"There's a little lump here; do you feel it?"
Dr. F, my primary care doc, guided my fingers to the side of my right breast. I dutifully palpated, but had to confess that I couldn't feel anything.
"Well, you're due for your annual mammogram anyway. We'll send you in for a sonogram at the same time," she said.
A week later I was at the spiffy new Carol Ann Read Breast Center in Oakland. The mammograms were the usual experience of mild discomfort -- breasts squished flat between the cold glass plates, neck unnaturally arched. The technician took considerably more shots than usual, then ushered me in for a sonogram. Lying down, having warm goop spread on me and a wand-like device passed over my skin was much more pleasant.
"The radiologist wants to discuss your results with you."
In a dozen years of annual mammograms, I'd never heard those words before.
Mammogram films look lovely to me, like images of the Earth from space -- silhouetted on a black background, the globular breast is filled with swirling white luminescence. My films hung on a light board on Dr. K's office wall.
It turned out they weren't lovely at all.
"Do you see this concentration here?" she pointed. "We'd like to see what's causing that. We're recommending a needle biopsy."
Fine, I could deal.
Then she continued. "Unfortunately" --a pause, while my heart dropped -- "there is another area over here where we see calcification. We want to do a needle biopsy there also."
Whisked to the office of the surgery coordinator, I was scheduled for two appointments, a week away and two weeks away, and given a brochure explaining breast biopsies.
The white-haired volunteer who'd chaperoned me from office to office now escorted me to the curbside.
"They found something, didn't they?" she said (not hard to guess since she'd taken me to the surgery coordinator's office). She patted my arm. "It will be okay." Her voice quavered, her eyes welled. "The same thing happened to me and it was cancer, but I made it through."
Jeeeeeeeeeesus.
She wanted to be kind, but I wasn't ready to make the leap from needing more information to confronting the Big C.
I called Mark. "What's the good news, honey?" he asked, his perpetually upbeat question.
"Well, there isn't much today. There's the bad news and then there's other bad news."
Perhaps the boatman who ferries people across the River Styx is a white-haired old lady who pats their arms. Seeing theatrical possibilities. :-)
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