The Day After My Diagnosis

The moments after.

I woke up expecting to feel a sense of relief. The emotional weight of the past two weeks had peaked. But there were literally no more tears available to cry. I tried to summon some but none came.

What I discovered is that everything had just shifted. Feelings shuffled a little bit to the left or to the right, and nestled in anew. The deep, belly-hollowing fear from the day I received my breast cancer diagnosis had been replaced with profound, numbing sadness. Grief. There was a heaviness in my bones.

A change of scenery was exactly what I didn’t want but something my husband knew I needed. He suggested that we get in the car and drive. No plan and no destination. My worst nightmare. But I relented. It felt like I had been swimming against the tide and decided to finally just let the current carry me in to shore.

We ended up in a neighboring state at the wackiest outdoor safari. None of the enclosures were labeled, there were no park maps, and only 3 employees were on site. It all felt fitting, somehow.

The sun and the kids’ giggles softened the rigidity that had settled into my body. In those moments I was able to wriggle free from the diagnosis, contorting my shoulders just enough to squeeze through an imaginary escape hatch and take a deep breath before being swallowed back in.

The kids didn’t know about my diagnosis and I had no idea how to tell them. It felt like I was keeping the worst secret imaginable from them, but I had decided that I wanted to know exactly what my treatment plan was before trying to explain what was going on to them. Although the initial results from my biopsy had come back there were a number of important pieces of information not yet available in my pathology report.

And so we ambled through the safari, between animals that delighted the kids (ponies) and disgusted them (zebras -- their poop was pretty potent -- nothing personal, zebras!), before driving back home and back to reality.