On Doing it Scared

...and a wholehearted endorsement of EMDR therapy

This week, in between packing school lunches, ducking from multiple horrifying news headlines, and calling my worthless senators, I scheduled a double mastectomy for the spring.

I was folding laundry when my phone rang. Before having school-aged children I would never even consider answering an unknown phone number, but now I race to pick up before it goes to voicemail.

I hurtled myself across my bedroom to answer the mystery call from a local area code. My dog, always picking up on my anxiety, chased me across the room so I scurried to our closet and closed the door behind me.

“Mrs. Peterson?” a woman on the other end of the phone speaks up, “I’m calling to offer you a surgery date.”

I open my Apple calendar to find the date she suggested, as though I hadn’t already blocked off that week in my head and planner to possibly have my breasts removed.

MEGAN SURGERY (TENTATIVE), it reads all the way across the week from Monday to Friday. I update it then and there, changing the date range and deleting the word tentative.

I put the phone down next to my sweaters and let the un-tentativeness of it wash over me, finally.

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10 years ago, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. And while her surgeries went well and she is doing just fine today, the experience of being her caregiver throughout the whole ordeal completely traumatized me in a way that I didn’t even realize until almost a decade later. At the time it was fine. We were just trudging along, mostly because we didn’t have another choice.

There are so many details about that period of my life that for a long time felt like they weren’t mine to tell, but I have since processed it in a way that made me realize that being part of her experience was very much my experience. One might think that your parents breaking up in your mid-twenties “shouldn’t” affect you, but one would be wrong.

These weren’t just things I watched happen, they were things that also happened to me. I always act like it wasn’t a big deal, until I’m trying to describe it and find myself in tears.

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My mom’s surgery. Watching her recover in the home we loved so much that no longer felt like home, with boxes packed and a move-out date looming as she lay asleep in bed between doses of pain medicine. My brother and I felt like strangers in a haunted place that was once familiar, making sandwiches in the kitchen and stealing away to the basement to watch Parenthood on a laptop.

My parents’ divorce. The doozy of the realization that your parents are also just people who make insane mistakes sometimes. Relating to them as adults (or not). Understanding that you can forgive them (or not). And finding a way to untangle your identity from your family—or anything else that you believed in, but turned out to be a lot different than it had appeared for so long.

My positive BRCA 2 gene mutation test results. At the time it felt like one more thing and who even gave a shit? My mom was the one with actual cancer at the time and got the test done to help her decide what surgery to get to treat it, and when it was positive they recommended that I also get tested. I had a genetic counselor talk me through the entire thing both before and after the test, but looking back I don’t know if I really understood what I was getting myself into.

I had so many other things going on at the time that learning that I have a breast cancer risk of 60-85% seemed like small potatoes compared to juggling my mom’s health, my parents’ marriage, their house, my own brand new marriage and a city we had only called home for a couple of months.

It was something I felt could be compartmentalized and put on hold until later.

But now after a decade of annual mammograms, MRIs, ultrasounds, and more recently some intense therapy to finally process the events of that time in my life, I finally feel (more) prepared to take a step toward putting it behind me.

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For about two years I have really actively avoided the idea of having surgery, sometimes wondering if I even want to do it at all.

The fear and hesitation built until I realized it was time to deal with whatever else might be going on. I had started EMDR therapy in the summer of 2023 and had really good success with it, so I brought up some of the intrusive thoughts I was having about going under the knife. We decided to tackle it.

During one session, I explained to my therapist that when I imagine my own surgery I picture myself there in the room, either floating above my body or in the gallery like a Grey’s Anatomy intern. I don’t imagine it like that any more but I couldn’t get that image out of my head for so long, as though I would have to somehow feel and witness these procedures.

“I wish I could just close my eyes and then open them to have the whole thing over with,” I said to her one day.

She smiled and reminded me that having surgery is literally like closing your eyes and then opening them in another room with the whole thing over with.

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I’m still really nervous. Lately I find myself jolting awake as I’m falling asleep, remembering that in three months I am actually doing this. But instead of a dark and ominous, fully irrational fear that had attached itself to the trauma of what I went through with my parents, I am able to separate what is a normal amount of medical anxiety from what is now a great deal of understanding and gratitude for some of the things I experienced a decade ago, as well as the very precious opportunity to have surgery on my own terms.

For most of my life I learned that if you felt scared about something, then you were in danger. Negative thoughts meant a negative reality. Never did it occur to me that sometimes, you might feel fear because sometimes, shit is scary.

I will still be scared, but I am going to do it anyway. And I’m so glad I got here.