It’s been a week since my bilateral mastectomy. Diagnosed on April 21 with cancer in my left breast, I waited 45 days for the surgery to remove the deadly invasive ductal carcinoma from my body.

To say I was afraid the night before would be a gross understatement. It wasn’t just the surgery or the idea of losing both breasts that distressed me, but also the possibility that they might cut me open to find that the cancer was much more advanced than they had believed. No, I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t.

I got up at 4 a.m. and showered, knowing it would be the last time in a while when I’d be able to shave my legs, wash my hair, or feel truly clean. It was also the last time I would bathe with my body intact. I stood there in the hot water, tears pouring down my face, my hands instinctively reaching to hold the part of me I was about to lose.

My sister and younger son Benjamin got up with me and prepared for a day at the hospital. We left my house at 5 a.m. and reached the hospital at 5:30. The sun was up, light spilling over the plains onto the mountains as we took a few minutes just to sit in the parking lot, where I did my best to gather my courage.

Robins sang in the trees. The sprinkler system kicked on, water spraying out over the asphalt and not onto the grass. Typical. We joked about making use of the off-kilter sprinklers to give Benjamin’s car a bath. And then it was 5:45. Time to go inside.

Facing my worst nightmare

The surgery center was busy and staffed by medical assistants who seemed far too cheerful to me. Did they not understand how afraid I was or how damned angry I was to be facing a bilateral mastectomy? I’m sure they intended to be professional and polite, but to me their attitude felt like cold, corporate indifference. I was sure they didn’t give a damn what was happening to me, and I wasn’t about to let anyone hide behind a superficial smile.

“Pamela Clare reporting for mutilation,” I said to the one at the desk, unable to keep the tears out of my eyes.

She blinked, clearly taken somewhat aback, then returned to her script. “Show me your ID. Gimme money. Sign here. Sign there. Blah blah. Nice weather. Please have a seat over there. Blah blah blah. Someone will be out to get you soon.”

My parents arrived a few minutes after we did. My mother smiled and gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, but I could see the grief and fear in her eyes. She didn’t look like she’d slept much either.

A nurse came for me in a few minutes and led me back to a room, where I took off everything that made me feel like me — clothes, earrings, ring. Those things were replaced by two hospital bracelets, one of which was mostly a bar code like you’d find on a box of Corn Flakes.

We quickly came to the first thing I’d been dreading. A man from radiology came in to inject radioactive isotopes into my left breast near the tumor. The isotopes were supposed help the surgeon identify the lymph nodes that the tumor was draining to — the sentinel nodes. I’d gone to great effort to research practices at various hospitals and had made it clear to my doctor that the injection would not happen unless I had numbing medication first.

And yet despite guarantees that I would get lidocaine as patients at most hospitals do, I discovered that the lidocaine was mixed with the isotope solution. In other words, I wasn’t really going to be numb before the injection. The lidocaine was just there to take the edge off during the injection.

I was pissed. I really don’t understand why the medical profession doesn’t do all it can to eliminate unnecessary pain. How people feel ought to be of supreme importance to all medical staff. It wouldn’t have cost but a few minutes to numb me up first. Why couldn’t they take that extra step given what I was going to go through that day?

When the radiology tech did the injection, I let him know exactly what I thought of his apparent indifference to causing me pain. “This is fucking bullshit!” I said, squeezing the heck out of my  mother’s hand.

So far, the morning was becoming the nightmare I had feared.

The nurse promised I’d get sedation as soon as I signed consent forms. She started an IV, hooked me up to a bottle of lactated ringers, and left us alone.

I lost it for a while. Anxiety from six long weeks of waiting had taken its toll on my emotions. Combine that with lack of sleep...

I cannot tell you what it meant to me to have my parents, my sister and Benjamin there. They held my hands while I cried, kept their arms around my shoulders, and just generally surrounded me with love while we waited together.

Laughter and acts of kindness

At 7 a.m., my priest arrived — and everything began to change.

Rev. Susan has a lovely voice and a beautiful presence. I met her in January after my former mother-in-law’s sudden death made me want to return to my spiritual roots at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Thanks in part to my cancer diagnosis, Rev. Susan and I got to know each other quickly, trivialities swept aside for the deeper discussions that happen when one is facing serious illness.

