Hakuna Ma Tatas

Healing Through Ink: Processing Emotions and Crafting a Healthcare Legacy for my Offspring

Hello Breast Friends!

Feel free to read this post with your 👂🏻👂🏻 instead of your 👀. Audiobooks are real reading! Notice you can change the speed of the audio to the left of the audio button to get this over with faster😂 I may invest in a better🎙️!

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I am launching this Substack blog as a form of therapy and documentation for my children should they need to navigate healthcare crises, and I am not around to nag them. You are welcome to come along for the ride, too; feel free to hop on and off as you need. These words are my womanifesto!

Ideally, I would like to create a little community of support for people navigating any healthcare challenges; however, the central theme for me will be breast cancer. Accidentally, I have found writing to be therapeutic for me. The words in this blog will be my own, although I will occasionally get inspiration from generative AI like Chat GPT and Microsoft Co-pilot. This space will be friendly and collaborative. Feel free to move along if you don’t like what I am journalling about.

I have a flare for the dramatic and a wicked potty mouth, and I don’t plan to hold back here. During my theatrical meltdowns, my mother always told me, “Jennifer, your Academy Award is in the mail!” Well, Ma, it has arrived🏆! I am going to talk about menstruation and menopause and breasts and feminism. I also unapologetically use way too many emojis. I love the visual little fuckers! Note that this blog is presented from a patient’s perspective. I am not a medical doctor.

Dr. Jen Gunter inspired me to use Substack as my blogging platform. Feel free to ignore the buttons and requests for pledging or payment. As mentioned, this blog is healing for me and possibly useful for my kids (feel free to remind them about it😊). My publishing plan is best described as willy-nilly; I think I will initially overpost because I have copious amounts of notes to share and may taper off to once a month-ish as the healing settles in.

🍋🍋Check your lemons! Mammograms are effective but don’t pick up all masses! Find out your breast density (through a mammogram) and tell everybody you know - not your density but that mammograms don’t pick up all masses!

The Canadian Task Force guidelines need to be updated! STAT! ASAP! YESTERDAY, even!

Much Love,

Jenny

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