close to home

I haven't blogged in the past week partly from shock, exhaustion, and general malaise and busyness. My grandmother was nice enough to allow me to write about this, so here goes. On Tuesday, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had gone for a fine needle aspiration on Friday, and from how she described it, I pretty much knew then that the results wouldn't be so good. But it's a whole other experience actually hearing the words, "It's cancerous." And as someone who works in the field, whose life centers around cancer, I didn't think I'd have the stunned reaction that I did, but life is funny like that. It still doesn't seem quite real to me, but she's handling it very well, as is my grandfather. (In fact, they even read this blog!). She's going for a metastatic workup on Tuesday to see if it's spread anywhere else, and then meeting with her doctor tuesday afternoon to go from there. Right now we're in that grey area of not really knowing anything definitive that will guide treatment or give a prognosis. Funny, though I know all the statistics, for some reason I never actually thought they'd apply to my family - as if working in oncology gave me a certain protection or something.