I’m embarrassed to say it, but I’ve never been super great at remembering to do breast self-exams. It’s always a sort of afterthought to shaving my armpits. Like, “Oh! While I’m in this region, maybe I’ll just do some other poking around.”
It was during one of these not-frequent-enough feel-ups that I noticed a bit of pain when I poked and prodded. After further investigation, to my horror, I felt a lump. I panicked as I finished my bath, visions of chemotherapy and cancer treatments blurring my vision.
As I toweled off, I took a look in the mirror at my neglected boob, which now was at the center of my every thought. Not expecting to see much of anything, I was surprised at the quarter-sized circle on the side of my right breast.
After several Google searches and a nipple-covered selfie that I sent to my bestie, I began to chill out a bit. It seemed that most dangerous/cancerous lumps in the breast are not red and rarely cause pain. Chalking it up to some vicious spider bite, I took my wise friend’s advice and drew a circle around the red lump with a ballpoint pen to note the initial size and tried to forget about it as I fell asleep.
The next morning, as I got ready, I noticed that my right lady was sort of throbbing and took another look-see in the mirror as I applied my deodorant. My lovely blue pen-drawn, quarter-sized circle was no longer an accurate measurement of my “bite”.
The painful red lump had, at least, doubled in size
Stress
That was a definite possibility.
She prescribed me with a hard hit of antibiotics and told me to be aware that I probably would get COVID-19-like symptoms in the following days, but they were, most likely, the infection associated with mastitis in my body.
As if speaking it into life, I spiked a high fever on my way home and spent the next 24 hours feeling achy and fighting off chills and nausea.
It was a rough go, but I made it through to tell about it.
To tell the story years from now about how, once upon a time, in the year 2020, kids no longer went to school, people wore masks to the grocery store, there was a nationwide toilet paper shortage…
And these dried-up, non-nursing boobs got mastitis.