She entered the room, a sympathetic smile on her face, and hugged me. I sobbed on her shoulder, and she didn’t let go. When I had gotten the tears out of my system, she introduced herself to my parents, greeted Benjamin and Michelle, and listened empathetically while we talked.

The surgeon came with papers for me to sign. When he saw I was with my priest, he left us in peace.

Rev. Susan guided the conversation to a spiritual plane, bringing her perspective to my worst fears — losing a precious part of myself, facing prolonged illness, possibly facing death. She talked about God’s love and the Resurrection of the Flesh and what that means for those of us who’ve lost parts our bodies in this life.

“Jesus holds these precious parts of us in trust until we are resurrected. We’re reunited not only with our loved ones, but also with parts of our bodies that we lost,” she said, her hands curving into cups. “If you can imagine Jesus holding this precious part of you... ”

And we all burst into laughter. Jesus holding my boobs?

It felt so wonderful to laugh, so much of the tension I’d been carrying dissipating in shrieks and howls.

The surgeon opened the door, perhaps wondering if we’d all gone insane, and came in to listen.

Rev. Susan finished the point she’d been trying to make, then she invited my surgeon to join hands with us in prayer. Her prayer was beautiful, helping to fill me with the sense of peace I’d needed all morning. She anointed my forehead with oil and blessed me, and then stepped aside so that the surgeon could go over the consent forms with me.

The anesthesiologist, a woman from Australia, was right behind him. She asked some medical questions, had me sign some papers, and then told me to tell everyone goodbye. “Once I give you the sedative, you won’t remember anything, so it’s better if you say goodbye now.”

I hugged Rev. Susan, my father, my mother, Benjamin and my sister, each one of them finding different words to offer me reassurance, my mother and sister with tears in their eyes.

Then the nurse injected a powerful sedative into my IV and ...

I do remember being wheeled from the room and into the operating room.

“Can I please wear lipstick during the surgery?” I asked the anesthesiologist.

I have no idea why this was suddenly important to me.

“I don’t see why not,” she answered.

She reached into my bag of belongings, fished a tube of lipstick from my purse, and helped me put it on. “Is that good?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

And then she put the mask on my face, and I was out.

She could teach that radiology tech a thing or two. Just a little touch of kindness here and there can help a patient feel like a person.

In the recovery room

As I slowly regained consciousness a couple of hours later, I felt a stabbing pain in my sides and pain across my chest. I heard voices — a couple of nurses — talking about the dose of medication a patient needed to receive. They were trying to do the math.

I can’t do math to save my life — unless I’m semi-conscious and on morphine apparently. I saw the numbers behind my closed eyelids and spoke the answer out loud.

The voices stopped.

“She’s right,” said one.

“You must be a math whiz,” said the other.

Me? Hahaha! A math whiz? I barely survived college algebra. I have math phobia. I hate math.

I drifted in and out for a while. I told someone I was in pain and asked over and over again whether they’d found cancer in my sentinel nodes.

At first nurse’s voices and then my surgeon’s voice told me that the surgery had gone well and that they’d found no cancer in my lymph nodes.

I cannot tell you the relief I felt when that news finally sank in.

The pain was bad. The surgeon gave orders for more pain medication — morphine. And then he stood there beside my bed, one hand holding my right hand, the other pressed against my right forearm.

“Everything’s okay,” he said in a reassuring voice. “You’re going to be okay.”

I don’t know how long he stood there, but it seemed like a long time. Maybe it was the anesthesia or the morphine or both, but I felt a kind of peace come over me. And in my mind, he became Jesus, standing beside me, comforting me, reassuring me that all was going to be well.

The worst behind me

I was still semi-conscious when they wheeled me upstairs to my room.

“Are all of these people your family?” one of the nurses asked. “I hear you have a lot of visitors waiting for you.”

My family. 

They were there — my parents, my sister, both sons, my brother Robert. They were all there except for my youngest brother and my sister-in-law and the kids. I felt so lucky and happy to be able to share the good news with them. The surgery was behind me, and now all I needed to do was rest.

I could feel pressure bandages across my chest, and I truly did feel like I’d been stabbed in the sides, the pain the result of incisions made to accommodate three drains.

