Becoming Aware
Heads up that this one is kind of a bummer. It’s a happy ending, I suppose, in the sense that there’s not an ending…you’ll see what I mean if you read it.
From the radiology waiting room, it dawns on me: I should text Mary Kate and tell her I’m here. Did anybody know I was here? I can be accidentally secretive sometimes. Had I told anyone at all?
It is a Monday morning, and I am about to get the first mammogram of my life. A challenging milestone for anyone — a strange and (literally) uncomfortable reminder that aging is risky, and you’ve aged into a new era of risky business. For me there is, of course, some extra baggage. I’m here a year early (in good health, mind you) simply because my mother died of breast cancer. I recently saw a new GP for the first time; I told him this detail of my biography (or rather, of my mother’s) and he told me there was no need to wait for 40 to start. In fact, he told me I could get the mammogram that very day.
That was a month ago.
“Send chill vibes,” I text MK, who knew my mother; MK, who also lost a parent to a rare cancer just a few years ago.
When I visited the new doctor last month, my pulse read about 30bpm higher than my typical resting heart rate. “Are you nervous?” the nurse had asked.
Always, in hospital settings.
“White Coat Syndrome,” he’d told me. “A lot of people have it.”
In the mammogram waiting room, mine has kicked up.
“Sending very chill vibes,” my best friend messages back. I’m in LA; she’s in Maryland, in the middle of a work day.
I am called from the first waiting room into a second waiting room. In the dressing room, I put my hospital gown on backwards — well, backwards for a mammogram. Normal for a gown. I notice mine is on different as soon as I sit down next to the several much-older women already sitting in the second waiting room.
The tech is absurdly, over-the-top kind to me. Is she always like this? Is it because it’s my first time? Or is it because her handful of simple questions about why I am there (ostensibly lumpless, at 39) had backed me into a corner, forcing me to explain that my mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 48? In any case, I am exceedingly grateful to be babied.
Should I note here that my mother got all her routine mammograms? But, see, her cancer had been inflammatory, meaning there was no tumor. The scans never detected a lump, because there wasn’t one.
Now, I have no deeper family history of breast cancer of any sort. I have no reason to believe that I, too, will develop the same rare variety my mother had. But perhaps you can understand how, on top of everything else, this appointment had always felt futile. “Always” meaning for the decades I’d been anticipating it. Perhaps you can understand my White Coat Syndrome.
The kind tech tells me my results will come in seven to ten business days. In reality, they come in just five: all clear. I had been expecting an “all clear,” really I had. That’s the point of a routine exam. That’s the point.
In my car after the scan, I’d updated Mary Kate, telling her I’d made it through in one piece.
“And in pink October, too,” she wrote back. “Jesus, what a stressful thing to do!” I sent her a photo of the swag they’d given me - a pink pen, a pad of post-it-notes, some pink-lidded hand sanitizer. All of it emblazoned with the triune directive: DETECT IT. TREAT IT. DEFEAT IT.
It’s not a coincidence that I’m writing to you not just on the Day of the Dead/All Saints Day, but also from the relative safety of November. As I’ve written before1, October is a minefield. This October, for example, I flew on three (3!) Delta flights, and on each one the safety instruction demonstration was preceded by a heartfelt video about two Delta employwees, both breast cancer survivors, who supported one another. One of these women expressed how scared she'd been that her young daughter would grow up without a mother. I shit you not -- the video is like 30 seconds long and that made it in there. And yes, it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and sure, this video was moving, earnest, and touchingly made, but...damn. Did they really have to pipe it over the loudspeakers AND through the entertainment system headphones? I could not have been the only soul on board who didn't feel that she needed to be made more aware.
In truth, it wasn’t that many years ago that, fresh off another uneventful doctor visit, I realized that I’d been operating under a hazy assumption that my life would get cut short too. Without knowing it, I’d been counting down the years, comparing my timeline to my mom’s. Rarely considering old age, dreaming only as far as my young adulthood might take me. Now I find myself at a strange, new precipice. The youngest person in the waiting room, and the road ahead so bright I can’t even see what it looks like.
That, it turns out, was the awareness campaign that had been missing for me: The awareness that I might live.
Sorry for banging this same old drum, but some drums are chosen for us