my children, I cried. I’d try to enjoy a sweet moment or they would say or do something funny, and I would cry. Weeks went by before I could say the words “I have cancer” without crying and even then it was spotty. Every time my brain tried to get preoccupied with something joyful, the words “very aggressive form of cancer” ran through my mind. It was a nonstop cycle of fear and anger.

Why did it take so fucking long to know what’s going on? Why did it take a week for test results to come back? Why did I have to wait over a long holiday weekend to get a consult? Not that it mattered that I had to wait that week because the full report of my biopsy didn’t come back until the end of July. It took a month to have an official diagnosis.

Josh was strong. The first day was  hard, and I was so scared because he wasn’t speaking. But he found his strength through a motivational speaker he enjoys listening to. Our new family motto: ”I can. I will. I must.” We said it every time we feel the tears coming. It helped stop Josh’s tears, but mine would just keep coming. I have had so many people say “Jordan you’ve got this, you’re the strongest person I know.” I didn’t feel strong. I knew I needed to find that inner strength and rise up over all the scary thoughts but I felt small. I felt weak. I felt like I’ve let my whole family down. 

I kept apologizing to my husband. I don’t even know why. Had I gotten this spot removed when I first noticed it in college or when I realized it was changing, maybe we wouldn’t be doing this right now. Had I taken my health more seriously, maybe we wouldn’t be doing this right now. Had I not waited six years to see a doctor, maybe we wouldn’t be doing this right now. But I didn’t. I didn’t take my health seriously. I took my age for granted. I was the stereotypical “I’m invincible” young person. That frame of mind bit me in the ass. Now here I am, a 30-year-old, married mother of two with cancer.