January 20, 2022 is the day I received my cancer diagnosis. It was actually a stupid conversation on my part. The nurse practitioner from my doctor’s office called to let me know the results of my mammogram and ultrasound (two of each a week apart). I was listening to her talk but no words came to mind. I thought that I had been preparing myself for bad news about the results but obviously that wasn’t so. She told me that there would need to be a biopsy but it was obvious that it was cancer. She gave me instructions as to what would happen next and in what order and I heard them but I heard them as if it was a voice coming from far, far away. I pride myself on staying calm in the face of emergencies, tense situations and bad news and in fact, what I am trained to do is help people through crisis, stress and tension. None of that mattered at that moment. She was lovely and delivered the news gently with compassion and kindness but you can’t hide the word cancer no matter how nice you are or how much you try.
She asked me several times if I had any questions and I had none. What? I had no questions and I am assuming that I was in some kind of shock. She told me that now I was to wait for a call to set up an appointment for a biopsy and then a surgeon and added that it would happen very quickly.
That same day I received another call from the doctor’s office to let me know that the breast cancer assessment centre had informed them that it would be two weeks for an appointment and if I would collect a CD with my test results and deliver them myself it could speed things up.
My husband and I were trying to process the news and he, in his always positive style, was talking about how we will get through this. I’ll tell you more about his reaction later. I heard him but I couldn’t get past thinking about how tired – no, not just tired, how exhausted I’ve been and the pain I’ve been feeling in my left breast for some time until I convinced myself that he was wrong and there is no getting through this, past this, however you want to describe it. I keep going over and over the conversation trying to figure out if there were underlying messages in the conversation with the nurse practitioner. Was she trying to tell me it was the worst news possible, that the cancer was already unfixable. I say unfixable because, for many years, my stock line when faced with problems or issues is, “nothing is unfixable. There are always solutions”.
Where has that attitude gone when I need it?
I am the kind of person that needs to tell someone my news to make it real. It makes it real, it makes me feel like I am dealing with it. I have friends that hold news close and keep it to themselves but that has never been me. I guess we all deal with things the best way we know how. I called my children first. My boys live far away and this is always difficult when any of us are having a tough time, particularly because we’re so close. Both of them had many questions, the questions I should have been asking in my initial phone call. I will certainly ask them soon. I was so nervous about telling my daughter as she is the one who is here, the one I spend so much time with and without question, we need each other. She called right after I finished speaking with her brothers and immediately said, “ok, what things do we need to do?”. It somehow grounded me because that’s how I have always dealt with any situation- what do I need to do? We made plans to pick up and deliver the CD and get things moving.
That’s when I figured out that the worst thing for now is the waiting…………… the waiting and not knowing ………………. the waiting and not wanting to know ……………… the waiting and all the thoughts that have now taken over my every waking moment.
