Emmy just turned two in July, and her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. She amazes me every day. Her pronunciation isn’t always clear; she will be demanding mucus in the car and I’ll say “What are you saying? Mucus?” “A song, a song!” she’ll demand instead. She means music!
My vocabulary? Amazingly, at 40, my vocabulary is expanding as well. What is “RT”? I just searched Twitter’s help section to see what the heck RT means. Re-tweet was the answer, and it turns out there’s a right way to RT and a wrong way.
What about BRCA? BRCA is breast cancer, as in breast cancer gene testing. It’s been about three weeks since I found out my mom went to have a gene test. We’ve always wondered if we have the BRCA gene mutation; Mom was first diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 40, and I was 27 when I was diagnosed.
If we find out Mom does have the mutation, what then? Most likely my sisters and I have the mutation as well. One of the mutations will make us more at risk for developing ovarian cancer along with breast cancer. Whoo-hoo! A double whammy! We’ll have some important decisions to make.
My biggest worry is about my daughters. Have I passed the mutation on to them? Now there’s some motherly guilt that will be pretty hard to recover from.
But then again, maybe I won’t need to feel guilty. Maybe my mom and I both having breast cancer at a young age is just a coincidence. A strange and unnerving coincidence, but perhaps one more bearable than having the BRCA gene mutation.
And so we wait….
