Memories and Mammograms

I was playing cars with my brother on the cool slate lining the pathway to our front door when my mom first told me she had breast cancer. I was 6 years old, the second, and markedly less well-kempt, of two redheaded little girls in Ms. Gallagher’s first-grade class at St. John’s Catholic School (Caroline Dumbrowski, wherever you are, I hope those perfect pigtails have served you). What I remember of that moment is daylight, my 42-year-old mom’s slow stride as she approached, her leaning down to speak, and her walking back inside as if she’d just assured us the sky was blue. I don’t remember the moment after, nor anything of the rest of that day or even week.

I don’t remember quite a lot of my mom’s two-year+ nightmarish ride fighting a cancer that was just as determined to win as she was. I remember my class making cards, red, blue, green construction papers folded in half and covered with crayon hearts and every assortment of backward letters, and I remember carrying those cards to her bedside at NIH where she recovered from surgery. I remember my grandmother coming to help care for us, my dad buying a new TV, and the plentitude of lemony Italian ice suddenly stocked in our freezer. I remember my mom losing her thick, shiny red hair and eyelashes, shopping for a wig with my grandmother, then losing that wig to a rogue wave on the beach in Santa Barbara while she was busy playing and making magic in the frigid water with my brother and me. And very clearly, as if just yesterday, I remember lying in my bed each night, over and over again praying that the cancer would not come back and that if it did, it would come for me instead.

The past few months have been a ride. At 41, I’ve been diligent about annual mammograms since having my boys eight years ago. When your mom had breast cancer so young and you have dense breast tissue, they’re willing to smash and prod you on that awful machine at intervals they wouldn’t normally. And for that, I’ve been quite grateful actually (well, for the data, anyway. The process of trying to get this small-chested lady into a contraption that is entirely 90-degree angles feels like a medieval war crime). But in September, my annual mammogram came back abnormal. They identified a spot close to my muscle tissue below my right breast that hadn’t been there previously. Another mammogram led to a rather long ultrasound which led to a failed attempt at a needle biopsy, and finally, an MRI which continued to light up the trouble spot. As weeks bled into months without any clarity, I began to think through how to talk to my kids about my own surgery, Fiona being just shy of the age I was when my mom broke the news to me. There are a lot of places our minds can and do go in the in-betweens and unknowns. I assure you, I went to most if not all of them.

Finally, this Thursday morning, I underwent a successful MRI-guided biopsy, listening as they drilled three holes into my right breast and plopped the samples into a small plastic vile. I walked into my classroom shortly after to teach one of the hardest classes of my life, still bleeding from the incision and tightly wound in gauze and bandaging hidden below my sweater. (I joked with friends that I felt very much like Gwenyth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love but was rather disappointed by the utter casting failure wherein my mom was called in to play the role of Joseph Finnes in unbinding me). My students did not know of course, and I would not have ever told them. They were already carrying the grief of the world on their backs and needed, more than anything, a safe place to simply name the pain and hold space for their sorrow. Which is what we did. I’ve never felt more honored to be in a classroom.

My pathology report came back the next day, the ring of my phone breaking loudly into a conversation between my colleagues and me about how to care for students in crisis for the remainder of this semester. I silenced the call but checked the message after my meeting. Very thankfully the results were negative. Benign. Come back in six months. All looks good.

Exhale.

Yes, technically we are still waiting to determine through genetic testing whether any number of genetic markers mean I am at high risk for having breast cancer at some point in my life. And once that data is in, there will no doubt be decisions to be made. Or not. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or the next mammogram. But for today, I am grateful. I don’t know why I get the pathology that says benign this time when many who I desperately love have not. I don’t know when we will find a way to stop this awful effing disease from taking so very much from us. I don’t even really know why I share all this except that I know some version of this experience is shared by so many women in our country—current rates show that 13% of women born in the U.S. will develop breast cancer at some time in their lives. (So yes, please get your mammogram. Like really, please.)

But I think I also share to say that it’s all been another very sobering reminder that this moment counts. This one. This singular one, saturated with all the light and sorrow, boredom and longing, unknowns and yet-to-be’s. This moment between what we have lived and what we do not yet see coming. This ordinary moment in this singular day, whatever crazy it offers. Because we only get one of these.