A woman on the other end said , " Can you come back in this Thursday, just so we can take some more pictures? Don't worry about it, though. It's probably nothing."
I hung up the phone slightly rattled, as I'd never received a call back after a mammogram before. Still, one tends to go with what one has already experienced. And the majority of my health scares (except for a little white pimple on my nose that wouldn't go away and turned out to be a basal cell carcinoma) had turned out to be nothing. At 1pm, I picked my boys up from an early release day at school and took them to the movies, where we documented the moment in a photo booth. I definitely remember feeling a little spooked at the theater. Still, I really had no concept of awaited me just around the corner.
Yesterday I dug back into an old journal to see if I had written about this time. Here's what I found:
"One week and the world has done a sort of tilt on me. A simple test, a mammogram, the day before my birthday. Well, who planned that, you might ask. I did. Bad plan. Bad, bad plan. On my birthday, I got a call. Calcifications, she said. "Probably nothing but want to take more pictures." On Thursday, I'm back in the one-sized fits all pink robe that barely covers my upper body nakedness, waiting in a room with a bunch of strangers, my comrades in their matching pink robes watching a TV show called "Steve." Steve is wearing tall, springy shoes on his feet - some sort of new fitness device. Another man is also wearing these strange shoes and is bouncing around rhythmically in them, doing something akin to aerobics on steroids. They are jumping , laughing, looking ridiculous, when a woman calls my name.
I follow her into the mammography room. I stand before the machine and the nurse begins contorting my boobs and arms into all sort of unnatural positions, like a Gumby toy. When we're done, I thank the woman (what I am thanking her for? I think. But it's automatic).
I'm back out in the waiting room now. Even though it's just been a few minutes, some of the faces have changed. New soldiers in the ranks. This time I don't watch TV. This time I dig through the bounty of outdated magazines on the table for something recent and find the October issue of Vogue. Other women get called and disappear behind the door. For some, it's judgement day; others will never even remember being here. A blip.
A woman I remember seeing and smiling at during the Steve show comes back from the abyss and takes a seat again in the waiting room. She's my soul mate for the moment, the two of us waiting for the radiologist to read our results while others simply come and go, onto the next thing on their to-do list today. The door, the gateway, opens again. A nurse calls my soul mate, who stands up and walks toward her.
"You can get dressed and go," the nurse says. The woman smiles, then escapes.
For some reason, this makes me think the odds are not in my favor. She got off, so I won't. I text my husband, "This waiting is getting to me. " I try to watch TV again. And then I'm called. The nurse does not say "You can go now." Instead I pass through the gateway into the first circle of hell--a small, sparsely furnished room that smells like antiseptic where I'm left to wait. Shit.
The radiologist appears with a young a man, a medical student. I know the radiologist. Her name is Betsy. She looks a little bit like Big Bird. I'd interviewed her before, many years ago, for the newsletter when I was still a Lahey rookie. She tells me about the findings, microcalcifications that look suspicious. Could be a sign of early cancer. Or not. She explains about the biopsy. How it's done
I ask lots of questions.
"We've got a journalist here," Betsy jokes to the medical student. He's still smiling. I wonder what he's thinking.
This is where the entry ends. Fast forward through biopsies, genetic testing, MRIs. It's before my surgery and I'm sitting in a room with a doctor at Lahey who is telling me what I might expect moving forward. Surgery. Chemo. Radiation. Maybe Herceptin.
It's just a year of your life, she says.
And so here I sit, one year later. I'm somewhere between who I was in that movie theater a year ago, and who I want to be. Mostly I'm stunned how quickly a year can pass.
My friend Rachel used to joke with me when I complained about my birthday, about getting older: "It's better than the alternative." A sentiment that has never felt more true.
Yet how does one celebrate such a momentous birthday? I'm not really sure, but I think I'm going to stretch it out for a while. It may involve a massage, a new wardrobe, Anchorman 2, and a 2nd annual I had a Boob Once contest. I'll keep you posted. It will involve starting Tamoxifen,
When I was 11, I wrote my father a b'day card with a poem, or rather rhyme, inside.
"51 and still having fun," it read.
