My aunt is having her breasts removed today. While she is my aunt by marriage, she is still the third woman in my family who has had breast cancer. She's 13 hours away, but my thoughts are with her right now. My thoughts are with her and with the role this cancer has played in my life.
Both of my grandmothers developed breast cancer at the age of 42.
My father's mother went through the surgery and treatments, but died. My father was 18 at the time and this broke a large piece of who he was and shattered it into tiny fragments. No one talked about death or how to grieve back then and so my father's method of handling this was self-medication and emotional distance. Oh, he also got someone pregnant. I resulted from that. So while I never met this woman, her life, and her death from breast cancer, had a very strong impact on my life.
My mother's mother had a radical mastectomy and lived. As this was also before I was born, I never knew her in any other way than as the woman who only had one breast. As an adult, and with some reflection, I know she felt disfigured by this. It was a horrible, but necessary event that kept her from dying. While what had happened to her was explained to me in the terms children can understand, all I knew for years was that she was Gran.
A lot of people get annoyed with the games on Facebook to raise breast cancer awareness. I don't. Thinking about bra colors or where you put your purse is a far easier than thinking about dead grandmas or disfigured ones or someone putting poison in your body or someone else being 13 hours away and you can't even hold their hand or kiss their cheek as they get wheeled into a surgery that will save their life, but leave many scars.
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