It started about six months ago, an occasional spasm of pain
in my left armpit. Unpredictable and fleeting, the pain is severe enough to be
noticeable but not so much that it was debilitating.
When I look it up on Web MD, which is usually pretty
fatalistic in its diagnoses, nothing comes up, but because it is on my “cancer
side,” I mention it when I go in for my annual mammogram a few weeks later. The
nurse checks me out pretty thoroughly, the films are clear, and she suggests it
is probably a muscle spasm.
The pain persists, so a month later I mention it to my
sister, who is a nurse practitioner. She thinks it sounds like a muscle spasm
and gives me a few tips to address the symptoms, none of which I do. I figure
that anything muscular can take care of itself.
Months later, the pain has not abated, so I make an
appointment with my doctor, or rather, the nurse practitioner at my doctor’s
office. Like everyone else, she asks me
questions, feels me up, and has no answers, but since the pain is in proximity
to the place where lymph nodes had been removed 15 years earlier, she suggests
I make an appointment to see my oncologist.
By now I have already invested about a million times more
time and energy into this than merited, but I dutifully call the oncologist,
with whom I have had no contact in ten years. I am booked to see the nurse
practitioner, who—like all the nurse practitioners I have consulted up to
now—is absolutely wonderful. She
recommends physical therapy, an ultrasound, and an MRI to try to figure out
what’s up in my pit. She also asks if I would be interested in genetic testing,
something we had considered years ago but I put off.
In addition to the annoyance of all the cost and time
involved, I’m increasingly aware that I am being sucked back to cancer world, a
place that I thought I left behind long ago but that is in fact always
thisclose. No matter how far you move forward, once you’ve been to cancer
world, it’s intertwined in the fiber of who you are, and it doesn’t take much
to pull you back to a dark place of fear and helplessness and endless nausea.
Although it’s fear the drives me to pursue the additional
tests, I book the physical therapy to prove that I am fine. My physical
therapist, Amy, works exclusively with women at risk for lymphedema which,
apparently, includes me. (Seriously, I didn’t know that.) Amy assesses the
range of motion in my arm and concludes that there is plenty of room for
improvement. As I lay on her table, her fingers find tight knots of scar tissue
that I didn’t know were there. The pain makes me cry, but I can tell it is
helping. And as she presses deeper, I know that the tears come because she is
touching emotional scars as well.
Amy talks to distract me. By our third session, she begins
to tell me her own cancer story, which makes my story look like a day at the
beach. At age 38 she is a three-time survivor. She’s undergone genetic testing
and had her young children tested as well. They all have the gene, and are
doing all they can to be on guard. She lives with cancer every day; it’s not
just a bad memory tied up in a knot under her skin.
I want to live my life looking forward, not backward, but
sometimes there is no moving forward until you deal with the past. My cancer
story is only a small part of who I am, but it was a significant turning point.
I don’t want to live in that world, but sometimes
it’s necessary to revisit it and to continue to learn from it.
I might be ready to pursue genetic testing. Whatever the
results, it can’t be as painful as physical therapy! And it might be helpful to
my kids and other family members. So, deep breath…and one step at a time.
And the spasm in my arm? Yeah, we’ve still got no answers on
that. But I’m learning to live with it.
