The One Where She Tells Me: “It is a cancer”…

*At exactly 1:38pm on Wednesday, August 28, 2024, my phone rang. On the other end was my OBGyn, “is this Katherine?”

Her demeanor nothing like her usual chipper cheery self – she sounded restrained, concerned, sad.

fuck

Then the words “pathology report” and “tumor” came tumbling out of my phone and, then, worst of all…”is a cancer”.

“is a cancer” is not something I expected to hear after the biopsies she’d taken in June prior to the hysterectomy had come back fine.

but this was the fibroid that was living inside the wall of my uterus – the one inaccessible fibroid.

Neither she nor I had worried about that hidden fibroid because it is exceedingly rare for a fibroid to be malignant. Like, exceedingly rare. We’re talking possibly as rare as 1.7 out of 100,000 women rare.

“In my entire career I think you’re like the 3rd patient I’ve had where a fibroid was malignant.” Kind of rare.

There is potentially reassuring news: the tumor appears to have been “all encased” – meaning just looking at the tumor, it appears it hasn’t spread. So that would make me stage 1 – meaning, at least according to the study I took notes from in the picture above, I have a 50% chance of still being alive in 5 years.

Lucky me.

A fucking coin toss.

That same study calls my kind of uterine cancer, which is a uterine leiomyosarcoma: “highly malignant with an adverse prognosis.”

It’s Friday as I’m writing this now, almost exactly 48 hours since that phone call. I’ve been through a lot of emotions, a lot of tears and a fair amount of fear.

I have my first appointment with the gynecological oncologist Wednesday.

I’m also waiting for a call back from the gynecological oncology department at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center up in Seattle, where two people who love me have both very earnestly urged me to have a consult since they are at the forefront of cancer research and treatment and this is such a rare and aggressive cancer.

I’m fucking terrified and all I want to do is call my mommy and be comforted… times like this are when having a narcissist for a mom is the absolute worst, most lonely.

So, yeah, in the span of an 8 minute phone call I went from my biggest concern getting enough rest as I heal up to prevent my ME/CFS baseline from lowering again to wondering if I’ll even be alive at the end of this, my so-called ‘Year of Healing.’

On a positive note, I am resilient as fuck, adaptable and curious and strong willed (some might say stubborn).

It’s only very recently in my 52 years that life has gotten what I’d call good and, most importantly, safe – I’m not done.

I’m going to keep writing a weekly blog for this ‘Year of Healing’ and, hopefully, it really will be a year of healing. Hopefully whatever scan and/or new biopsies that get done show this tumor hadn’t spread. I imagine there will be regularly scans or whatnot for at least the next few years and I’m OK with that. 

I’m not OK with dying when life has only so recently got so good it’s worth fighting for.

For those of you who’ve read this far, thank you AND please do not offer medical advice – either alternative or allopathic. I am open to ideas for finding even more enchantment in this journey though, so please feel free to share those!

Love, Kat

*(this was originally published on my Substack)