There is no cure for a genetic mutation. You can't just staple 1834 amino acids to the 38 that I've got.
But there are, of course, "options". I use the word "options" advisedly because "options", like "choices" makes it sounds like you get to choose between two or more things that are essentially equal in outcome. "Options" are supposed to make you feel empowered, as if your have an active role to play in your fate. But "options" like "choices" are frequently just a form of Orwellian double speak. The objective is to promote docile compliance by creating the illusion of control in the mind of the coerced. I do not think that a person being mugged at gunpoint feels very "empowered" by the "choices" proposed by his assailant.
So here are some of my "options": I can *choose* to have my ovaries and fallopian tubes removed in a surgery known delightfully as an "oopherectomy" or I can "choose" to have regular surveillance of my organs. The thing is that when it comes down to ovarian cancer, surveillance does not work.
My new super specialist gynecologist/geneticist/oncologist, whom I shall refer to as "Dr. Statistics", to his credit, didn't bother to bullshit with me about "options". The first thing he said to me was "well you know, the ovaries gotta come out", as if he were discussing my wisdom teeth. According to Dr. Statistics, this will cut my breast cancer risk in half and reduce my ovarian cancer risk by 90% or more.
The bad news is that this surgery will put me into menopause. Immediately. And here I was this entire time so looking forward to my perimenopause!
I find all of this rather horrifying. First, the notion of evicting perfectly healthy organs, albeit ones that may go rogue and kill me, is a mind fuck beyond compare. For fuck's sake, I was still using those ovaries!
I'm not antimenopause per se. As every woman must, I accept the inevitability of the ol 'pause as part of the ongoing journey of life, as natural as labor pains and orgasms. But I didn't expect to have to go through it so soon and so. . . . alone. I just thought that when the time came, me and my girlfriends would sit around sipping very slushy margaritas with the air conditioning cranked up discussing our colonoscopies and our husband's faulty prostates. I imagined my husband's viagra sitting in the medicine cabinet next to my boniva.
But now, today, well, I'm only 40. My darling husband, my Boy Toy, is only 34!
I was supposed to be a cougar, not a spayed house cat.
Sorry just found this blog, I am actually 25, pregnant with my second baby and positive for BRCA 1. My doctor would like to remove my ovaries when I am done having children, which would be soon...like I said I am only 25... :(
Posted by: Bri | July 10, 2009 at 12:42 PM