One Day Closer to a Plan

February 19, 2026

I’ve just clocked out for the morning and need to be back at my desk by 6:30pm tonight. That extra hour and a half is usually pretty busy with people on the West Coast ending their day so I need to get a good day’s sleep. 

Looking at my “Critical Illness” Insurance paperwork I see that I need to print about 20 pages of just paperwork that the insurance company requires and then another however many pages of radiology, mammogram, and office visit reports for use as proof of a critical illness.

Michigan winter has been all over the place. Below zero for weeks and now it’s almost 50 degrees! This is causing air quality alerts due to viruses in the snow thawing bringing back Influenza A and B. Both had been rampant before the freezing weather and now the seasonal flu and RSV are making a strong comeback.

Just because I work remotely doesn’t mean that I’m at any lower risk for contracting one of these viruses. I do handle mail and packages and I do go out once or twice a week. That thought sent me to my wish list for masks, hand sanitizer, and a sign for my front door. I’m currently living in a townhouse style apartment so I have maintenance that comes in as well as various city inspectors and I want to be sure that they have hand sanitizer and a mask when they enter.

When I lived downstate I lived in between two college towns and the maintenance people were entering more often than I think they needed to. I only noticed when I began working remotely and it seemed that I was woken up at least once a week by someone yelling “Maintenance”. The ironic thing is that they never really did anything – nor did I call them – they just simply showed up. I was very happy to move and I’ve only had maintenance here three times and city inspectors – if we count today – twice.

I’m probably getting ahead of myself expecting that I will need chemotherapy even if I have a mastectomy but I’d rather be prepared and not need the stuff imminently than need it and somehow Amazon be overloaded and not deliver Prime next or second day. 

Sadly, I was unable to get a good day’s sleep and I got maybe 4 hours before my alarm startled me awake. The good news is that it wasn’t as busy as I expected. Because I started my shift so early, dinner is late getting started. If you want to call it dinner, it’s leftovers. I actually planned that so I wouldn’t have to have a long involved process because I knew I’d be starving. I was actually hungry before I even tried to go to sleep around 7am.

Upon waking, my chest felt tight and achy and my back is sore as well.

Was it George Carlin or Robin Williams that did the whole comedy skit on “This is my father’s walk”?

Anyhow, I feel like I’ve aged years instead of weeks and then I get to thinking that my diagnosis is invasive so maybe my chest hurts because it’s metastasized. Talk about catastrophizing things. It’s been below zero for weeks and the windows haven’t been open to allow the staleness out and even if they had been open, they would have let in all the no longer dormant viruses into the house.

Unsurprisingly, I was Googling lumpectomy vs mastectomy because I want to have an idea of what the surgeon is going to talk about with me on Tuesday.

This brought to mind that I should probably have some kind of glossary for your perusal on this site. That is currently in the rough draft phase and will be forthcoming. Of course, you can use Google yourself but as I said before, I just want to provide you with a single site where you can potentially obtain answers more quickly. I will also eventually provide a compilation of websites that seem reliable. Likely hospital sites across the country that provide user friendly, non medical jargon, reliable articles. 

There are so many acronyms used in everything these days but the HER2+/- along with ER+/- and PR+/- were really throwing me off so that is how the Glossary idea came to mind.

I hope that readers will use the comment sections to interact with each other and provide their experiences. Probably not a day to day like I’m doing, but somewhere you can write a paragraph or two about your journey and timeline along with other notable phases of diagnoses rather benign or malignant. 

Please let your friends and family know of this blog – if you find it useful – this is a place for growth and cancer has many stories and phases of treatment and diagnosis. Information is power!