I wasn’t certain how I was going to be able to face my new body, but given that I could barely open my eyes, I opted not to worry about that yet. I was just grateful to be free of cancer and to have so many of my greatest fears behind me.


Part II coming soon.

Tonight is my last night with natural breasts. It’s also my last night with the cancerous tumor that invaded my left breast. My emotions rock from relief that something is finally being done to combat this deadly disease to deep grief to be losing a part of my body that has meant so much to me.

My breasts aren’t the sexiest in the world, but our standards for “sexy” when it comes to breasts are so absurd that it’s the rare woman who can meet them without surgery. Still, I’ve always been happy with them from their shape to the fact that they’re small enough that I’ve always been able to go braless to the pale pink color of my nipples.

My breasts have given me so much sexual pleasure. I’ve gotten emails from readers asking why there is so much “nipple action” in my books. Some women don’t have sensitive nipples. Being licked and nipped and sucked does nothing for them. It has always made me melt. But after tomorrow morning, that avenue for sexual pleasure will be gone. Permanently.

Yes, there are procedures whereby doctors can spare nipples during mastectomy, but it largely depends on the shape of a woman’s breast and how close the cancer is to her nipple. And even if a woman is a good candidate for nipple-sparing surgery, she will still lose sensation in her nipples, as all the tissue beneath them, including nerve tissue, is stripped away and checked for malignancy. Also, there are no long-term statistics about the case of recurrence in women who’ve kept their nipples, and some surgeons refuse to do the surgery on those grounds. I will lose my nipples tomorrow morning.

My breasts went bare in Europe on beaches and public parks in Denmark and elsewhere. The feeling of sun on my bare skin was wonderful and so liberating. We have such a bizarre attitude about nudity, particularly breasts, in the US. But I was able to enjoy being young and beautiful in the sunshine without wearing a bikini top or shirt. That rocked.

My breasts also fed my children. Nursing babies is the purest, most beautiful expression of love I’ve ever known. It gave me time each day just to hold and cuddle my babies, time to relax and have eye contact, to smile and babble and coo together. I wouldn’t trade those memories to save my life.

I breastfed both of my sons for a longer period of time than most women. My older son was breastfed for 15 months, my younger son for about a year until hospitalization for an ovarian cyst led him to wean himself. I was heartbroken to have that connection severed so soon.

Breastfeeding is without a doubt the most natural way to nourish a child. I never had to bring bottles or formula. My kids never tasted the chemical concoction that is formula. They had my milk every day from birth until they were weaned. This has made me a big supporter of breastfeeding, a “lactivist” if you will. Breastfeeding should be encouraged, facilitated, and supported.

The breasts I fed my children with will be gone tomorrow.

I am in mourning for this. I think I’ve been in mourning since April 21, the day the radiologist walked in and said, “It looks like we have an early breast cancer.” He might as well have struck me in the head with a sledgehammer.

People say, “A woman is more than her breasts.” I know this, of course, and don’t need to be reminded. My breasts didn’t run the newsroom at the papers where I was editor. They never wrote a story or edited copy or did a single interview. They didn’t do homework with my kids or clean the house or plant rose bushes. They didn’t push for the bill that ended the shackling of pregnant inmates here in Colorado.

But my breasts are mine. They are a natural part of my body, a part of my sexuality, a part of what has always made me feel feminine and womanly. And I’m going to lose them forever. For months, I’m going to walk around with slashes on my chest where they used to be, long scars over skin that has been stretch flat and stripped of all underlying tissue.

There is no way to feel good about this loss, no way to gloss over what losing my breasts means to me. I am mourning for my mammaries. I am heartbroken, and I am angry. I hate this.

I know that one day they’ll be replaced with reconstructed breasts, either silicon implants or tissue from an abdominal flap (which also means a tummy tuck). But those breasts will be designed only to fill out a shirt and give me a normal appearance. They won’t feel anything. They won’t be capable of feeding a child. They won’t feel like mine.

They won’t have cancer either, and, yes, I know that. I’ve waited an unbearable and unforgivable 45 days for surgery. I’ve had to worry every one of those days whether the cancer has spread. I won’t know until the final pathology report is back whether this awful disease has sneaked its way into my lymph nodes. Those are questions that touch on my survival, my very presence on this earth.

