Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin, who shocked her 50,000-plus fans last week by announcing she has breast cancer, published a lengthy post on her cancer diagnosis today.
Jardin, who had noticed an anomaly on her own body recently, explained she decided to check it out after two of her friends were diagnosed.
“This anomaly must be misplaced anxiety, my logic-brain tried to explain to my lizard-brain” wrote Xeni, before going into a play-by-play of her journey from examination to diagnosis.
“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.
“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”
I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.
As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.
…
I cried, but someone else was doing the crying, someone else was doing the shaking, someone else was lying there, and now the gun was diving in to someone else’s flesh to bring back rock samples from outer space for the lab to analyze.
Jardin continued to use space metaphors in her post, describing the cancer as a trip to a lonely cold planet, and the only thing that brings you back from that fearful place is… “love.”
Boing Boing readers were quick to throw in their support today.
“This is the sweetest, most honest, telling of bad news that I’ve seen in perhaps ever” commented Uncle Duke.
Besides writing a lengthy post about her experience, Jardin continues to tweet instagrams of her check-ups, like one today, where she appears to be drinking a contrast dye shake before getting a bone scan.
Photo from Xeni Jardin’s Instagram feed
