Note to readers: I wrote this a few months ago, just before I got pregnant, but now seemed like a good time to publish it. Breast cancer has been on my mind a lot lately, what with Elizabeth Edwards’ sad news and Barbara Isaacs’ excellent article about cancer recurrence. Also, it was my mom’s birthday last week, and she totally pwned breast cancer. Chuck Norris? Has nothing on my mother.
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The dressing room is cold, and you don’t want to take your shirt off. But you do it anyway, and you stare at yourself in the mirror, wondering what’s going on in your breasts. They look the same as ever — not so hot since they’ve been mauled by a baby — but you can’t stand not knowing anymore. You cram your shirt, bra, and jewelry into the plastic bag they’ve provided, feeling like an idiot for even wearing jewelry, feeling gross because they told you not to wear deodorant. Feeling a terror so profound you don’t even know how to describe it.
You awkwardly wrap the kimono around yourself with the opening in front and hold it closed as you bungle your way into the inner waiting room. All the other women are older, reading Woman’s Day magazine and Modern Maturity. They’re bored, jiggling their feet. They’ve done this before. One smiling woman in her 50s waits in her dressing room, instead of the main waiting room, and you suddenly realize she already has breast cancer and must stay away from other people’s germs. You wonder how many women have left here and cried, foreheads on their steering wheels, in the parking lot.
You pick up a People magazine and leaf through endless pages of celebrity gossip. All the women have nice breasts. You really hate Ellen Pompeo’s dress. You jiggle your foot, and think maybe the other women are nervous, too, not bored. You wonder if it ever gets easier.
You think of the book review you just did, about the journalist in her late 20s who found out she had breast cancer, and how she wore bright red lipstick for her mastectomy surgery so the surgeons and nurses would look at her as a woman, not just a patient. How the book terrified you, made you finally schedule a mammogram. And though you’d been reaching for Chapstick, you grab instead the sassiest lipstick in your purse and, tongue firmly in cheek, apply a bold layer. It feels like a battle flag.
Then it’s your turn, and you’re following the radiology tech down a long hallway to the mammography room. There are a lot of pink decorative accents. The tech notices you struggling with your kimono and grins as she shows you that there’s a tie on the side, so you don’t have to keep holding it shut with your hand. Oh.
The mammography room is dimly lit, and you feel as if you are participating in something slightly illicit. The tech smiles and asks you to remove the kimono. You do it quickly, before you lose your nerve. She scotch-tapes tiny metal balls to your nipples and says they’re to provide a point of reference on the mammogram. You secretly think she’s just screwing with you now.
Then she coaches you through the strange rituals of the mammogram: left breast on the shelf, left hand holding the handle, turn your head to the left. Don’t breathe. She arranges your breast on the tiny shelf, prodding it, pushing it over a bit, until it’s positioned just so, and you think of the pork roast you pounded flat this afternoon, how you flopped it around on the cutting board with the serving fork.
As she presses the hard plastic plane down onto your breast, she reminds you, “Don’t breathe, okay?” The pain is immense, continents wide. You couldn’t have breathed if you’d wanted to. Then the other side. Second verse, same as the first. Much, much worse. You watch her arrange your other breast on the tray, and wonder how your mother felt when she had this done 11 years ago. How scared she must have been.
The tech scans your right breast, and you remember giving your mother a long hug the day of your uncle’s wedding, remember feeling the steady thump of her heart underneath the hideous green taffeta bridesmaid dress, how you had no idea then that it was the ticking of a bomb. You remember that day a few months afterward, the exact street you were on, the exact intersection she had just driven past, the exact seat in the minivan you were sitting in, when she told you and your little brother that she’d found a lump.
The tech tells you to put your kimono back on, and you tie it shut this time before you go and sit in the waiting room again. Minutes later, she comes back, smiling, and tells you everything’s okay, but the doctor would like to do an ultrasound on your breasts just to make sure. You panic, just a little, but you follow her. You wonder how you will tell your husband, what words you will use to tell your small son that Mommy’s sick, if they find something. You remember how your son always fell asleep on your breasts when he was an infant, his milky breath fanning your skin. You want to run out the door. You lie down on the padded table instead and pull off the kimono again.
The same friendly tech squirts gel all over one of your breasts, and because you talk when you’re nervous, you ask her how long she’s been doing mammograms.
“Thirty years in mammography,” she says. “Three years in ultrasound.”
“Is it ever difficult, when you do a mammogram and you know something’s wrong?” you say.
“Only when it’s my sister,” she says, her mouth tight. You ask her if everything’s okay, and the story spills out, that she performed an ultrasound on her own sister a few days ago, and found a tumor in one breast.
“I’m kind of having a bad day,” she confesses. Her eyes are dry and she keeps her eyes on the monitor as she talks, pass after pass over your breasts.
You don’t know quite what to say, but you tell her, “Well, your sister’s lucky to have you in the family, since you caught it so early.” She nods, and then you’re absolutely out of things to say, so you stare at the ceiling. You think about your mother again, how you sat on her bed one evening in the first month of her chemo, when she was feeling so sick. You remember running your fingers through her hair to soothe her, as she always used to do to you when you were small, and your shock when a long hank of bushy brown hair came away with your hand. You remember how you picked hair out of your dinner for the next few months until she gave in and had her head shaved.
The tech smiles and tells you to stay put while she reviews your ultrasound with the doctor. So you lie there in the dim room, and as nervous as you are, you begin to doze off.
And then, just like that, it’s over. She comes back, noticeably more cheerful, and says everything looks great. She gives you a piece of paper that says the same thing: everything’s normal. You wonder what to do with it. Frame it? Toss it? You put it in your purse, where it will sit in limbo until the ink rubs off.
You get dressed in the ultrasound room, but when you try to put your necklace on you can’t quite work the clasp. Your hands are shaking and your eyes are burning, and you realize you’re crying anyway. In relief, partially. But also for your mother, who’s alive but with a mastectomy that looks like a radioactive wasteland. For your friend Elaine, who’s so brave and cheerful in the face of her illness. For your hairdresser Lana, who’s in remission but can’t get health insurance ever again. Even for the tech’s sister, who had canceled her ultrasound three times for fear of what the scan would show. For your husband and for your son, because you hope they’ll never have to go through what your family went through when your mother was sick.
You sag against the wall in the elevator and tip your face up to the mirrored ceiling. Your eyes are puffy and red, but the lipstick is still looking pretty good.
the bushel, listened to stories about relatives who died in coal mining accidents, sat white-knuckled while my mom passed coal trucks on twisty highways, and watched the morning mist burn off the mountains from my grandmother’s porch (the view is at right).
