Holiday parties and Hanukkah, bridal showers and birthdays! (and: Just BE, part 3)

These past few weeks, and these next few weeks are BUSY. B-U-S-Y. And that's a good thing. I need the distraction.
I've had THREE beautiful, wonderful, amazing bridal showers in the past two months. This week Sean and I have two holiday parties, plus the annual "Cookie Day" we have at my office. This coming weekend is my family's annual Hanukkah party in Virginia, followed by a Hanukkah party Sean and I are hosting at our house early next week. Then we've got another holiday party, and then my birthday! Following that are more weekends of fun (Jordanna coming to visit plus a New Years' Eve wedding in Philadelphia)!
I love this season for many reasons, and not for the reason most people would think, which is Christmas. As a Jewish person, I love this season for Hanukkah. I also love this season because it's my birthday (and my brother's and cousin's!) I love this season because I get to attend holiday parties and wear dresses that usually just hang in my closet. I love this season because of New Year's, which, this year, we have wonderful plans for!
Once all this holiday chaos is said and done, I'll be well into the countdown for my bachelorette weekend, which is mid-January. Then we'll stuff and send out the wedding invitations, I'll begin my dress fittings, and after that we'll start pre-wedding Aufrufs at both synagogues (Northern Virginia and Philadelphia), followed by more wedding planning (taste testing and cake-picking!), and then ... THEN! We're into March, a month where we only have ONE free weekend! (Think a wedding, my cousin's Bar Mitzvah and other celebrations.) And then? I can barely even say it: OUR WEDDING! Yes, we're three months and three weeks away. And in between now and March 31 we have only happy, fun things to celebrate. The parties will go by fast. Time will fly. The planning will eventually conclude. And we'll be celebrating what we've been planning this past year. And we'll be celebrating even more than that: we'll be celebrating life. The fight we had this year. And that Sean and I get to spend the rest of our lives together. The wedding may be the big "bang" at the end of all this craziness and planning and pre-wedding fun, but it will be the beginning of our marriage, and that is what I am most looking forward to - sharing and spending my life with the one person I love most in this world.
So I've had some really happy times these past few weeks, and I am really looking forward to even more fun times. But in the middle of this all, I'm still suffering. Not as much as I was before my surgery. Yes, I'm still in pain, but it's getting better every day. I also still have this #$%^$'in lump in my neck, which I've done a REALLY good job of not touching all the time. (Every 5 days or so?) It hasn't changed, thank G-d, and it still feels small and round and a little bouncy/movey. But is it supposed to STILL be there, especially if it's just a lymph node?! UGH. Who knows. So anyway, I was proactive and got my second follow-up ultrasound on it scheduled for Jan. 9. Good. It makes me feel better that I have more testing scheduled. But it also makes me nervous to wait. I HATE waiting for tests. Sure, this is nothing like the tests I had to wait for for my breast cancer, but I'm still anxious and it's still a test. And even though the first ultrasound came out "OK" - in that they didn't think it looked suspicious, that doesn't really make me feel any better about this test. They could see something different this time around. They could want to take action this time around. They could look at it, with different eyes and a different machine, and maybe realize something they didn't the first time. UGH it's terrifying. They could order a biopsy. Or want to surgically remove it. BEFORE the wedding. Yes, I know, imagining different scenarios makes me crazy. I don't KNOW what the doctors will say, and that's the truth. But having cancer twice and having Li Fraumeni Syndrome makes you (rightfully so) believe everything is cancer. So a lump that doesn't go away after more than a month? What am I supposed to think? Sure, it's good news (I guess) for the doctors to want to just monitor it and not automatically jump in there with needles, because it means they don't believe it's super serious. But monitoring ALSO sucks. Knowing it's there and trying to get on with life while also make sure it doesn't change is, to say the least, STRESSFUL. I am doing a really good job of not letting it consume me. Like, I know it's there, but I try not to obsess over it. When I think of it I go into a short, five-minute panic spell where I imagine the worst-case scenario, and then I remember: 1. I already got it checked out once and nobody seemed too concerned, and 2., what my therapist has helped me realize, which is that worrying about something does NOT give me "control" of the situation, nor does it help me "prepare for the worst," despite me thinking it does. So I let it go, just a little, and move onto something else. But as long as the lump is there I will be a little crazy. It's true, I can't escape it. And really, can you blame me?!
