I opened this blog over a year ago with an essay about my first heart attack. I started with that essay because it had been an idea that I had been carrying with me for a long time and I both needed to get it out of the way, out of my mind, so I could go on to write other things and I was ready to write about it, had enough distance from it to make light, put it in context, write about what I had learned from it. I was also looking back on it as part of my medically nuts thirties, when my heart tried to kill me. All of that was my past and there was nothing but blue skies and the promise of exciting things to come in my next decade.

Then, last spring, I found a lump in my breast. Continue reading