May 2023

“Your love makes me feel alive,” she says, eyes on the floor, blank faced, looking anything but alive.

This once bubbly girl with a jazzy soul and a voice bursting in major chords, weeping  over the beauty in Chopin’s Preludes, as lights soared beneath her slender fingers moving across ivory keys. Who attended college until her senior year only to suddenly withdraw with a forest fire burning through her mind.

When Alma first felt a lump in her right breast, she assumed it was a meaningless skin lesion. But it grew, ultimately taking over the breast. Then her skin blistered, thickened, and turned red. Alma knew it was breast cancer—she’d looked up online images of advanced disease but abruptly closed the web pages. She told herself that “cancer doesn’t happen to me.” Though in her 40s, she was her father’s “mini-me,” adored and indulged.

I entered the world as a rag doll—so poorly sewn together that one pull on a single thread could cause me to unravel. And throughout my more than seven decades of life, many threads have been pulled. Whether I’m receiving exceptionally good news or dealing with inconveniences that I magnify into tragedies, I all too easily become undone and succumb to a tsunami of tears.

Dear Pulse readers,

In my work as a physician, I sometimes see patients whose bodies have come undone. It happens. But in truth, I spend far more time reassuring patients that their bodies have not come undone.

That lump is not a cancer.

Your headache is not a brain tumor.