I want to live. I want to make more memories with my grown sons. I want to enjoy lovers. I want to visit Paris and Denmark and Spain again — not to mention many other places. And that means my breasts need to go. Although the tumor is only in my left breast, I have chose to sacrifice both because women who’ve had breast cancer have a higher chance of getting it in the other breast than those who haven’t. I never want to go through this again.

My sister and I went into the back yard tonight. While I wore a sarong, she took some practice shots. Then I dropped the sarong, and we took photos of my bare breasts, trying to give me a way to remember them and all the life lived with them. I have a six-foot privacy fence, but I couldn’t have cared less whether anyone saw us. (I almost included the photos. I’m not shy, but some of you might be.)

I plan to do all I can to beat this terrible, brutal, violent disease, this sickness that steals so much from women. But I can’t deny the reality of my emotions.

In so many ways, life as I knew it ended on April 21, and I am just dragging along in pieces. It’s not just the loss of my breasts, but everything that will come with this — chemo, the loss of my hair, and ultimately the risk to my life.

I’m not sure I want this new life, but it is my reality now.

The fight begins tomorrow.


I want to thank those of you who’ve sent cards, gifts, and emails, sharing your support. Your warm thoughts and prayers have sustained me through this terrible time. My mother and sister have been my heroes, enduring my mood swings, my wild raging emotions. My brothers, too, have been there for me in their own way, which is to say they’ve made me laugh a lot when I thought I no longer could laugh.

But a special heartfelt thanks goes to all of you who donated to the Good Food Fund that author and friend Thea Harrison set up. Almost $7,000 was raised to provide me with organic, homemade meals that will be delivered to my door during my recovery from surgery and during chemotherapy. There is no way I can send cards or emails to all of those who contributed, but please know that I read your messages. When I heard how much it had raised, I burst into tears.

Deep, profound thanks to those of you who donated to the Medical Expenses Fund. The idea came from author and friend Courtney Milan, who helped spread the word about the Good Food Fund, too. Right now, I believe that fund has raised $3,800, every penny of which will go to my cancer treatments. Although the food account is on hold now, anyone who still wants to contribute can send a donation to the Medical Expenses Fund directly via PayPal via this email address.

You all are helping to save my life. Thank you for making me feel loved in the midst of this nightmare.


One last word before I get ready for tomorrow’s surgery. Please don’t skip a mammogram. And if you find a lump or a thickening in your breast between mammograms, get it checked and push for another mammogram.

This lump wasn’t found by my doctor. I felt a thickening, asked her to check it, and she said it was normal fibro-cystic changes. Months later, it shows up as cancer on a routine mammogram. If I had skipped this mammogram, I would be fighting for my very life.

Thanks again for your support, good wishes, and prayers.

It was late afternoon in mid-February when my younger son Benjamin and I visited the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France. The sky was filled with bruised clouds that threatened rain, but there was enough sunshine to keep the air warm.

We climbed the steps that lead to the cemetery and stopped. Stretched out before us were 14,000 white marble tombstones aligned in perfect and silent rows, each one of them representing an American soldier who had lost his life in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in World War I.

Fought over a period of 47 days from Sept. 26, 1918, until the Armistice on Nov. 11, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive was the biggest battle in U.S. history — and the bloodiest. The United States committed 1.2 million soldiers to the battle, 26,000 were killed. And yet most Americans know nothing about it.



Ask the average American to name the biggest U.S. war cemetery in Europe, and undoubtedly someone will point to the cemetery at Normandy. They’d be wrong. That distinction goes to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. Sadly, the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery is almost forgotten, receiving few American visitors. Sadder still, no standing American president has ever visited the cemetery.

Benjamin and I walked slowly row by row among the crosses and stars of David, reading off the names of the slain and the states they’d come from. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois. There was one from Colorado. I found myself with a lump in my throat, wanting to touch each headstone, to let them know that their sacrifice wasn’t forgotten, that someone from the United States was paying them a visit.

These men died amid shouts, the deafening blast of artillery barrages, the staccato buzz of weapons fire, and the cries of dying men. But now they were surrounded by a deep silence, a stillness. And yet despite the peace that prevailed there, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they would rather have come home for burial in the U.S., where their families might have been able to visit them.

