Actually, pink is the official color of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This shit is no joke, and super fucking scary to have to go through. Mine was benign, thank God, but that is not the case for everyone. The mental gymnastics this one question of a diagnoses can cause is enough to keep any family awake for days. I know it did for me.
It was two months before the wedding. Everyone was so excited about us getting married, and basically having an entirely too expensive, unnecessary party, that it didn’t seem appropriate to bother people with my problems. It’s so common, the doctors said. Don’t worry about it, they kept saying. It’s probably nothing. Those are the absolute dumbest phrases that you can say to anyone when you have just presented them with the prospect of the big C. That’s like telling someone to “just get over it.” Um…fuck you very much.
Have you ever actually had to go through getting a biopsy done? It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to have someone go in and take a chunk out of your boob. Yes they numb you, of course, but it’s still extremely invasive. Then you have to wait days for the results, because that shit just takes time. I pretty much slept like garbage for the next 72 hours, which does wonders for your anxiety, I might add. Like I said, mine wasn’t anything to be worried about, so they just tagged it and left it there due to my unwillingness to have an unnecessary surgery.
Self-Exams at Home
I never did this. Even for years after the scare it just wasn’t something that was on my mental radar. Sex education at school wasn’t exactly helpful in explaining any of the reasoning behind why we were supposed to touch ourselves. Actually come to think of it, I was told not to touch myself because masturbation was a disgusting practice that women weren’t supposed to participate in, nor talk about. Abstinence was drilled into our adolescent skulls. Sex is evil and gross. But at the same time, save yourself for your marriage night where it will be so wonderful to give your virginity to your husband. What the? How does that even make sense? Furthermore, I didn’t “lose” my virginity. I know exactly where it went.
We live in a society where the penis reigns supreme, so the majority of the scientific and the general health-related information is male centered. Even my husband, who literally grew up in a barn in the back woods of Giles County, learned how to put a condom on a banana during health class. I basically learned that Aunt Flow was coming to town, I was going to be a complete bitch, and to plug it up as the girls exclaimed in Carrie as they threw pads and tampons at her in the shower. Oh! And I had an aversion to cauliflower for quite some time after watching the STD slide show from hell.
I have read a bunch of books about the female reproductive system, and quite frankly they are insanely difficult to find. And the ones that you do find, contradict each other. I did really enjoy exclaiming to my religious therapist that I bought my first Bible, as I held up a copy of The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jen Gunter. She laughed. (She isn’t the super-annoying, in-your-face-about-it religious people.) I do the Fertility Awareness Method from Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler, which we should teach in school. This book was way more valuable than what basically equated to going over the package insert from the Tampax box. I also read Beyond the Pill by Dr. Jolene Brighton and The Period Repair Manual by Lara Briden. I like the recipes.
Sometimes It Be Like It Do
This incident led me down a rabbit hole of what exactly is cancer and what causes it. Quite frankly I am more confused than ever. WebMD says everything causes cancer, and the more you dig the more you wonder if that isn’t at least partially true. We’ve compromised our food to the point where the nutritional value is nothing compared to what it was when our grandparents were growing up. It’s almost like some crazy science experiment gone horribly wrong, and we are the lab rats.
It’s hard to not sound like a conspiracy nut sometimes when I talk about this stuff, so I usually just keep it to myself. Many diseases in our society are caused by us, and then instead of fixing the root cause of the problem, we treat the symptoms of it with pharmaceuticals. Our environment creates a ton of problems, but people think of environment as the world out there. We blame it on the big corporations polluting the air, nothing we can do about that. Wrong.
The definition of the word environment is confusing people. It is the air we breathe. That is absolutely true. And it’s the food we eat, our stress levels, our emotional fortitude, our quality of sleep, nutrition, hydration. It’s so much more than the ecology of the Earth. I’ve seen what happens when someone gives up their life to those outside forces. “Oh well, I guess this is just how it is.” It’s heartbreaking, to say the least. Mainly, because it doesn’t have to be this way.
Mad love, Jenna
