anniversay (a)
Two years ago this week my beautiful life came to a crashing end with a mere phone call. It was a Friday morning, and I was working on the technology cart in Room 248 on a PowerPoint for the next week’s lectures. I was anxious because I had a workplace mediation session that afternoon. I didn’t feel all that well; figured it was a low-grade fever from the mastitis or the dehydration from diarrhea and from the special nursing-safe antibiotics I had been taking. I had fed my daughter at 7, so my breasts were filling up, and I had planned to go to the daycare at noon to feed her, as I did every day.

Earlier that week I’d had my first mammogram. The person who read it didn’t like what she saw, so I was taken to another room for an ultrasound and then a needle core biopsy. When a woman is nursing, it is nearly impossible to do a mammogram, and even though I took my breast pump and emptied right before the test, the boob-squisher still hurt me a lot and didn’t give the results that were needed. The ultrasound was more or less like the ultrasound you get when you’re pregnant, but it was images of milk ducts, etc. Those results led to an immediate needle core biopsy, which involves driving a friggin hollow nail into the middle of your boob. One small complication: due to the ph of the interior of a nursing woman’s breasts, the anaesthetic would not work. Let’s just say I have no need to ever get anything pierced; I have tested my limits of pain tolerance and passed, so I have nothing to prove.

So the radiologist’s call was put through to my room around 11 am. She said she was sorry to tell me that I had cancer. Just like that: “The needle core biopsy sample shows cancer.”

Shock? Disbelief? Horror? I can’t describe the feeling except that an eerie calm came over me, and I knew I was going to die. In Lewis Thomas’s Late Night Thoughts on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, he talks about the chemical rush that animals have that makes their end in the jaws of a predator probably painless, i.e. the deer frozen in the headlights, the shocked bird or no-longer-trembling-or-struggling mouse in the cat’s mouth. This gift of adrenaline and natural painkillers at the end is, for an extreme humanist, perhaps, evidence of a merciful deity. I thanked her politely for calling me and went on with my day.

I went and fed my child, nursing her on the healthy side. Then I talked with a colleague for a while. She is a lawyer and a doctor and extremely religious person, rumored to be nun even though she wasn’t. She told me what was going to happen. I was going to have surgery and chemo, a really bad year and then it would be ok. She told me to be thankful the reading was invasive ductal carcinoma rather than inflammatory breast cancer. (Prophecy? The diagnosis was changed to inflammatory breast cancer about 6 mos later.)

The mediation session didn’t go well. My former boss blustered and bellowed and bullied, but I really wasn’t listening to him. He is a gambler, a blackjack player over at the boat, and he constantly brags about all the money he wins at it. He was sitting there thinking this was some kind of tiddlywinks game; he didn’t realize he was playing Russian roulette. After a few hours, my boobs hurt b/c it was time to go feed the baby again, and I was sick of listening to him, so I finally spoke up and told him to shut up, he was pathetic. The look on his face! I should have done it years before… The ability to speak up being one of the first changes that cancer would bring.