Remember that during World War I, a trip to Europe wasn’t something most families could afford. It was a 12-day-plus journey by boat just to cross the water. If you lived in North Dakota, you had to get to New York first. Most of these men have probably never had kin stand at their grave sides, their mourning parents, wives, brothers, sisters, and children left with only memories and personal belongings.



Many never knew where their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers were laid to rest because their remains were never identified. Among those with names were more than 4,000 that did not have a name inscribed. They read, “Here rests in honored glory AN AMERICAN SOLDIER known only to God.”

As we passed one after another after another of these stones, the lump in my throat turned to tears. No, I didn’t know any of these men. None of them are related to me — except that they were all Americans, men who went to war and died far, far from home.

Memorial Day in the United States has become a day to shop till you drop and then hang out with the family next to the barbecue grill or at the beach. That’s not what it was intended to be. It was set aside to honor Americans who died fighting for their country, and it ought to be a day of remembrance.

In Australia, ANZAC Day, their version of Memorial Day, starts with sunrise ceremonies honoring those who died for their country. The ceremonies are so moving that you don’t have to be Australian or a New Zealander to be moved to tears. I wish Americans would observe Memorial Day with a similar reverence.



I also hope with all my heart that an American president will one day travel to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and pay his (or maybe her?) respects to these forgotten soldiers, whose sacrifice helped end what was arguably the most brutal military conflict in human history.

Benjamin and I visited the memorial and the chapel, both of us silent, caught up in our own thoughts. We signed the visitor log. We read the more than 4,000 names of the American soldiers whose final resting place is still unknown that are inscribed on the memorial’s walls. We read about the battle itself and how it helped bring the war to a close.

As we were leaving, a school bus arrived, and a group of French pre-teens climbed out. They ran through the rows of headstones, called to one another, shouting and laughing. One pretended to be an airplane, making propeller noises with his lips, his arms stretched out at his sides as he ran. I wanted to call to them to stop running and to show more respect for these men, who had been killed in a war that was not of their making. But seeing those kids having a good time during a history field trip made me remember why our soldiers had given their lives in the first place — so that France could be free.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never been very good at waiting when the stakes are high. One thing that made journalism work for me as a career was that everything was happening right then. News breaks, and you respond. A story falls through, so you find another story. A computer breaks down, so you come up with some creative way of getting the paper to press anyway. It’s all action all the time.

Waiting to find out whether the cancer in my left breast has spread and whether I’ll need chemotherapy and for how long quite simply sucks. As of this moment, I have a tentative surgery date for early June — which seems terribly far away. I can’t make it get here any faster, and I have no way of knowing any more about what I’ll be facing until the surgery is completed and I have the full pathology report.

I find myself in the exact circumstances I’ve always hated — one in which I have no control and can take no action. All I can do is pray and wait.

In the past — as recently as the weekend prior to my diagnosis on April 21 — waiting on the cusp of something potentially frightening had a way of ruining my entire day. During the week following the news that I needed to come back because they’d seen something on my mammogram, I felt sick. I couldn’t get my mind off it. I could not escape the fear, some part of me knowing that this was not going to be good.

On April 21, hearing the radiologist say, “It looks like we have an early breast cancer,” made me feel absolutely ill. I cried. I closed my eyes while they did the biopsy. I simply shut down, my entire mind and body rocked by the news that I was now facing a long-term health struggle, one that would change my body and my life forever.

The week that followed involved more dreaded waiting as I carried my cell phone everywhere, anxious to get the pathology report so that I would know whether this was an aggressive cancer or a slow-growing tumor. Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter — estrogen and progesterone positive and HER2 negative.

Then came the week of waiting to see a surgeon and a plastic surgeon, each appointment making the situation I’m facing more real.

And now I’m waiting to have surgery so that we’ll know everything we need to know about the battle ahead of me — whether the cancer is in my lymph nodes, whether the genetic type of tumor requires chemo, whether the surgery went well...

The strange thing is that I have moved from shock and panic to a strange sense of calm. And, no, I haven’t been taking advantage of the state’s legalization of marijuana to achieve this.

Part of it is the fact that I’m getting lots of TLC from my family. My mother has been amazing, cooking meals, doing laundry, letting me live almost like a child in her home and enabling me to focus all of my energy on my own situation. My father has listened to me rant, using words he would ordinarily not appreciate, just to comfort me.

