I'll admit it...I was freaking out...

Yesterday, I found a "lump" in the left side of my neck, and another one just above my collarbone on the other side.

I called my local doc's office right away and got an appointment with the Family Nurse Practitioner for this afternoon. I figured (translation: desperately hoped) that it was something stupid or trivial. Rather than spend 2 hours and $300 to go see the oncologist right away, I decided that I really needed it to be "nothing serious."

Keeping the monster in the box, I got busy last night on finishing the taxes. Everytime my hand would stray up to the spot to feel them again, I'd take a deep breath, put my hand down and change the subject in my head. But inside, the panic-wailing threatened, barely under control.

My FNP took her time today palpating the spots I showed her. She said she was concerned. They were most certainly swollen lymph nodes, a sign of a problem. Then she lifted my hair back and saw the 3 inflamed bug bites on my jawline, just above the bump near my collarbone. And then the big swollen knot of the other bite on the back of my neck, right next to the other node-of-concern. We have a plausible explanation now for the agitated lymph nodes. They are fighting the toxins from the buggy-bites.

It's a temporary relief, but a welcome one. If they don't resume normal size by next week, I will have to go get them looked at again, this time by the cancer people. I just had a roomful of docs feeling everything from my chin to my waist last week at UVA, so this is the most likely cause. Let down. Big sigh. Probably nothing.

But this is what it's like all the time now--just waiting for something else to go wrong, another lump to appear, more bad news. I absolutely detest that this is what life seems to be about. The gremlin is always there in the background--I can ignore it most of the time, feeling good, getting better, and then WHAM! With a twinge in the bone, an ache in the gut, a bump in the skin, it all comes roaring back like a sleeping beast awakened. And every little thing, no matter how insignificant I think it is at first, has to be investigated as if my life depended on it. Because it does. I can't trust my judgment anymore about what is normal and what is abnormal.

How do I discern vigilance from paranoiac hypochondria? How do I know what needs to be looked at and what can be safely ignored? If I had thought this through, I probably could have figured out that these lumps and bumps were the result of my insect bites, but I still had to go running downtown and hear someone else tell me, just so I could resume breathing normally! I hate crying "wolf," I hate even thinking "wolf;" Is that what I'm doing here?

The problem is that I now expect my body to mess with me. This old crate used to be my friend! And then it betrayed me! I thought I knew my body, and I got shown the extent of that huge delusion last year. Now I have to decide whether I'm ignoring things that are serious or blowing the trivial way out of proportion, and I don't know which is which. I'd like to be able to keep a balance of being responsible and monitoring potential problems without going over the edge into an abyss of speculative hysteria at every little thing. I want to go back to trusting my body, and yet I'm constantly being handed new things to think the worst about. It just seems like it's never really over.

How do you live with optimism and verve, when Mr. Nasty-Cancer is always hanging around the backdoor, looking for a way to break into your house when your alarm system is temporarily turned off?