2024

“Hello?” I answered the yellow phone with its coiled cord dangling from the kitchen wall. To my surprise, my doctor was calling ME, a seventh grader, with results of my blood tests. (Mono.) I still recall my shock that a doctor – practically a celebrity! – would call my home. Shouldn’t his staff be calling?

It was a lump in my groin, discovered in the shower, that brought me to the doctor’s office. “Likely a hernia,” he said. “Let’s schedule surgery.” He seemed calm and unworried, and I expected the best.

When the phone rang several days post-surgery, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you it’s cancer: non-Hodgkins lymphoma.” I dropped the phone on the floor and started to scream—not scream but howl. I was 37 and had two young girls. His words pierced me as if I were on a firing line. Am I going to die? stampeded through my brain.

My father exhibited some goofy language errors during a phone conversation, substituting sound-alike words two to three times over a ten-minute period. I called my brother, and we made a seventy-minute drive to take him to the emergency room. The resident physician suspected a stroke, and Dad went for an MRI. Stroke seemed like a pipedream as his symptoms were not clear. The MRI came back, and the resident back-pedaled as the new findings looked more like tumor than stroke. I confirmed what part of the brain was involved, his risk for seizure, and the follow-up treatment plan.

In that space between the knowing and the not knowing, that mezzanine containing neither a safe room nor a hall of horrors, within that space the fear took on a life of its own.

His broad, open smile met me as I walked into the exam room. I noticed his feet didn’t quite reach the floor, and he was wearing sandals. His feet were wide and squarish, the type of feet one would get from going barefoot their entire life. The type of feet my yoga teacher always asked us to emulate with toes spread wide and space between each digit.

During dinner with an oncologist friend, she noticed a lump at the front of my neck. “Likely a thyroid cyst,” she said, “nothing to worry about,” and explained that an ultrasound would differentiate a cystic from a solid lesion.

Thirty-two years ago, I was the mom of a toddler and a baby. I’d found a spot above my left eyebrow that hadn’t healed and that was itchy. I went to a dermatologist (that’s another story) and had a biopsy. A couple of weeks later, a message was left on my answering machine: The biopsy was positive; the lesion was skin cancer.

A good imagination can be an asset but also a liability. I first discovered that fact in 1974, when I found a lump on my left breast. Three more lumps—another on my left breast and two on my right—reinforced my belief that my creative mind could be my most formidable foe.