My sister arrived last week, and she makes me laugh more than anyone. She has always been my best friend. When I was coping with the aftermath of being sexually assaulted at age 10, crawling in bed with her in the middle of the night made the nightmares go away. She’s just magic that way.

Also, a quiet community of authors, all of whom are either survivors of breast cancer or currently battling breast cancer, have reached out privately to me, enabling me to ask questions and offering me their reassurances. One of my best friends in Denmark had exactly the same kind of tumor a couple of years ago and spent a good hour or so on Skype with me sharing the details of her experience. All of these incredible and strong women have helped me find my way beyond panic to hope.

My family rallied around me and helped me get spring cleaning done inside and outside my house, taking the burden of that work off my shoulders so that I would have one less thing to worry about in the coming weeks. Their support, expressed in sweat and hard work, means so much to me.

My readers have sent dozens of sweet cards wishing me well, some with gift cards to Starbucks or bookmarks or breast cancer bracelets.

My faith community sent me the flowers from the altar from last Sunday’s service and connected me with women in the congregation who are going through the same thing. My priest, Rev. Susan, gave me a chance to vent my anger and frustration.

All of this together gave me hands to hold and an outlet for the initial emotions I felt about this diagnosis, and for that I am eternally grateful.

But something else is happening as well.

All of us have heard how we should accept the things we cannot change. That idea has been expressed in so many different ways through faith, philosophy, slogans, Facebook memes. It comes down to a simple idea: If you can’t control it, don’t worry about it.

My response to that has always been irritation, even anger. As a reporter, I was ready to go to the mat for the sake of an important story. Fight the bastards. Gather the facts. And flip the bad guys the bird by putting all their dirty laundry on Page One. What a rush! As the editor-in-chief, I was the boss. Shit would happen, and I would tell people how to respond. A crisis almost pepped me up, as it gave me a chance to pit my wits against some kind of obstacle while on the clock.

When the Columbine shooting happened, for example, it took me less than five minutes to make all the decisions regarding our coverage and the deployment of reporters and freelancers. Though the situation was horrifying, I was able to control my emotions and respond immediately.

I have simply never accepted that there might be a situation I can’t overcome by being quick on my feet, smart, proactive, and relentless.

But there is no way to win by pitting one’s wits against breast cancer. I cannot outsmart it or assign a team to deal with it so that I can do something else. I cannot make it go away by writing about it. There is evil-doer to expose, no deadline after which the problem will be gone. And the adrenaline rush isn’t fun; it’s terrifying. There’s really nothing for me to do that will change the outcome of my surgery.



Oh, sure, I can research the hell out of breast cancer and treatments and doctors and procedures. I can (and do) get second opinions. And at the end of the day, my situation hasn’t change one bit. It is what it is.

By all rights, I should be hanging upside down from the ceiling pulling my hair out by now. Uncertainty and helplessness are not the environments in which I thrive. But for the past couple of weeks, I’ve had far more good days than bad ones, far more days when life has seemed more or less normal than days when I’ve been consumed by fear.

I’m astonished at how normal and fun a day can feel even when you know you have cancer.

I guess I’m starting to “get it.” I cannot change the situation I’m in. I can’t outwit the tumor in my breast  or bark orders at it or call it out in public and shame it into going away. I can’t worry myself into being well, or make the surgery day come any faster. This is my reality. And I just have to surrender to it and take life one day at a time, enjoying each moment as fully as I can.

If someone had told me on April 21 that this is what I needed to do, I probably would have told them to cram it. But something has shifted profoundly for me in the past ten days or so. I find myself willing to let things go. I call it “taking time off from cancer.” If I don’t have an appointment or anything that I can do that day, I say my morning prayers, let it go, and focus on the day.

It’s not that I have to trick my mind into thinking of other things; I truly do let it go. I didn’t know I was capable of doing that, and knowing that I can enjoy life now, that I can cope and even thrive has  opened a world of possibility for happiness that I didn’t realize existed.

That’s not to say I don’t have bad days or bad moments. I definitely do. Also, I haven’t started writing again, and that perhaps is the truest test of how well I am coping emotionally. But my days are no longer dominated by fear.

If there is anything I could do with my own experience so far it is to make other women less afraid of doing monthly breast self-exams, getting regular breast exams and mammograms, and being assertive about getting extra screenings if they feel anything might be wrong. Feel you need an extra mammo? Demand it.

