Is Watching TV Good for You?

Who'da thunk watching the 11 o'clock news could save my life? I guess there's something to be said for being a night owl. So let me go back to that night for a moment, and then I'll let you know what happened afterwards: Week 1: Watched the 11:00pm news on Channel 4. News anchor Doreen Gentzler featured a story about breast self-exams and a focus-group of women who failed to detect lumps in a synthetic breast. I promptly began feeling my "good" breast. To my surprise and horror, I felt what I suspected was an enlarged lymph node. It was located where the breast tissue extends into my underarm. (Yes, ladies, breast tissue reaches under your arms in addition to the top of your chest wall, so be sure to do self-exams there, too.) I obsessed with checking, and double- and triple-checking my breast all night long. I wrestled with whether it was real or just my imagination being led by the power of suggestion from the news segment. The next day, the "lump" was still there. I struggled internally with the possibility that something might be wrong, that my cancer had come back. But that's nothing new. I'm used to living with a dark cloud over my head. Every sneeze, wheeze, bruise and headache makes me wonder if I have cancer. Finally, the "I'm freaking out" voice inside my head won the argument. Thus I decided to make an appointment to see my oncologist. Week 2: My oncologist confirmed that he felt something, too. He referred me for an MRI and scheduled me for a PET scan. Better safe than sorry. I went home thinking I owed Doreen Gentzler a "thank you." If she hadn't done the segment, I wouldn't have checked myself. I sent an email to the station to let them know how important I thought the story was. A few days later, I went for an MRI. What I thought was a problem in my good breast turned out to be nothing. Instead, the MRI showed a suspicious mass on the opposite side, at the site where I had a mastectomy from my prior fight with cancer. I was already vaguely aware of said mass, but I had written it off as the valve in my implant. (I thought the implant had somehow shifted, and I was eventually going to call my plastic surgeon, but who knows when I would have actually gotten around to it.) "Okay," I reasoned, "it's just the valve they see." Deep inside, however, I wasn't convincing myself. I was nervous, but I held on to that hope anyway. At some point while this was going on, I received an email back from Channel 4 News. The producer asked me if I would meet with Doreen Gentzler for an interview. "Sure," I said. Due to conflicting schedules, we settled on meeting after the Thanksgiving holiday. Week 3: Whatever chemical they shot in me for the MRI "burned" intensely at the time, and a few days later my chest and arm started aching. The sensations were intermittent, but it hurt so much at times that I thought I was having little heart attacks. Although I didn't have a problem with it the first time I was diagnosed, I chocked it up as an after-effect of the MRI potion. Fortunately, the pain faded away a day or two later. Meanwhile, I was reminded, and disgusted, of the many, many side-effects I went through during treatment for my original cancer. Little did I know that pain in my arm was just a prelude to what's to come...