I’ve noticed something strange lately. Everyone’s staring at my chest.

It’s not that I’m particularly well endowed, or that I wear those super low v-neck Tshirts hawked by Abercrombie & Fitch.

No. It’s because something is missing…and people know it.

Three months ago, in early September I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I noticed a little dent in the side of my right breast and went in for a mammogram. Results: irregular (this is a nice way of saying “Uh oh!”). Then, in quick succession, I had an ultrasound, a biopsy, and a very unpleasant phone call from an apologetic radiologist. This was followed by a lumpectomy (unsuccessful), a mastectomy (successful), and, starting next week, chemo.

So I’m missing a breast and people look at my chest and try to figure out which one. It’s okay—don’t feel bad—I’d look too. I have looked. It just feels weird now to be the one being looked at.

My life has changed and will never be the same (is this good? Or bad? Still working on that.) Having breast cancer is time consuming and very expensive in terms of money, energy, and emotion (not to mention, my hair). It’s almost like having a demanding new career that I didn’t go to school for and wasn’t quite expecting. But it’s mine, it’s been given to me, and I can’t opt out.

And I haven’t written a word about it until now.

My tagline for my writing career is “Start a Little Adventure” It’s on my website and my business card. It even serves as the very last line of my book, So Long Status Quo, a memoir about women who changed the world. In fact, I was talking to my sister-in-law on the phone when all of this was first going down and she said “You wrote a book about strong women.  Now you’re going to have to be one.”

Right.

So, just as it does for every woman who joins the pink ribbon club, breast cancer has rocked my world. I’ve been living it, with no thought of writing about it, until last week when I had coffee with a friend. She lives in Wyoming and was in the San Francisco Bay Area for a friend’s wedding. We had the chance to sit down and talk at Bodi’s Java, an awesome local coffee house.

My friend loves books as much as I do. We’ve joked before that books are our first language. We talked about lots of things and at some point got around to

my cancer thing.

“Are you going to write about it?”

Deep breath. Hold it. Exhale. “I don’t know.” There are so many reasons not to.

It’s embarrassing, It’s painful. It’s public. It’s new, and raw.

“I’ve been wishing you would,” she said, quietly. Her voice held a note of longing.

So, dear friend, here we go. I’m going to write about it because books and the written word are my first language. It’s how I make sense of the world. It’s how I can even begin to know who I am and what I’m doing. So I guess that trying to make sense of breast cancer can only happen, for me at least, through words. And maybe there are others out there like me.