Behind Door Number Two

Behind Door Number Two – The Biopsy Results!

I walked the tightrope of a week between the biopsy and the results very carefully. I had to do it that way as I am uncoordinated and can lack emotional balance in the best of times and these were not the best of times. These were waiting times and looking at the swollen, bruised and biopsied breast times. These were hours with days strung between them.

I told myself over and over that everything would come out just perfectly. The Doctor would tell me that there was nothing there except some benign grains of sand trapped in my breast. They would be innocuous and simply part of my being and not to worry about anything. I could hear the words but not seem to make them real. I tried visualization but my brain was a stone skipping on the quiet waters of multiple thoughts.

I would start to do something and get lost in my own home. Try as I might I couldn’t find a safe and happy inner-me. Outer-me, I thought, was holding it together with a stiff upper lip and all that. I talked in short sentences about the biopsy, I can say it now with small letters because it is past, if Dave asked me anything about it. I didn’t tell many people. There seemed no point in worrying anyone when there was nothing concrete to worry about yet.

Dave made me special dinners to make up for my boo-booed boob.

At nine in the morning, exactly a week after the biopsy, Mary from the Doctor’s office called to tell me the results were in. She made me an appointment for ten that morning which I silently blessed her for. I had waited the week I could wait one more hour. Besides, I had to get dressed and get there myself.

Dave offered to come with me. The thing is I knew he meant it, but he said it with the same look he’d have on his face if he’d asked if I’d wanted him to put his hand in a meat grinder.

Seriously though, I find it easier to just have to deal with me in these situations. If he’s not there I don’t have to worry about him worrying about me and him trying to say the right thing, which he usually doesn’t because he’s trying too hard or worse, he’s not trying at all. Or, as is sometimes the case, I don’t hear him properly. (Once, when we were first working together, I wore an extraordinarily expensive suit to a meeting. Later, on route to the car, I asked him what he thought of it. He thoughtfully or thoughtlessly said, “It’s really inconspicuous.” He then said what he really meant was that the suit didn’t detract from my face. A hopeless romantic, he finally redeemed himself by adding. “I just want to rip that suit off and fuck you here on the street.”

So I went by myself to the Doctor’s office. Mary looks like she sounds, all squishy and round with big dimples and sparkly eyes. She pointed to one of the offices and said Dr. A would be right in.

There is a basket filled with magazines in the office. I like the attention to patients comfort the staff makes. I pick up a Chatelaine and look at the cover. There are articles on decorating, home improvement and breast cancer. I put it back and pick up a different magazine. There I can read about how to lose weight, bake a cake and have breast reconstruction surgery – is it for you? I put that one back as well and started to look for a Golfer’s Digest, or a Popular Mechanics though I neither golf nor mechanic.

The Doctor’s first name is Heather and I like her. She is the only Doctor I’ve ever been to who is consistently on time. There are never more than two other people in the waiting room and they are usually together. I knew when she walked in the door and smiled with her lips but not her eyes all wasn’t great.

“I’ll get right to the point,” she said as she closed the door and took a seat across from me. “There’s bad news and good news so I’ll start with the bad news first. It is cancer, but and it’s a big BUT, if you have to have one it’s the best you can get.”

I don’t know quite how I felt but I do know that that was the moment I started to disassociate from myself. Illogically I thought I can’t have cancer. It doesn’t run in my family. Logically, I asked the right questions and got the right answers. It was DCIS which means Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. Translated, it meant it was non-malignant, a lumpectomy not a mastectomy and radiation not chemotherapy - cancer with a small ‘c’.

She wrote the information on a scrap of paper so that I could Google it. “Just don’t over Google yourself on it,” she said, then added, “We’ll set up an appointment with the surgeon and let you know when it’s made.”

I drove home on auto-pilot. Realistically, I figured it would be weeks before I’d meet with the surgeon. I told Dave the results as if I were describing how to change the oil in the truck, not that I know how to do that, but with the same tonal detachment. I simply reiterated the information, answered his questions and went ostensibly back to work. (If you can call staring at your computer screen working.)

“You have to tell some people, Laura,” Dave had said as I’d started down the stairs, “They’ll want to know.”

He was right of course. Tell some people….tell them what? Hi, it’s Laura not to worry you but I have cancer, but don’t fret, it’s the good kind….mind if I smoke?

At twelve-thirty the phone rang. It was Mary already and super sing-songy. “I made an appointment with the surgeon for you for nine in the morning on Monday.” I was stunned. I was barely home and already I had an appointment in three days with a surgeon. I wasn’t prepared for that type of speed. I wasn’t prepared for the morning that had just passed. I really wasn’t well prepared at all for any of it.

I talked to Denise, a good friend going through her own life issues on both ends of the spectrum. She has a fourteen year old daughter, just starting high school, just starting out on a long promising future. She also has her eighty-two year old father in the fading health and light point in his life. Not to mention she works at her own business. Denise is a solid friend built of old-fashioned ethics. When she covers your back you are truly protected. Of course, she asked about Ryan. “You have to tell him, Laura, he’s your son, he has a right to know and he’d be really upset if you didn’t.”

I hung up and looked at Rye’s picture. (It used to bother my mother when I called him, Rye. ‘He’s not a bottle of whiskey you know.’) Sometimes I call him Guy as in ‘Rye Guy’. I don’t even remember when these names started but he was much younger than the twenty-six years he is now. The biggest problem was that Ryan is living in Australia. He’s not down the street, or a few towns away, he’s not even on the continent! Why should I bother him with this when there is absolutely nothing he can do?

If there were a good reason to let him know I would, but arrggghh, there is a good reason to let him know. He truly would be mortified if he found out from someone else. Odd as it is we do share at least one friend. And, I will have to tell my sister. For that matter Dave could let it slip.

I waited until later that day. I thought long and hard about how I would present this to him so that he wouldn’t worry. For some reason, the image of Ryan as a child at the kitchen table popped into my mind. I can see him clearly, thoroughly exited about finding the Bay Leaf in his stew. He knew not to eat them but for some reason always got excited when his dish contained the Bay Leaf. I doled out the food. It was really an easy, cheap way to make him happy.

Ryan: “I got the Bay Leaf!!!” Ryan’s Mum: “I got the Good Cancer!”
Somehow it stuck in my mind and I knew he would understand the connection. Most people wouldn’t but he would. I wrote the most positive, ‘happy cancer’ letter ever written, at least by me.