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The doctor is already running late, and I’m forced to wait nearly thirty minutes alone in an exam room wearing one of those stupid gowns.
A knock on the door precedes her entrance. She’s pretty, with light brown hair, brown eyes and flawless skin. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.” She washes her hands. “I had a baby arrive at six a.m., and that little darling has thrown off my entire day.”
“No problem.” What’s thirty extra minutes when you’re waiting to hear if you have a dreaded disease?
“Let’s see what’s going on, shall we?”
I lie back and bare the breast in question. As she gives it and the other one a very thorough examination, her expression never changes until she returns to the first one and zeros in on the area where the lump is.
“There’s definitely something there that shouldn’t be.”
My insides fold in on each other in a cascading tower of fear and panic.
“That’s not to say it’s something sinister, so don’t go there. I’ll send you for a mammography and, if warranted, an ultrasound.”
“I’m trying not to have a full-blown panic attack here.”
“Don’t do that. It won’t help anything.” She types the orders for the tests into the computer and tells me where to go. “They’ll be expecting you.”
I try not to make a thing out of her saying they’ll be expecting me, but it’s hard not to. Did she put some sort of flag on the orders that saysurgent/possible breast canceror something like that? I’m so scared and rattled, I can barely unbutton my shirt at the mammogram place, so I pull it over my head without unbuttoning it. I put on the smock and meet the technician in the freezing-cold room where she smashes breasts for a living.
As this is my first mammogram, the tech takes a little extra time to explain what will happen, to tell me it’ll be uncomfortable, but only for a few minutes, and that I should tell her if it’s too painful.
Lovely. Now I’m even more stressed out than I was before.
She positions me where she needs me and manhandles my breast like it’s a side of beef. I suppose she does this a hundred times a day, and one breast is the same as another to her. The smashing hurts. Badly. I have tears in my eyes by the time it’s over, and then I find out she wants a side view, too.
We repeat the entire ordeal on the other side, and then she asks me to wait in the room until she’s sure she got what she needed. I wait for a long time, shivering from the cold as much as the fear. Will those images change my life?
I’ve never experienced fear quite like this, even in the dark days after I lost Mike. Somehow, I knew I could handle raising our kids on my own if I had to, but this… I can’t handle this.
She returns with another woman, who gives me a kind smile that sets my nerves further on edge. “If you’ll come with me, we’re going to do an ultrasound.”
That means they saw something worrisome on the mammogram.
“I, uh…” I’m paralyzed. I couldn’t move if I had to.
“Let’s see it through before we jump to any conclusions, okay?” the second woman says, her tone kind and reassuring.
I nod and manage to rise to my feet and follow her to another freezing-cold room. “Why is it so cold in here?” I ask when she settles me on an exam table.
“It’s for the equipment.”
“Freeze the patients and save the equipment. I see how it is.”
She laughs. “We get complaints about it every day.” She puts a blanket over me that I’m immediately thankful for.
The ultrasound is painless but seems to take forever as both breasts are thoroughly examined. When she’s finished, she says, “I see two areas I’m concerned about. One in each breast.”
Dear God, just when I thought this couldn’t get any worse. “Wh-what does that mean?”
“I’d recommend we biopsy both areas.”
“Do… Is… Is it cancer?”
“We can’t know for certain either way without the biopsies. Do we have your consent to proceed?”
I want to say no. Hell no. I do not consent to any of this. I’m a single mom to three young children. There’s no way I can have cancer. The universe wouldn’t be that cruel to me, would it?
