Pretty Is What Changes

I keep thinking it over and over in my head. What does it mean? Is it that the only thing that changes in you if you have profolactic surgeries is your beauty? Is it that if you have the surgeries and go through all this, you're still the same person, but your idea of beauty changes?

I got the book yesterday. Pretty Is What Changes by Jessica Queller . I drove home and spent about 3 hours reading. And it was familiar, the reading. I can lose myself in a book quickly and race through it. About page 24 Pete asked me if I learned what I needed to learn. And it was then that I realized that I was looking for guidance in some sense from the book. Learn what to do from her choices and decisions in the book. At page 70 I realized that she had much the same relationship with her mom that I had with mine. Just a tumultuous relationship that ebbed and flowed and made life difficult.

Then I realized that I was racing through the book. It's what I usually do. Read quickly, not to get the book done, but to emerse myself in it. I tried to slow down and take in more.

Then I read a line that really hit me. She was upset that the clinic she was at kept refering to her as a patient because it was a cancer clinic. Then they explained that once you test positive for the mutation, you are considered a cancer patient. What a powerful label. Not powerful in a good way, but powerful.

I'm half way into the book. I had to stop last night so that I wasn't drownding in the subject. It really brings me down. I did learn that there is a message board called FORCE = Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered. Part of me wants to check it out and the other says that it will be more information than I can handle.