I'd like to say there's nothing good about breast cancer, but that's not really true. I remember sitting in a waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, chatting with another turban-clad woman about to go through treatment for breast cancer. I made a silly joke about feeling guilty about something. She closed her eyes and shook her head emphatically. "No, not any more," she said with conviction, "I refuse to feel guilty any more."

Breast cancer teaches you to stop the baloney—because as everybody and her sister will point out to you, constant stress probably helps bring on the disease in the first place. So gradually you come to see how stupid it is to worry whether the house is clean enough if the world drops in to inspect with its white glove. How destructive it is to feel guilty when you forget to give the kids lunch money. How petty it all is, how beside the point. We are all going to die someday, and when the time comes we'll need to feel we've spent our lives doing something a little more important than all this negative navel-gazing.

The First Signs
My diagnosis was almost an accident. I was one of those dizzy dames who hadn't gone to the gynecologist or had a mammogram in years. My grandmother had had breast cancer, but she was in her late 80s, and I was only 47—plenty of time to worry about that. I had no idea that my mother's own colon cancer put me at higher risk for breast cancer as well, since the two have some genes in common.

The only reason I went to the gynecologist after a seven-year hiatus was that I had lost my job and wanted to get all my checkups in before the health insurance disappeared. I love the irony of telling people that getting fired saved my life. The gynecologist noted a very large lump—6 cm—in my right breast. Now here's the part I need women to hear: It was nothing like what I always imagined a lump would feel like—round and hard, like a pebble. It was just an undefined area of skin that, once it was pointed out to me, seemed a little harder than the surrounding area.

They can tell us to examine our breasts for lumps all they like, but if "lump" means one thing to them and another to us, it's a lost cause. Maybe we should all practice on a dummy. Bonnie Breast Cancer.

It Starts to Hit Home
Like most doctors, my brand new gynecologist went through the list of, "well, it could be this, or it could be that," but recommended I have a diagnostic mammogram and see a surgeon right away for evaluation. Some women freak at this point. I'm more the type to think, "Oh, this is one of those situations where they're going to come back and tell me it's a cyst or something." My nonchalance was so complete that I asked the doctor about hormone replacement therapy. She looked at me as if I had a hole in my head, and politely told me she couldn't give me estrogen until the lump issue had been resolved.

Later, when the mammography technician pressed the glass onto the area where the lump was, the pain was unbearable. I think the denial started to crumble at that moment. I had had only had one previous mammogram, but I knew it hadn't hurt this badly. The tears flowed.