While I await the biopsy results, and other test results, I find myself wondering – what should I be hoping for? If you are going to have breast cancer, the next question is, what kind of breast cancer? The problem is, I really don’t want to do a lot of reading about the different types of breast cancer right now. I only want to know about one type – the best type to have, whatever that is, so that I can hope that is what I have. But I don’t know enough about breast cancer to have even the foggiest idea of what I should be hoping for.

One thing I keep hoping is that it doesn’t spread to my lymph-nodes. I know that spread is bad – so I hope that it is localized. Of course, anytime I feel the slightest bit of anything on the outer edges of my breast I get concerned. Am I feeling it spread to my lymph-nodes? Are things moving along fast enough?

Now that I have told my family, I see they are going through the denial phase as well. They are saying, ‘the results could still come back negative’. Perhaps that is true, and nothing is confirmed until the biopsy results come back, but that doctors were pretty clear. I’ve had three different specialists say that ‘they would be surprised if it isn’t breast cancer’. I think I stopped that line of thinking when I saw that they changed my current conditions status on my health record. My current health conditions now list ‘breast cancer’. Seeing that in writing, at that moment, was pretty emotional. I think it was then that the reality set in.

The radiologist reports say ‘highly suggestive of malignancy’ (BI-RADS 5) on the left breast and ‘suspicious abnormality’ on the right breast. The BI-RADS classification of 5 has a greater than 98% chance of malignancy. And so, although others are going through denial, I think I am ready to move to the next phase – bargaining. So, now I am asking myself, what should I be hoping for?