I've also noticed I have developed a new, probably detrimental to my mental health, habit. After I found the lump in my neck, I (half-joking) vowed I would either wear gloves all the time so as not to feel anything on my body, or purposefully NEVER touch myself anywhere, or only touch myself in the most minimal way, so I would never, ever, again risk finding something scary on my body. So, scratch an itch. Or wash my hair. Or get dressed. Or whatever. But never actually FEEL things, which I guess I always did subconsciously, which is how I discovered the neck lump. When I found it I must have been really really "digging" and not realizing it. That's because it's really deep in there. Just finding it for the first ultrasound was hard, so when I found it I must have been massaging my neck or something. Because now, when I go to find it, I can't find it right away.
I know, I know, breast self exams found my cancer early and could have possibly saved my life and affected my prognosis and saved me from other, possibly harmful, treatments. I will do self-exams. They are recommended, especially for me. But finding the lump (this time I'm talking about in my breast) made me insane, and made me crazy with feeling things. It traumatized me, honestly. Just the other day at work I was sitting at my desk scratching the underside of my leg, and I found myself almost like feeling it, like I was "looking" for something. I felt bones and liagments and muscles, and then I thought I felt a "lump" only to realize it was some muscle, and not a lump at all, and I had the same exact one on my other leg. It took me a few minutes of that until I realized what I was doing. I find myself massaging my head and neck and upper back, but so much so to the point where I'm not just massaging them, I'm actually "feeling around" for things, and I don't realize until I'm actually doing it. So finding the breast cancer myself was an incredible thing. But it also made me insane in this way. I have subconsciously started looking for lumps and abnormalities around my body, and I'm not sure when it started, but I need to stop. YES, it can save my life if I (G-d forbid) discover something else. But now knowing I have Li Fraumeni Syndrome, I'm always "looking." I guess this is one way having LFS would change my life, but in a way I wouldn't be aware of right away. Well, I'm aware of it now. And I need to stop doing this because it will make me crazy. I should just be aware of my body, like I already am, and get my regularly scheduled recommended tests and screenings, and hopefully that will be enough for me. Maybe now that I know I'm actually doing it, I can work on stopping it.
It's probably a good thing that I was feeling around in my neck last month and came across the lump, because I wouldn't have found it otherwise. Like I said, it's so deep in my neck I'm not sure how I even located it in the first place. I HAD to be really "looking."
I think it's pretty understandable that I have this new habit. I've had cancer twice, and the second one I found myself. So it only makes sense, that as scared as I am to "find" something else, I'm subconsciously "looking" anyway. Maybe to have a sense of control. I don't WANT to look and I definitely don't WANT to find anything, so I'm not sure why I'm doing it. But, it's not part of my conscious descion-making. I do this for some other, deep-down reason. But it's bad for me mentally. Every pimple and freckle and muscle and ligament becomes a cancer scare. When I wrote about how I wanted to just BE and live my life with LFS but not let it consume every ounce of me, this is NOT what I had in mind.
So, new habit has formed. I've addressed it. I know I do it. Now, I work on stopping it.
I'm going to distract myself with happy plans and live my life and have this wedding, and the lump in my neck will be there for now. An unwanted guest. But I'm taking care of it. I'm getting it checked.
And in addition to my neck and my new (terrible) habit, I've still got breast cancer on my mind. I was just thinking in the car on the way to work today if I would feel relieved once I had the other breast removed. I had always thought the answer to that was an obvious resounding YES. But for the first time, I wondered if the answer was no. If I'd still be scared, even without both breasts. Probably a little, as I know breast cancer can develop even IF you don't have breasts, because it can form in any remaining tissue in your armpits, it can develop in the chest wall, and it can develop in lymph nodes. I hate that I know all this, but I think I'd hate it even more if I didn't. I like how I educate myself and take control of my health. I have to. I have no other choice. I care about my body. I care about my life and the people in it. So I like that about myself. But when is it TOO much?! Again, it's somehow about finding balance. Letting yourself live, but being aware. Taking control, but not to the point of insanity and exhaustion. Balance. Just being. Just living with the information and knowledge you have, no matter how scary, no matter how paralyzing.