telerib | Not gonna freak out

So, what to do with disturbing news in the middle of the day?

I could call Moe, but he'll just worry himself into a frenzy and it's his first day off the patch. My sister's incommunicado while teaching, and I'm so not emailing this to my father. He deserves a phone call, and not one at work.

Onward to the LJ, then. Just don't tell Moe you heard it before he did. :-/

I have a serious family history of abdominal cancers. Colon, endometrial, uterine... you name it, probably someone on my mom's mom's side has had it. My maternal grandmother died of colon cancer at age 52, and my mother died last year from endometrial cancer. So it makes a whole lot of sense for my sister and I to begin early screenings - particularly because we suspect that endometriosis might be a warning sign.

So I had a series of ultrasounds done last week, mostly to look for the endometriosis.

So I got the results today. There's a 5cm mass in my liver. WTF?

So I'm getting a CAT scan ASAP to get a better look at it, then a biopsy. The doctor says it might just be fatty tissue. (Please, please, please be fatty tissue!) There was also some odd shadings on the uterine ultrasound, but that's kind of secondary to the TWO BLOODY INCH *thing* in my liver at the moment.

So. Yeah.

Now what? I half want to take the rest of the day off - seems reasonable, right? - but then what? Rattle around the house all day and stress? Maybe Happy Denial Land would be a nice place to go, at least til quitting time. But it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for optimal control theory when there's this looming in the background. And there's the weird balloon-head feeling.

This is scary. I'm not panicking - not til after the CAT scan and biopsy, anyway - but it's still scary.

Thanks for reading. It's slightly less scary when you've told someone. :-)