My Right Breast Likes to Grow Things, Unlike My Tomato Plants Which Don’t

Breasts only have one actual job. To produce milk when a baby needs it, in order to grow said baby into an actual child. My breasts did that admirably for three years, one child. You’d think that amount of production would be enough for a lifetime.

My tomato plants, while also having only one job, made a feeble attempt to grow one infinitesimally small tomato, which produced its own teensy-tiny growth. Which tomatoes are not supposed to do or have. Neither are breasts.

My tomato plants never really tomatoed, whereas my breasts have always admirably breasted. Until now.

My right breast seems to have rerouted some of the energy I spent trying to get tomatoes to grow. Instead, it grew something even more infinitesimally, teensy-teensy, microscopically smaller than my one tomato. An eensy-weensy carcinoma. As if copious amounts of breast milk wasn’t enough.

My tomato plants never really tomatoed, whereas my breasts have always admirably breasted. Until now.

Not to panic. The teensy-weensy growth is a zero-stage ductal carcinoma in situ, grade 2. A fancy way of saying I have a little bit of cancer, contained in a milk-duct and non-spreadable. Probably.

This isn’t the first time my right breast decided to grow something. Twenty years or so ago, it produced a benign lump the size of a small tomato. I wasn’t even trying to grow actual tomatoes then. My right breast seemingly has a mind of its own.

Yes, I had missed a few mammograms during my forties and early fifties, enough for such a lump to go from seedling to tomato size. I never made that mistake again. I’ve gotten mammograms yearly since my early fifties.

Except some genius decided women of a certain age only need mammograms every two years. So I skipped last year. It’s debatable if the new entity would have shown up on a mammogram a year ago, but we’ll never know.

During the two year interim, my right breast decided to produce a seedling which blossomed into the tiniest of growths. Perhaps out of boredom — there’ve been no babies to feed for twenty-eight years, and only a sporadic attempt at entertaining a partner to play with them the last few years.

Unless my breast or breasts decide to grow more seedlings in the future, the little bit of cancer I have isn’t considered life-threatening.

Unlike the tomato I tried to eat from my nearly infertile tomato plant, which tasted terrible and suspect. Maybe too much manure in the fertilizer. It was the only tomato on the five-feet-tall plant, so it got all the manure.

The doctors don’t know what fertilizes stuff that grows in breasts, although it’s unlikely to be manure.

Apparently I have three risk factors, age, weight and alcohol. I can only do something about two of those. And if you think I’m giving up wine with dinner while undergoing radiation, you are highly mistaken. I’d rather give up chocolate, and that’s not happening either.

Will I cut back? Of course.

Did I get tipsy a couple of times after the diagnosis? What do you think? Did I get so tipsy, as to get so consumed by giggles with my sister at a combination dog park/bar, that she had to drive home? Why yes — yes I did. And isn’t the person who thought of combining a dog park and a bar a genius?

I digress. What I will do is quickly schedule the harvesting of the minuscule growth, and whatever other treatments the doctors and I can agree on.

I’m not an easy patient, wanting to know absolutely everything they spent years in medical school learning before I make decisions. However, I do keep them laughing throughout, so we all have a better time with the best outcomes.

I will lose weight. I will cut back on alcohol. Probably fat, too, although that may be out-of-date advice, which I’ll get back to you about. I plan to depict my journey with all the hilarity I can muster.

Get a mammogram ma’am.

Stay tuned if you want to laugh along with me on this journey. But not if you want to learn how to grow tomatoes. About that, I have no idea.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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