When I first got the "you have cancer" phone call from my doctor I did the following things: wrote everything down that he told me, knowing I wouldn't be able to remember any of it; wrote Chris a text message and told him he needed to come home; curled up into a ball on the couch and started crying. I stayed there until Chris got home, and then for awhile longer after that.

I had a lot of different emotions going on. I felt scared, worried, angry, overwhelmed, sad. I was in shock and disbelief. All normal feelings, I'm sure. The one thing I wasn't feeling was surprise. I had a feeling that he was going to give me that news. Partly because when I had called a week before asking why I hadn't received my pathology results yet he told me it was because he needed to review the results with the tumor board first. The tumor board? You mean you need to discuss this with other oncologists and pathologists and radiation oncologists and nurses? Was my case really that complicated? So at least I was expecting that phone call to come, and I had assumed that because he needed the time with the tumor board, or patient care conference as they like to call it, that it wasn't going to be good news.

As it all started to sink in I started to figure out how I was going to tell my family. Who do I call first? What do I say? How can I soften the news for them? Yup, even at this point if was more concerned for how my family would handle the news than I was about myself! I poured a very large glass of wine, took a deep breath, and thought to myself "you can handle this". I honestly can't remember who I called first, what I said to them, what we talked about. I got through that day though, probably the hardest day in my entire life, and I probably cried more on that one day than I remember ever crying before.

Then came the day to sit down with my oncologist and talk about The Plan. I went prepared, I had a full document prepared that had questions listed, split out into different categories and ordered based on importance and/or significance. Shocking, I know. It was such a "me" thing to do though, I'm always organized, and I think it gave me a sense of order in those hectic days. We learned the plan for the upcoming second major abdominal surgery, and the suggestion to follow it with a round of chemotherapy. We had a lot of information thrown at us that day, a lot of hard questions were asked but the one thing I tried to remember is that I am my own best advocate. No one can speak for me, no one should make decisions for me, and as hard as it was to have to think about certain scenarios, I had to think about everything. I came home that day exhausted but realized that I was ready to fight this with everything I have. With my family and friends by my side.

Excuse the language in this photo, but this speaks directly to how I decided to "deal with it" once it all sank in.