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| THANK YOU to my former boss and dear friend who sent bagels from NYC. #comfortfood |
Hello, all. If you’re just tuning in: I’ve got a touch of breast cancer. I kept the news quiet for a while, but I realized that was selfish. I know, I know, you are saying, “Brigid! You’ve got cancer. You get to be selfish!” You are right! Selfish includes me thinking about my family, and it would be horribly unfair to David and the boys if they had to go through caregiving alone. Community is everything to me.
My surgery is tomorrow, and it is an outpatient bilateral mastectomy with sentinel node removal. My mom was in the hospital for a week with her mastectomy, so I'm a little freaked by going home. But COVID is scary too, so I'm happy to be away from a hospital.
From 2017-2019, I was the caregiver for my parents as they each died of cancer. The only thing that got me through that with any trace of sanity was my support system. David and my little guys are managing all kinds of appointments and feelings and additional duties, from physical to emotional. It’s a lot for them. I want them to have their own support system.
Some dear friends have organized a GoFundMe that I am embarrassed by because I hate asking for help. I am trying to be brave about it and accept that sometimes the way we help each other -- especially during PANDEMIC -- is by buying someone a meal or paying a bill for them. Funds from the GoFundMe will pay medical bills or buy ways to keep the children smiling. Their experience with cancer so far has been watching my parents decay, and they are understandably scared to hear their mother’s diagnosis. No pressure AT ALL. It's a way for you to help, but I will not put up a paywall behind information about cancer. Also, several of you have already sent dollars directly and your names won't be on the fancy GoFundMe wall. Let me know if you want public honoring: I'll sing your names loudly. If I get more than I need, it'll go to cancer research or support organizations.
Answers to all your questions & responses to your comments:
I don’t know, and I won’t know until after surgery. Let us put into the universe that it is Stage 1. Stage 1 would be amazing. Let us have Stage 1 thoughts.
What type of breast cancer is it?
It's invasive ductal carcinoma, ER+, PR+. The tumor that was finally found on the MRI is 8mm.
Why did you think you were at risk?
My mom's cancers were not on gene markers that have been mapped, but her oncologists believed them to be hereditary, based on looking at family trees. One day I'll geek out and show you my family tree, color-coded to the cancer diagnosis, but for now, trust that I knew my family had hereditary cancers. I did everything I could to lower my risk -- I rarely drink, I haven't eaten meat in 25+ years, I breastfed forever, I exercise. You can't fool genes.
How did you know something was wrong when your mammogram and ultrasounds were clear?
I persisted because over the past year I had had some weird symptoms developing - fatigue, decreasing appetite without any weight loss, but never any palpable lumps. I know my body really well. I had a home birth. I breastfed for seven years straight. I know my breasts especially well. The biggest symptom was is a weird itching, burning, tickling, tugging feeling deep in my right breast, and it sometimes radiated to my shoulder and neck.
After the clear mammogram in March, I talked to my gynecologist about my intuition. She believed me and did not dismiss it as anxiety (she was also the same person to have first found my mother's breast cancer, when my mom's mammogram was clear) and referred me to a High Risk Breast Health clinic where I was on a wait list to get a diagnostic MRI. That MRI got delayed three times due to COVID.
In the mean time, my GP followed up on shoulder & neck pain. I had a shoulder MRI which showed DDD and bursitis and bone spurs and rotator cuff issues, so we did that surgery in June thinking that might have been the problem.
When I finally got the breast MRI in early September, the tumor lit up right away, in a way that the mammogram and ultrasound could not. They were able to find the tumor on an ultrasound eventually after hunting around for a long time and biopsy it.
"Be cautious. Depending on what you say or discuss, your feeds can suddenly become clogged with advertising, some of it ghoulish."
YES! This is great advice. My feeds are already a mess, having purchased two urns on Amazon and buried both my parents. My targeted ads have been about clinical trials and cemetery plots for years now though, but in general this is super good advice. If I weren't a public figure, I would likely keep this to myself. But so far since I first posted this on my blog ten different people have messaged me to say they scheduled their mammograms. So weird internet be damned. I'm either all secret or all public.
Who are your doctors?!
Right now I'm at Norton in Louisville, but I plan on several second opinions after the pathology from surgery comes back. The surgeon doing my mastectomy also did my mom's mastectomy 20 years ago next month. I'll post more specifics on the central page for medical updates, where Jeska Forsyth has been kind enough to take over posting info so that my family can focus on me instead of the internet.
"Glad they caught it early"
I don't know staging yet, but let us all HOPE that I caught it early. Also, let it be a reminder to everyone reading that doctors don't know everything, especially about your body. Trust your gut, and if something feels off, follow up on it until you get an answer.
“What the hell, Brigid?!?"
I KNOW!! Fucking cancer.
Can I come mow your lawn or something?
I have amazing friends. THANK YOU all who have reached out. Thank you for buying mastectomy pillows and button-up pajamas and beautiful notebooks and markers for my family to make recovery easier. THANK YOU to those who have venmo'd, paypaled, sent gift cards to restaurants and such. My mind is blown by the support I'm seeing. There is a GoFundMe which is set up but absolutely not at all me asking -- it is a place to show support if you can, but there are also so many other ways to show support.
My address is PO Box 5803 Louisville, KY 40255 and I love cards and letters too. If you need an address that's not a PO Box (i don't check the PO daily), email me or my husband.
You could also pay it forward to someone else in need. Make a dinner for someone else going through hard times. I believe that the acts of service we perform for others have incredible capacities to reverberate through the community, so do something nice for someone today. It doesn't have to be for me.
I wish I could have visitors. COVID makes that impossible.
We hired a lawn service, but thanks for the offer!
Are you still making music?
YES! Thanks to my patreon community, especially, I'm going to be releasing "18 Months Later" on digital platforms soon. I filmed part of a video for it this week, and I'm hoping to edit it together while on bedrest. I'm also going to be working on an entire album of meditation music while I"m in recovery.
MASSIVE THANK YOU to Dawn Landes for jumping in without question to fill in for me on virtual concerts that I can no longer perform. Her new album is came out last week, and I recommend it so very much (and not just because I got to sing the dream role of Amelia Earheart on it!).
3 comments
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