Good Luck, Bad Luck

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Since getting my diagnosis, I've had a lot of thoughts about luck, both good and bad. I've always felt like my life was full of blessings, never more so than in the last few months with my healthy, happy baby boy, my wonderful husband with whom I am deeply in love, loving family and friends, a beautiful home, and a stimulating career that I was excited to return to. And then I got breast cancer at 35, which at times feels like the unluckiest thing that ever could have happened to me.

From age 30 to 39, a woman's absolute risk of getting breast cancer is 0.44%. This means that 1 in 227 women in this age group can expect to develop breast cancer. Put another way, of the 20 million women in the US today who are in their thirties, 88,000 have been diagnosed with breast cancer or will be before they turn 40. I can picture what 88,000 people looks like - an almost-capacity crowd at the Coliseum - but I can't decide if that seems like a lot or a little. A little, I suppose, compared to the total population - but far too many to be battling breast cancer in their thirties.

To be one of that group does indeed seem unlucky. And yet, I know that of those 88,000 women, and all the other millions of women of all ages with all types of cancer all over the world, I am one of the luckiest. I live minutes away from three of the best medical facilities in the world. My disease, though aggressive, is treatable, and I will have access to the best drugs and surgical methods. I have excellent health insurance which will cover the cost of most of my care, and I have the means to pay for whatever insurance doesn't myself. I have so many good people in my life who will take care of me and my baby when I am not able to. And I have a partner who has been with me every step of this process, who has taken careful notes at each doctor's appointment, who talks with me endlessly about every feeling that I'm having, who will hold my hand through chemo and surgery, and who will make me feel beautiful when I'm bald.

To have developed breast cancer just months after having a baby also seems unlucky, even cruel. Weaning Ike from breastfeeding is breaking my heart in a way that having cancer is not. Each time I nurse him now, knowing that the end of nursing is near, I feel like I would do anything to be able to continue - anything, of course, except risk dying of cancer. But I feel that it's fortunate in a strange way that he is so small. If he were even a little older, he would be able to experience fear and sadness, and to be unhappy when we're apart, and to be upset if I'm too tired to play with him. If he were older, he might understand enough to be afraid of losing his mother. As it is, he won't remember any of this - one day we'll tell him about how I was sick when he was a baby, and how I got better.

Good luck? Bad luck? Seth has pointed out that every challenge we've faced together so far has brought us only good things in the end. We have to keep believing that in some mysterious way, that will be true again with this illness.

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