Susan Swinford Chase

Hello!  Welcome to this weirdly structured artificial environment meant to facilitate interactions around My Disease.  Actually, I do think this is a lovely idea, this site at which updates and help can be coordinated.  It's just that it's not totally my style, and yet I find it so very hard to relinquish control of the words that are used to shape this adventure that I'm reluctant to let anyone else flesh this thing out much. To cut to the chase, though, if you've somehow randomly stumbled on this page, the "Story" is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer in June and subsequently tested positive for a BRCA2 gene mutation (and not one of the harmless ones).  That fact, combined with the number and size and location of the tumors, means I'm undergoing 4 months of chemo, followed by a bilateral mastectomy and radiation.  And then might lose some other assorted bits in an effort to address my odds of getting ovarian cancer.  Not precisely the way I'd planned the latter part of 2016 to shape up, but not all bad news, since the best part is that the doctors do not believe the cancer reached my lymph nodes.  Chemo, not to put too fine a point on it, is rotten in a myriad of uncomfortable, inconvenient, yucky ways.  But I am ever mindful of how very, very lucky I have been and am, by and large, extraordinarily buoyed by the reminders of how much is good and wonderful in my life. Seriously.