Generations of teenage girls have grown up reading the tales of teenage angst told by beloved author Judy Blume. Among the most memorable of her best-selling novels; Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Blubber and Superfudge.
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She's moved the conversation to Twitter, amassing a following of over 72,000 fans and admirers to whom she regularly responds. So it was no surprise Blume took to Twitter to tell the world she'd been diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma earlier in the summer.
How I Spent My Summer. Warning - may be more than you want to know.judyblumeblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/happen…
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— Judy Blume (@judyblume) September 5, 2012
She detailed the diagnosis, surgery and recovery in a blog post appropriately titled "!@#$% Happens."
"There’s no breast cancer in my family (recent extensive genetic testing shows no genetic connection). I haven’t eaten red meat in more than 30 years. I’ve never smoked, I exercise every day, forget alcohol -- it’s bad for my reflux -- I’ve been the same weight my whole adult life. How is this possible?" she wrote in her blog. "Well, guess what -– it’s possible."
Blume writes that she underwent a mastectomy six weeks after getting the cancer diagnosis, around the time she was supposed to be Italy working on her latest novel. But she's grateful.
"I got off easy," she writes. "The cancer hadn't spread anywhere. I don’t need chemo which is a whole other ballgame."
She also details how she channeled Margaret Simon, the small-breasted teen in Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, and told her doctor the breast enhancing exercises (that Margaret and her friends did in the book) didn't work for her. Great sense of humor remains intact.
By using social media to share her news, Blume is accomplishing just what she set out to do, as she wrote in her post.
"As I've told my friends who've also been treated for breast cancer, I've joined The Club -- not one I wanted to join or even thought I would ever be joining -- but here I am. I’m part of this Sisterhood of the Traveling Breast Cells (apologies to Ann Brashares). Medical diagnoses can leave you feeling alone and scared. When it comes to breast cancer you’re not alone, and scary though it is, there’s a network of amazing women to help you through it."
The author is back at her home in New York and hopes to get back to work on that novel this month.
Photo courtesy of Flickr,Carl Lender.
This story originally published on Mashable here.