Sitting here at 4 am is a bit surreal. I’m exhausted and sore, but I can’t sleep. I was diagnosed with Bilateral breast cancer yesterday, and quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m paralyzed by my body wanting peace and my inner ADHD wanting to bake a loaf of bread.

I’m really scared of losing my family or really being lost from my family, I should say. I found myself pleading with Google AI to give me a prognosis of survival and “Why did this happen to me?” I don’t have a huge amount of experience with AI, but oddly it was comforting to have on-the-spot answers with an almost human sensitivity.

I shouldn’t have cancer. I have no family history, I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs, I live on a farm and drink raw milk, I’m super active, and I breastfed children for over 8 years cumulatively. I’m the last person you would think would have cancer. I shouldn’t have cancer.

I immediately think of the Tim McGraw song where he says, “I asked him when it sank in
that this might really be the real end. How’s it hit ya when you get that kind of news?” He goes on to list fanciful adventures that his father embarked on to satisfy his bucket list. I heard this song a thousand times and wanted to think that if ever I received this kind of news, I may find myself on the back of a bull, grabbing life by the horns, fulfilling lost dreams, but it seems that all my desires are less exciting than old McGraw senior.

I want to see my children grow up and have children that I get to know and love. I want to go on an Italian vacation with my husband, just him and me, where we visit cheese factories and eat our way through the country and make love in stone villas with perfect yet old bodies. I want to read all the books sitting on my bookshelf in my room. I want to finally learn how to French braid my daughter’s hair so it doesn’t bubble up and fall out. I want to see them show their animals at the fair this year. I want to live my sweet little unimpressive life.

I’ve been asked plenty of times if I have yearly mammograms. The long answer is no. Why would I? I have no reason to think I would be a candidate for cancer. I also have incredibly dense breasts that are very hard to smoosh, even though they feel pretty saggy to me. I have come to find out that I should have actually been having ultrasounds not mammograms.

Around October of 2025, I started to have a sore spot on my chest. Aethel is just tall enough now that her head hits me right in that spot when she gives me big hugs. I thought I was getting bruised from her head; little did I know her head was leading me to finding a tumor. One night, as I lay in bed, I felt my “bruised” chest and found a rather large lump. Lumps on my breasts are very common and come and go, so I wasn’t too startled, but Cyning insisted  I call the dr in the morning. I did. I got an appointment that same day, and the NP sent me for a diagnostic Mamogram and ultrasound. She also found another lump on the side that I could barely feel. I didn’t get that mammogram for almost 2 and a half months due to a lack of appointments.

I didn’t think anything of this. I’ve had cysts in the past, and I’m very used to my lumpy bumpy bumps, so I truly assumed that I would just be told its cyst and I’m fine. It became very clear that the 1 hr mammogram appointment that turned into a 3 hour appointment where they kept taking more and more images because my breasts are so dense that they can’t see, turning into the ultrasound where she was clacking away and taking measurements of several lumps I didn’t even know where there, that I was probably looking at something a bit more serious than a cyst.

The radiologist’s office immediately scheduled a biopsy, but they were 3 weeks out. A friend of mine encouraged me to be aggressive in demanding an earlier appointment, so I had to call down to Colorado to set up a biopsy for next Monday. I hate crossing that state line because I am so proud of Wyoming and all the amazing people here. We don’t need Colorado to float us! But actually right now I do. Wyoming doesn’t have the staff, the equipment, or the expertise to fully handle breast cancer in a swift, efficient way. I found out very quickly that Wyoming is the old jalopy in a Lamborghini race.

When I received the results from my mammogram and ultrasound, it became very clear that this was cancer. Apparently mammogram/ultrasounds are scored from 1 to 5 on a Bi Rad scale. 1 means go home, don’t worry your fine, 5 means this lump has a 95% of being cancer. I scored a 5 on both sides. My sweet husband kept pointing out that I had a 5% chance of it being nothing. At the biopsy appointment, we had a chance to speak to the dr and he pointed out my 5% chance of health, and she thwarted that immediately by saying it looked more like a 3% chance and referred to the lumps as cancer for the rest of the meeting. He was not deterred in his innocent hope until the biopsy report came back glaringly positive.

I was offered anti-anxiety medication for the biopsy, which I immediately dismissed. I don’t like pain or anxiety medication, and I’m pretty tough. Push through it and get on with it is pretty much how I do things. Until, the lidocaine didn’t take effect fast enough and as the giant needle in my breast took a pass to grab and extract a chuck of tumor it hit a nerve which felt like a shot of lighting through my breast into my belly button only to land on my spine which propelled me to levitate above the table like a shot and continue burning for several minutes after. I screamed the f word and started to sob uncontrollably,y with no one to really console me since I was totally sterile. It was in that moment that I realized I should’ve taken the drugs. From this point forward, I will be taking any and all drugs offered to me.

So here I sit with this long, painful journey ahead of me unsure of where the path will take me. I hope I don’t die, I hope I get more time. I’m scared of losing my breasts and going through chemotherapy and losing my hair and my teeth and feeling sick and looking scary to my kids and looking unattractive to my husband. I don’t want to do this; my inner 2-year-old wants to hit the ground and refuse to participate while I scream and cry. I don’t want cancer.