But the message of this blog is simply this: Life with cancer can be happy. I never imagined I could be in this situation and yet feel so calm.




And now because I’ve gotten so many emails, I thought I’d do a quick FAQ about my own situation. (I can’t answer everyone’s emails or Facebook messages, so please post here or on Facebook rather than sending Facebook messages or emails! I can’t read through them all.)

Q: Did you feel a lump?
A: No. I had three breast exams by my doctor in the past 12 months, and she didn’t feel anything abnormal either. The lump, which is roughly 2 cm (an inch) in size, was behind fibrocystic tissue, making it hard to detect. Any time I go to the doctor, I get a breast exam. I figure what the heck, right? It didn’t help me, but it might help someone else.

Q: Do you get regular mammograms?
A: Yes. I’ve always gotten the screenings done when I was supposed to. This time, I delayed it by two months because I was on vacation in Europe. This is a very slow-growing tumor, so the delay will have no impact on the outcome. The surgeon says the tumor was already growing last year when I had my 2013 mammogram but was too small for radiologists to detect. I’ve seen last year’s mammo. There was nothing there last year. This year, a half-circle of white dots mark calcifications in the tumor. Had I felt reassured by my 2013 mammo and skipped this one altogether, I’d be facing a very different situation next year. Moral of that story? DON’T SKIP YOUR MAMMOGRAM!

What you might find out from a mammogram is far less terrifying that what you might miss if you don't get it.

Q: What risk factors did you have?
A: The only risk factor for me was being sedentary and overweight, one of the hazards of being an author. I have no family history of breast cancer. I had my kids in my early 20s. I breastfed for a long time. I don’t smoke and rarely drink. I did not use birth control pills for longer than five years. I’ve never had an abnormal biopsy. I didn’t reach puberty early. There’s no real obvious reason why I have this. My doc said they’ve seen a spike in breast cancer, in part due to better diagnosis, but also because rates are climbing due to environmental contamination by estrogenic carcinogens. (Go online for a list of these chemicals. You’ll find them in skincare products, food packaging, etc.)

Q: What is going to happen to you?
A: I have opted for a mastectomy of my left breast (the one with the tumor) and a preventive mastectomy of my right breast even though I could have a lumpectomy because I want to do all I can to minimize risk of future recurrence. Women who get mastectomies have a slightly smaller chance of having a new cancer in what remains of their breast tissue than women who have lumpectomies. That right there was enough to convince me. Other women make other choices, and I support them in doing that. But this is my body. I need to make my own choice.

During the mastectomy, they’ll check lymph nodes for any cancerous cells. My ultrasound showed normal lymph nodes. All of the blood work I’ve had done indicates that the cancer has not spread. The tumor is small as breast tumors go. The tumor is made of the most treatable kind of cancer. So there are a lot of things that stand in my favor and are very hopeful. We’ll know for certain after the surgery. 

Because I haven’t reached menopause and because I’m relatively young, I will almost certainly have to have chemo. They treat breast cancer more aggressively in younger women because of the estrogen in our bodies. But they’ll do a special DNA test on the tumor and more blood tests on me to make the final determination sometime after the surgery.

There is lots of waiting ahead of me. But I have lots of living to do in the meantime.



Thank you to all of you who’ve been so supportive. Your posts, pink ribbons, and virtual bouquets of pink flowers have meant so much to me. And all the thanks in the world to my family for rallying around me.

Those of you who are not spiritual might find all this uncomfortable and think I’m crazy. Those of you who are some version of fundamentalist or orthodox might find it offensive. But here goes...

I had a kind of premonition early this year that I would have breast cancer.

If I’d been right on schedule, I’d have gone for a mammogram in February. But I chose not to do that because I had airplane tickets and plans for a great vacation in Europe. Something inside me felt that if I got that mammogram, EuroTrip 14 would be cancelled because I would get bad news.

I prayed a lot before getting the mammogram, asking for normal results. But that’s not how it went. In the first week after my cancer diagnosis, I had a very hard time praying. I wasn’t sure what to pray for, given that I had obviously been ignored. I told my priest, Rev. Susan, that I figured God had felt more in the mood to hit the “Smite” button than answer my prayer. I told my mother that perhaps I'd been a Nazi in my last life or something. I said a lot of things.

