October 1, 2025: 10 days until surgery

It's 4 am, the witching hour. 
That's when my brain wakes me up with what if questions, an endless mental checklist of things that can possibly go wrong. 
What if the surgeon...? What if the anesthesia...? What if they don't get it all, what if they take too much, what if I don't recognize my own body anymore?

**

I have breast cancer. 
I've been reminding myself of this fact every day for the last three weeks, since I received the official notification, saying it over and over in my head to make sure it sticks. It doesn't feel real. Even after the mammograms and ultrasound and biopsy and MRI, the prehab appointments, the meeting with a genetic counselor, my surgeon and a plastic surgeon, it feels distant to me: a thing happening to someone else. 

Now when I wake up, it's dark and cool, my body tangled in the sheets, and there's a minute of peace before something knocks on the inside of my brain.
Paula, this is happening. To you. In ten days. 

**

The initial mammogram, scheduled 366 days after my last one, revealed an "abnormality". A Google search suggested it was related to perimenopause, which has felt to me like a slow, subtle shifting of my internal gravity, and made a kind of sense, in the "weird things happen at this phase of life" way. Or maybe, as I was constantly reassured by well-meaning clinicians, the abnormality could be nothing at all. 

At each step, I was sure someone would stop it, tell me the scans came back clear, the tests revealed nothing, it was all a big scary to-do but it was, fortunately, something I could put in my rearview mirror. Instead, each time there was a grim smile, a set jaw, a bearing down to deliver the next round of bad news: another test, a new finding. and within my right breast, a cluster of abnormal cells spreading and spreading. 

**
If you're reading this, I'm sorry. I didn't want to have to tell you. I didn't want to tell anyone, because I don't want it to be true. I've sent some texts and emails, notifying a few people in my inner circle, and each time it's traumatic - sharing my pain and feeling theirs back -- and at some point, I just had to stop. 

But there is some good news hidden in the bad, what the nurse practitioner told me three weeks ago, her brown eyes boring into mine: caught early, very treatable. I'm hanging on to that right now, a little but sturdy raft in an ocean of uncertainty.