It was November 3rd 2022.
Fall my favorite season. My house is beautifully decorated with all your classic fall essentials. Pumpkins of impossible colors and sizes. Maple leaves, pumpkin apple Yankee candle. I’m sitting infront of the tablet I just bought with funds from the Yoga business I started with my husband. It’s doing really well. Thank you for asking, we have a contract to teach Yoga classes to prison inmates twice a week. My mom and husband are here. Im ovulating which is exciting because my husband and are trying for our first baby after 2 years of marital bliss. I could be pregnant.
My mom collared neck from a skull fracture, has already cried once. My husband as handsome as he is, is radiating with concern and determination to understand. My gyno comes on the computer screen. She says “Charlye” with a sigh. And I knew immediately. “I’m so sorry I have to tell you this News. The results of your biopsy revealed you have breast cancer. Its pretty aggressive.” She says. “I know you know don’t want to hear this but you should stop trying to conceive. Time is of the essence.”
And just that quickly my life was different. Just that quickly I went from trying to conceive to trying to get rid of an aggressive form of breast cancer. Triple Negative. The most deadly breast cancer of all. I’m not a future mom. I’m America’s newest cancer patient and addition to an all too familiar statistic. Black and/ or Hispanic under 40 most likely to get breast cancer in thier lifetime.
The irony of the whole thing is I’ve been a hypochondriac my whole life. As I child I wouldn’t ride a roller coaster if I couldn’t first read the warning signs, the dos and don’t. God forbid I die on a roller coaster. I always thought something bad would happen but I never actually believed it would. I assumed as long as I followed the rules everything would work out. As I was Meditating two weeks before I got the news, the day of the biopsy. I was reminded of my great grandmother Lula and my auntie Cilla both victims of the same statistic, both fought the battle of breast cancer and did not live to tell the tale.
Up until that point they were the only family members I knew of who also had breast cancer. We would always say in our family that the breast cancer though deadly, luckily skips a generation as if it’s somehow an intelligent force laying in wait for the right generation to strike. My auntie Cilla was in my mom’s generation. This Breast Cancer. Triple Negative. Was never on my radar. By my families logic the intelligent cancer shouldve skipped my generation having been in my moms, it should’ve skipped me. My hypochondriac mind could dream up a lot of things but this was extremely wild. I wanted to go back to being worried about dying on Rollercoasters.
Yoga and The Real World 