Studded Snow Tires and Driving in Reverse

By the time the year-end holidays arrived, my stitches were out, and new routines began.

My 2017–2018 winter began with surgery in December and the news that the extracted and very small breast cancer nodule — perhaps one cell in which the DNA failed to stop reproducing, quietly building up its own community across a decade — had also sent settler cells out to colonize other parts of my body.

So the next steps were both fierce and optimistic: For the rest of the winter, two or three times each week, I arrived at the local cancer center to have my chest and underarm irradiated, a targeted burning intended to destroy any leftover cancer cells in the areas where most of them had been removed by surgery.

At the same time, I started taking a tiny daily pill meant to block how estrogen operated on my cells. Fortunately, I’d enrolled in prescription insurance when I first got the breast cancer diagnosis, because that medication wasn’t cheap. It also could have side effects, like weakening my bones, giving me muscle cramps, and more. But at first, it gave me no problems, and I accepted that it might be saving my life over the long term. In fact, I laughed, because the only other time in my life that I’d taken such tiny pills was in my college years and just after, and back then, the pills were The Pill (oral contraceptives). How funny that now, more than a decade after my cycles ended, I needed some sort of hormone adjustment all over again!