Although the Breast “Care” Center did not notice the hazelnut in my right breast and waved me away after my screening mammogram two weeks earlier, they now have a change of heart.
I need to come back for a diagnostic mammogram.
I still have not met with my new gynecologist. I call his office so he can order the procedure. But I do not tell anyone about the call-back, except my two best friends.
I tell no one in the family. Not my husband, not my children — especially not my children.
Why cry wolf? Yet an email from my oldest daughter, only two days before the diagnostic mammogram, sends a shiver through my spine. Is she prescient?
“Here is a little inspiration for you,” she writes. She attaches the poem “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver.
“When it is over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over I don’t want to wonder
If I made my life something
Particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself
Sighing and frightened,
Or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up
Simply having visited the world.”
