Wendy Irwin

And so I ignored her for eight weeks.

She just wasn't there.

And then for a further seven weeks, I did the other thing that I do.

I pleaded.

I begged.

Maybe if you don't get any bigger, or maybe if you wouldn't mind just disappearing because you weren't there last month.

Miss Maudie has other ideas.

One night she says, I'm just going to

do a little dance, make a little love to the healthy cells in your breast, and multiply with my malignancy tonight.

That pain was so bad, it took me to A&E.

And in that A&E trip, I ended up having an ultrasound.

And that ultrasound then led to a biopsy.

And that biopsy then led to an MRI.

And that led to this moment in that office.

where that oncologist tells me, I am so sorry, Wendy, but it is breast cancer.

And I recognize that I have lived long enough to see those odds shorten from one in 100 to one in 10, now one in two, now me.

And the weirdest thing is, is that I find myself saying, as the oncologist says, you know, have you thought about freezing your eggs?

I find myself saying out loud the stuff I'm thinking, like, I have never had, to my knowledge, knowingly eaten a frozen egg.

And what are they like with avocados?

Is that something we could maybe talk about, you know?