Today marks one month since I found the lump. And although I find it helpful to me to let other people know what I’m dealing with, I’m starting to feel pretty selfish.

It seems like every person who I’ve shared my news with is taking it harder than I am.  This seems more than a little messed up.  The idea is that I tell people and a) they think happy thoughts for me since I think that happy thoughts can help, b) people who are used to seeing me on a regular basis know why I’m at the doctor’s office all of the time for a little while, and c) everyone else understands why my head is not in the same place it usually lives… I’m a little distracted.

The point never has been, never will be, to make other people feel sorry for me or to make them think I’m a super-duper person.  I’m a normal person, who has an unpleasant disease.  I’m freaked out about things like having one cartoon boob and one inflatable prosthetic. I’ve spent several days obsessed with deciding what I should do with my roots, since I am figuring that I’ll lose my hair, and have it made into a wig so that I look normal when I need to.  I’ve cried. I’ve curled up in a little ball and considered not getting out of bed.

But so many of the people I talk to still make me feel like they expect more, and if I’M not going to freak out, they will will either decide I’m a super hero or decide to go into mourning for me. Please, pretty please, don’t.

There is very little about this that does not suck. I’m a planner, and this is throwing off, well, almost all of my plans for the next two years.  I was really and truly taking control of my body, and now I’m handing it over to my oncology team.   Even the choice between a mastectomy and a lumpectomy is being taken away by the cancer.  And the choice to get both taken off at once is limited by the need to have additional follow up treatments which will limit healing.

But in the choice between laugh and cry, I chose to laugh.  In the choice between getting angry at fate and saving the energy to fight the cancer like a ninja, I chose to fight. So please do me a favor and don’t cry for me. Laugh with me. That’s really all that I need you to do.  Otherwise, I feel like I’ve passed my freak out on to you.  And that would suck more than anything else.

For those of you are new (I’m likely going “facebook public” before I write again), you haven’t missed so much that you can’t read all of my babble,  but if you want the cliff notes, here’s what I heard at my first visit with my oncologists, and here’s the info from the follow up MRI guided biopsy.