I must have been very proud of that card to still remember it all these years later. So, leveraging that complex rhyming structure, I write myself a similar "card" today:
"45 and still alive."
Hooyah.
Happy birthday, Amy!
ReplyDeleteThat was a fast year. It seems like only a few months ago you were calling to tell me the news.
I'm beginning to think that our minds are like, . . . well, like us. But the "stuck-in-a-long-staff-meeting" version of us. The "listening-to-someone-describe-a-recent-dream" us. The us that checks out for long periods of time.
It's still doing things, of course, like pumping blood and breathing and keeping our bodies from falling over. Just like we stare at our significant others and occasionally nod our heads as they recount the [dumb? smart?] thing that their colleague [Bob? Linda? Joan?] in the [HR? finance? communications?] department did [that day? yesterday?] at work. But, just like us, they aren't actually there.
Which is understandable, I guess. I'm by no means someone with any deep seated feelings of self-loathing (quite the opposite, in fact ((I'm literally the greatest!)), but even I would find it exhausting to be around myself, day in and day out, for more than forty years (shout out to my lovely Appalachian child bride!).
Oh, sure, there are the occasional cinematic moments — getting bit by a large German shepherd; believing, with blood draining certainty, that the Son of Sam killer has broken into our secluded upstate New York home; losing momentary control of a friend's Pontiac Firebird while traveling at 110 miles-per-hour; feeling time stop when meeting my wife (granted, for the second time); racing to the hospital at 3 AM because one of my unborn children is in medical distress; meeting my kids for the first time. Any one of these moments would make for an absolutely fantastic season finale of a TV show (I would, of course, combine the German shepherd attack with any of the others just to push the level of drama to the absolute red).
But, for the most part, life is simply peppered with those kind of prime-time network moments. The rest of it is like an afternoon soap opera, but without all the sexy people or devilishly wicked villains or scenic locals. In fact, it's actually more C-SPAN than soap opera. And a black and white version of C-SPAN at that.
And not to mention the fact that we rarely listen to our brains anyway. Sure, they don't understand that we don't have time to read the electrical wiring instructions that come with the new smoke detectors or that we've got this when "this" entails drunkenly approaching the heavily tattooed guy with the missing eye at the bowling alley who we are (pretty) sure just gave us a dirty look. And they certainly don't see the advantages to drinking two 20 ounce Red Bulls in a span of 90 minutes even though they know that A.) Red Bull is incredibly delicious and B.) We like things that are incredibly delicious. But they do have our (their?) best interest at heart, and surely that should count for something.
What I don't get, though, is why you would feel that time has flown by. At least during this period.
It's not like your brain didn't have enough to occupy its attention. In fact, I would imagine that each of the days of your past year had trials and tribulations all their own that helped mark them as unique.
ReplyDeleteSo how to explain the disconnect.
Maybe, and this is only a guess on my part, maybe you operated outside of time this year. Or at least outside of our basic understanding of time.
I recently heard a story on NPR about the influence of linguistic rules on different cultures. They reported on a study that looked at the habits and health of people whose language featured tenses and those that didn't. Interestingly, those without tenses tended to be more financially secure and healthier than those whose languages featured those rules.
For those people, there really was no difference between the past, the present and the future. It was all the same. As such, the impact of damaging habits like drinking and smoking couldn't just be fobbed off to some future time ("I'll quit before it starts to affect me"), nor could the importance of saving one's cash be ignored for the allure of immediate materialistic gratification.
Maybe it's the same when you are facing a terrible illness. Maybe those time distinctions also just fade away. Right now becomes your focus, your only one.
If so (and Lord know there's a good chance I'm wrong here ((truth be told, I pretty much lost the handle on this analogy about six paragraphs ago)), then let me be the first to welcome you back to the future (shout out to Michael J. Fox!).
Put laundry down. Have a stiff drink or two (or three). Cut yourself an especially large slice of pie.
Thankfully (very thankfully, I think we can all agree), you now have the time to worry about all of that stuff later on. Much, much later on.
Happy belated birthday, Amy. Been thinking of you. Your hair looks fab. And love the photo of you and the boys. (This is Pat McT, not some young stud in Arlington, okay? So don't get excited.)
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