Breast Cancer

  

I'm an Amazon Woman.

Why?

I'm missing my right breast. It took two times at HUG (Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève) to eliminate the breast and its cancer. HUG is not pronounced like the English word but whooog. 

After the first time there was a cute little scar. I documented it in breastisyettocome.blogspot.com/ then self-published the blogs in a book The Cockeyed Nipple for English-speaking Geneva women with breast cancer who don't speak French, adding another level of scary. It's available in Kindle on Amazon.

19 Radiation treatments and I was free, or so I thought.

Four years later, I had to tell my new husband my latest mammo had failed. Back to HUG, revisiting with my wonderful doctor and surgeon and the many professional nurses. 

That surgery made me into an Amazon woman. Bye-bye breast.

Amazon women were said to remove their right breast so they could shoot arrows better. The last time I shot an arrow was in the Rocky Mountains in the early 1970s and I missed the target.

This time treatment involved chemo, leaving me exhausted. That new husband was amazing in caring for me. He did have trouble believing that nurses came to my house to give me daily shots. 

Because of the earlier radiation, they didn't want to give me more but found a different approach.

We made weekly train trips to Bern to meet with a doctor who would heat my breast area for 45 minutes and then zap it for 30 seconds. 

My fear we'd have trouble because I didn't speak Swiss German were unnecessary. He started in French, switched to English when he heard my accent. He spoke 11 languages, most of them fluently and we had deep and some times comic discussions during my 45 minutes.

This week, some 10 years later as I walked into HUG, pass the giant light board with the names of all the little residents born there during the week lit up, I worried about the mammo I was about to have.

I needn't have worried. I'm clean. I'm grateful. 

Strangely enough, I have many warm memories of the experience:

• The chemo session conversations with the other patients and nurses.
• Eating wild strawberries with a nurse at night after her shift.
• Sneaking under the nurses station with my roomie so we could see the fireworks for the Swiss national holiday.
• Being hugged by my surgeon after not seeing her for a couple of years.
• The wonderful care by my husband.
• Tummy, the landlady's cat, who came each morning and spent the day in bed with me.
• The doctor in Bern.
• Exploring Bern and a good lunch before treatment. 
• The radiation personal in Geneva, including the man who wanted to be an artist.
• The bird paintings on the doors of the radiation rooms.
• Meeting so many interesting people. 

If I had it to do over I would have had the second breast removed making a bra obsolete. However, it is nice with only one breast squeezed during a mammo, but just having a sonar would be better.

One in eight women in Geneva will face breast cancer. In America CDC's reported in 2022 "Based on the most recent data available, 279,731 new breast cancers were reported in females in the United States in 2022, and 42,213 females in the United States died from breast cancer in 2023."

Ladies, get those regular mammograms. I hope you have insurance. It can be a matter of life and death. I was lucky. May you be lucky too.