love|blackbird

I Googled It

Zero stars. Do not recommend. Oops…

But honestly – I would do it again. The saaaaame dang Google search. I mean, what is the first thing you want to know when diagnosed with cancer? I’ll tell you what mine was. Am I going to live? How long am I going to live? It took two weeks to find out what kind of ovarian cancer I had, after having the tumor removed. I met with my oncologist early in the day, in an office attached to the same hospital where I birthed both of our kiddos. He hadn’t gotten confirmation of the specific type yet, but I came prepared with a written list of questions, the most important to me being whether they had any idea what kind it *might* be. I wanted to know, I wanted to research, I wanted a plan.

Well, he did. But before he told me, he looked at me seriously and said “Don’t Google it.” HA. I did try. I really wasn’t going to do any kind of research… until we knew the type for sure. That seemed absolutely and totally and seriously maybe kind of reasonable.

I made it two hours from when we got home.

Small Cell Ovarian Cancer.

10% chance of survival.

Median survival: 11 months.

I could feel the heat rise in my body. The burning fear of realizing your own mortality. I flushed, and couldn’t look my husband in the eye. I was sitting on one of our couches in the living room, the one with its back to the window bay, and he was across from me on the other. I told him what I had seen, and that I was going to stop looking for now, but that if this is what it was, we were going to have a lot of work ahead of us. I wasn’t going to succumb to this.

A couple of hours later, my oncologist called me to confirm it was Small Cell, and we briefly discussed plans moving forward. Chemo would need to begin ASAP, I’d need a port, we’d need a PET scan to properly stage me. I didn’t absorb a whole lot of what he shared, I just remember his kindness and empathy, that I was to try to get some rest, and we’d talk the next day.

So yeah – I Googled. And what I found terrified me. But it also started me down a path of researching and advocating for myself that I know played a big part in my survival. More on that in another post. My point is – no one knows what this experience is like for you – except YOU. If you don’t want to look it up – don’t. But if you want to – go ahead. There are no right or wrong answers here. There is only honoring what YOUR intuition is telling you to do. Love yourself, give yourself grace… and if you need someone else to Google it for you – I’m your gal!

xx,

Tay

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