the cancer conundrum

i'm officially freaking out. yesterday was a bad cancer day. first, i discovered quite by accident that an amazing man, brendan halpin (http://www.brendanhalpin.com/), who wrote an amazing book, it takes a worried man, about his 32-year-old wife's diagnosis with breast cancer--to put it bluntly, she's now dead. then, i got an email from sally, who just got her path report back and the cancer's in one of her nodes, and the margins aren't clear, which means more surgery, a possible mastectomy, and definite chemo and radiation. fuck. then i started reading the sf chronicle journal of alicia parlette (read it here: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/special/pages/2005/alicia/index.DTL) and by bedtime last night, I was in meltdown mode. What I originally thought was my sport-related leg/knee injury I'm now even afraid to think about. If Alicia can get "butt" cancer (in her muscle), well, I still can't even write it. It's bad enough the thought is in my head, but to commit it to anything outside my own brain...welcome to the life of a cancer survivor. You can go along for days, months, years, and then something happens, or a chain of events unfold, and suddenly you're wondering if the last few years were just a cruel trick to get you to feel safe again, just so tptb could pull the rug right out from under you. I'm going to worry myself sick about this, especially since I will not talk to anyone about it and put it out there--especially Mike, who had a bad enough day yesterday with the news about Sally and Brendan's wife (Mike read the book, too, since it was really about how a husband deals with his wife's cancer). I hope my chiro has the MRI request ready to go this morning, and I also hope my oncologist orders the test quickly so I can move on.