Finding The Lump

Thirty years ago, soaping up in the shower, there it was.  It felt big as a ping-pong ball, and in my little A-cups, that was huge.

I was not as alarmed as you might expect.  See, I’d had lumps for years and years.  The first one was when I was 16.  That one alarmed me considerably, but in a detached, invincible-adolescent sort of way.  I remember sitting in my room in a cold sweat, and the drama of thinking “Wow, I might die!” but it such an alien thought that there were no images or particular fears to go with it.  The doctor quickly reassured me that it was just a cyst, and sure enough it was gone in a few weeks.

Then in my early 20s there was a string of lumps.  Some were also cysts, and went away quickly, but some didn’t go away – and made the doctors frown, because their experienced fingers felt something awry.  That was when it got scary.  These lumps had to be removed surgically, and biopsied thoroughly to be sure they were benign.  The surgeries were done under local anesthetic, which was a creepy experience: feeling a lot of tugging and hearing the snipping of flesh, but all as if completely detached from my head.  The incisions were messy and the bandages extensive (even A-cups jiggle) but they all turned out to be benign “fibroadenomas.” After the third or fourth time, it was unsettling but no longer traumatic.

So I was mostly just annoyed when I found the ping-pong ball.  “Oh, this one’s going to have to come out,”  I thought, and my doctor agreed.  But I had a big vacation coming up – my husband and I were going to the west coast for my brother’s graduation, and then we’d take several days to explore San Francisco – and I didn’t want to spend those two weeks strapped in ace bandages.  The doc agreed there was no rush, and we put the surgery off until after my trip.