I was very angry. I was terrified. I was walking a path I’d never wanted to walk.

Some people told me that God never gives you more than you can handle, but I reject that outright. Despite what I said to my priest about the “Smite” button, I do not believe that God dispenses misery to humankind for kicks or as punishment. God did not give me breast cancer as a trial or test or to pay me back for years of using profanity. I take the story of poor Job as a parable about faith, about how bad times get better. The idea of God making bets with arch-enemy Satan while allowing innocent men and women to be killed and a good man to be tortured to within a breath of his endurance is deeply offensive to me.

That kind of God is not a God of love.

Also, I do believe lots of people endure situations that are, in fact, more than they can handle. Ask the soldier whose PTSD drives him to suicide. Or the incest victim who dies of anorexia. Or the alcoholic meth user whose abusive childhood deprives him of the very strength he needs to rise above addiction.

Saying that we are never given anything more than we can handle is a subtle way of blaming those who cannot rise above their tragedy and anguish. It’s also a way for well-intentioned, caring people to comfort themselves.

I had no real risk factors for breast cancer. There are no obvious reasons why I have it. But God is not the cause of it. And yet God didn’t intervene and prevent this from happening either.

What does that mean? I have no idea.

There are times I’ve been able to see God in my life. Was this the absence of God in my life?

I guess that’s the question I was dealing with in the midst of this terror.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I do know God is. How do I know? Ask a Catholic what being “slain in the spirit” means or a Protestant what it means to have a “conversion experience,” because that’s what happened to me one afternoon. It was like thunder inside my heart and mind, and it blew me away. My spiritual life since then has been a clumsy struggle to respond to that one event.

So God Is. And I am because God Is. That’s what I kept repeating in my mind these past couple of weeks when my heart was slamming so hard that I could hear it and my stomach was churning and full of butterflies and I could think or pray nothing else.

With the initial shock behind me and a treatment plan slowly taking shape, I’ve been able to reach out again for God’s loving kindness. And here are my random thoughts, which are, of course, subject to change at any time.

This life is a gift. Life doesn’t belong to me. I have a very short amount of time to walk this earth in this body, and I can control so little of what occurs around me. I can’t even control what happens inside my own body. I hardly have control of my thoughts and certainly not my emotions.

Many things happen in life that are unjust and unfair. They are not God’s doing. But when people rise above those things and treat each other and themselves with compassion, that is the spirit of Love inside them. And God is love.

I’m not saying that God takes them over and makes them behave a certain way like spiritual zombies. I’m saying that they choose to be their God-given higher self. They choose to serve the Spirit. They choose to be the higher human being they were created to be.



That doesn’t mean they’re not afraid. Even Jesus was afraid. As the story goes, he asked his apostles to stay awake with him in Garden of Gethsemane, and they failed him. He even felt despair at the end.

For any woman to be afraid when diagnosed with a terrible disease is to be expected. I am trying to be strong, but I am also going to let myself be human. I have moments where I feel fine, and then I have moments of raw panic, where I can do little more than curl up in bed and cry. But then I get back up again.

What I’m trying to do, what I’m hoping to do, is to lay my fear aside and trust that, even if this doesn’t go the way I want it to go, I will still be okay. This is God’s world, not mine. I didn’t bring myself into it, and I don’t get to decide how I leave it. But I can trust that there are still things for me to do here, still ways my life can count, no matter how things go for me.

And I can trust that God is.

I’ve been sharing my daily experience with this devastating diagnosis on Facebook, hoping to urge women to get mammograms and hoping to demystify breast cancer a bit. In turn, the support from my friends and readers helps me keep going — and I truly have no choice but to keep going.

I’ve had a lot of pretty rotten things happen in my life, and I’ve used them in my writing. I’m sure it will be the same with breast cancer. I’ve always known I came into this world to be a voice for women. And now I will include this experience in that voice.

My surgeon and oncologist assure me that missing that February mammogram has not made my situation worse. I have a slow-growing tumor, and there’s no obvious sign of any spread. And I’m so grateful I have those two months of travel to hold in my heart while I go through this. Those memories will sustain me — as will prayer, God’s love, and the love and support of my family and friends.