A bump in time...

I can't get my mind of my left breast - precisely, my left nipple. I can't tell if I imagining that occasional sharp pain or if I have put a tiny bump of fiction there, born of my little, but certainly not irrational fear. Somewhere in the textbooks of my seven year college stint I read that lesbians are more prone to breast cancer than heterosexual women - maybe due to the fact that we don't often use our breasts for milk delivery. I'm not sure. Ask the "God Hates Fags" crew and I am sure that lesbians are being punished and therefore, of course, breast cancer. I'm not going to indulge myself in the reasons why I might maybe be feeling a tinge of pain now and again. All I know is this, at my annual exam during a chatty moment between my doctor and I about the many ways to feel your breast for lumps, she finds something, brings it to my attention by pulling my index finger over it a few times, has the medical student take a feel for herself and in a very conversational tone tells me, "Check it out in a few weeks, after your period, if it's still there then call me, but don't lose any sleep over it."

Frankly, I'm not one to lose much sleep over anything except for an evening where I get caught up with youtube.com, unintentionally surfing videos of 12 year-old boys lip singing R&B with their shirts off. No, I swear, it's unintentional. But it's hard not to imagine the implications of a lump in you own breast especially in the wake of another family member's battle with the same beast. I'm not scared but I'm thinking about it with the loose ends of my mind - between the nonfiction stories of my peers and the lesson planning for my freshman class - there lingers a brevity of fear, a pictorial of myself in a variety of film-like scenes: crying in the shower, a unilateral scar across my chest, my partner's hand in mine, my hands roaming across my body, appointment upon appointment out on the Palouse, a sharp pin through my nipple.

The mind can go many places in it's exploration in managing distress and in search for meaning.  The fear of death is alight in the minds of many in my family, so it comes as no surprise to me that my own mortality came into question. The reverberations of age and illness permeate all the generational lines: my uncle passed of melanoma, my grandfather's age is taking him, my parents are aging and displaying signs of less vitality than I've known before, and I am at the age where invisibility is diminished by all these things. We can never be sure that we will survive, indefinitely, to see our retirement and certainly for my generation, a social security payment. And when I consider the monetary implications of a breast cancer diagnosis, I realize I don't come from money - no one in my family is rolling in it either - I am a student on a very minimal student health insurance plan with a clinic that doesn't do much more than treat you for the clap or a cough. Anything else is shipped out to an outside provider, someone you don't know who gets to touch your business, whether its Northern or Southern, and all you can do is hope that you like the doctor choices you get.

Which leads me back to existence in itself, you don't really get a lot of choices when it comes to biology or genetics (and if your on the "God Hates Fags" team - then you don't get a choice in what kind of punishment you receive for your sins). If there is a God, I don't think he's on their team. If there is a Goddess, I don't think she would deliver pain to our breasts. If there was a broader pantheon of great Spirits, my hope would be they'd reach a consensus: lets not inflict the human race with cancer - let alone put it in their pleasure places (not to mention mass genocides, war, poverty, etc.).

It's going to be rather hard to keep my fingers off my breast - as if I could magically press into this new found lump and like a zit, the source of the problem would come squirting out. But I am going to keep my hands off it until my next period, until a week after my next menstruation when my doctor says, "It could disappear." But I feel my chest on a regular basis and honestly, I've felt this before. I recall lying in bed a few years back doing my semi-monthly breasts exam, at the house that sat on top of I5. As I felt it up and down, I was wondering if the exhaust fumes from the freeway were as caustic as the log-like power lines they string above poor neighborhoods and reservations. And then I found it, square in the middle of my nipple and I thought to myself, Cystic breasts, and moved on. Nothing to be worried about. I went and felt it again. Round, isn't it. Not very hard. Hmmm... I'm tired. And with that, I was off to dreamland. Not losing any sleep. Nope. None at all.

And such is the case today. I am going to put my trust in my doc and do what she tells me. I will save my worries for when they are warranted. (And if you are my family or friends, do me a favor and do the same). There are better things to attend to: cooking dinner, spending time with friends, having a drink, loving your family or like me, you could be running off to teach freshman the art of writing the essay.