Three and a half years, in fact. Almost four years since my last update on this little corner of the internet. I finished the 2022 NYC Marathon and realized that not only did I not feel like blogging about it, but I didn’t feel like blogging – or sharing most of my life on the internet through social media – at all. Call it my Bottle Rocket moment.

So I quietly archived much of my life on Instagram, nuked my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and turned inward. Not in a major depressive way, but in a more thoughtful and deliberate way. Turning off all the notifications and realizing that not every moment had to be shared online in some way – from those selfie videos on IG stories in the car before heading to the gym, to the sharing of meals or day trips – it was unsurprisingly freeing. To go on a mini vacation and not share a single photo to the 12,000 people that follow my Instagram account? To be fully focused on the present and not on responding to the DMs I got? That felt better than the dopamine hit of strangers’ validation on the internet. But I digress.

So what was I up to in the past few years?

I went blonde and turned 40.

I grew in my career, traveled, and hung out with friends and family and celebrated joy at every chance.

I went back to brunette.

But since the beginning of this year, the headline in my life brings me to why I’m here once more after so many quiet years, typing out my little missives for the 6 people who still know this site exists: I’m having a prophylactic double mastectomy later this month, and I’ve got a lot of Feelings about it.

I know, it’s bizarre and still feels strange when I say (type?) it out loud. I’ve joked since my mom’s first diagnosis in 2004 that I would be fine with losing my breasts if they ever tried to kill me. I never imagined I’d find myself having to make good on that statement.

But when a routine screening MRI the day after Christmas found precancerous lesions in one breast, and led to a seriously awful biopsy experience, my oncologist (who knew I’d have one of those!) walked me through my options. And none of them felt right, aside from a mastectomy. With a lifetime risk of developing breast cancer over 70% by some risk scales, it wasn’t about if it would show up – it was when. Forty years of ultrasounds and MRIs and possible biopsies every 6 months, always crossing my fingers and losing sleep over the possible outcome. As a “perfect candidate” for this surgery (my oncologist’s words), I’d bring my risk from basically unavoidable to practically nonexistent. Some might call what I’m doing using a landmine to fix a gopher problem, but I see it as the only logical solution to a very real problem.

With all of this news comes a lot of introspection. I’ve found myself writing my way through some of the more difficult to navigate emotional paths I’ve gone down. For example:

On one hand, this is exactly why we do screening exams and biopsies – to catch things before they get untreatable. If it was cancer we found, we’d essentially do the same thing, if not something even more invasive and hard on my body, with chemo and possible radiation involved. So why not take advantage of the medical advances we’ve made and nip it in the bud before it can become cancer? True, I could choose instead to have a lumpectomy. But then I’d also have to do preventative chemo, which comes with its own list of negative and lasting side effects. And that would still only bring my lifetime risk down to around 40%, which is still much higher than the average 13%.

Do I WANT to do this? Of course not. It’s going to be pretty awful and it’s not fair at all that my tits are trying to kill me. Am I glad I am going through with it? Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. I’m learning how to hold gratitude and grief in the same hand, and it’s hard.

But I’m committed to learning and working through everything that this next chapter will bring, and I’m going to share it all here. So if that sounds like something you’re interested in, stick around and let’s see where the road takes us.

And I promise that I WILL be back to running happy eventually – it’s just going to take some time to get there.