Friday afternoon, the day after my biopsy, is one of those perfect summer days with a faint breeze chasing wispy white clouds across a blue sky, the kind of day when nothing bad is supposed to happen. I do not expect to hear about my biopsy. After all, when someone says 24-72 hours, it usually means 96 hours. But around 2 P.M. just as I think about leaving my office early, my phone rings:
-This is Doctor Dork from the Radiology Department
I feel perfectly calm at the sound of her voice because I missed the clue: good news is delivered by assistants or post-cards, bad news by doctors.
The tacit and “all business” radiologist from the day before sounds a great deal more sympatico today.
-I hope this is not a bad time. We have your biopsy results. Unfortunately, it is not at all what we had hoped. We found cancer. Less than 2 cm, 1.5 cm, slow growing, should have a good prognosis, probably a good candidate for a lumpectomy. You have probably had it for years. Maybe ten years. Any questions?”
-No questions.
Click.
For what seemed like an eternity, I am sitting there in my chair, my thoughts twirling like snow flakes in a storm. But my focus is not on what cancer means for my future. Instead, I am totally focused on the past, and on, by then, a totally irrelevant issue:
How could my lump have gone from nothing on the mammogram the year before to 1.5-2 cm this year?
How big was it last year when they didn’t even see it?
How come I have had a mammogram every year for the past decade and every time I came they saw NOTHING. How did this happen?
