Really, I’m fine.

Of course, it’s possible that I’ve said the word “fine”so many times over the last month or so that the word has ceased to have any meaning.

“How are you?”

Fine.

“No, I mean really. How are you?”

Still fine.

“But you have . . . you know . . . breast cancer (these words are almost always whispered). Are you sure?”

Oh, wait. Breast cancer. Let me double check. Yep. I’m fine.

I don’t have a death sentence. I’m not departing this mortal realm. I am simply going to be inconvenienced. And lopsided. Reconstruction will be great, but let’s face it. I won’t be a truly matched set ever again.

But yes, I’m fine.

I’m going about my days the same way I always do. I get up, yell at the kids to eat breakfast and get dressed and stop touching one another and put on their shoes and brush their teeth and get in the $%&^* car or we’re going to be late and stop touching one another. Then I go to work, pick up the kids at school and then yell at them to keep the Oreos in the kitchen and stop touching one another and do their homework and eat their dinner and stop touching one another and take a shower and brush your teeth and stop touching one another and go to ^%&%( sleep. I watch TV with my husband and go to bed.

During all of that, I am fine.

However, thanks to a bladder that has been tapdanced upon by my beloved minions, I have to get up in the middle of the night to pee and that’s when my mind starts to wander and maybe I’m not so fine.

Because, really, what if I’m not fine?

What if it really, really hurts for them to amputate my breast?

What if a reconstructed boob feels like a rock sitting on my chest for the rest of my life?

What if it comes back?

What if I need chemo and lose my hair?

What if someone comes to visit during my recovery and my house looks like a small atomic bomb went off in it and now I’m not the breast cancer survivor but I’m the woman who needs to go on “Hoarders?”

That’s when I have to circle back around to the “I’m fine” mantra. Not dying. Just lopsided. Which kind of matches my cockeyed sense of humor about the whole thing anyway.

Which is fine.