Cancer Scare

Two years ago (actually more like a decade ago, now—I found a draft of this blog recently and decided to publish it), I leaned, for the umpteenth time, what is important. I was making a disco out of my family room to celebrate John’s fiftieth birthday. What better way than to bring back the seventies, when we came-of-age, swaying long-haired under the surreal lights of a twirling mirrored ball? Thirty of his friends were coming to dinner, dressed in loud, weird clothes. John had dug around the attic and found white dress shoes and a white belt.

In the middle of rethinking and recounting (Did we have enough ham biscuits? Should I really stick a naked plastic dancing girl in the cake? Did any of the light bulbs need replacing?), the phone rang. The conversation started out like this:

Me: “Hello?”
My internist then—typical doctor, same ilk as my father and late husband, operating under the be-blunt style of communication: “Mary, I’ve gotten the results of your test. You have a solid, vascularized mass on your right ovary. It may be a complex cyst, but I’m referring you to an oncologist. You’ll need to be seen within the week.”

That fast. One minute I was setting out forks and napkins. The next, I was sitting at the bar with my ice-cold hands folded in my lap. The room spun crazily, and without benefit of the disco bill. I latched onto a stabilizing mantra: Don’t panic. Don’t assume the worst. All you have to do now is put out food. Put out food. Although I’ve learned to be a good compartmentalizer, the rest of the evening was a blur—I clopped around in four-inch platform shoes, smiling, chatting about books and people, trying to keep my dog out of the appetizers. It was like an episode of an old television program, The Twilight Zone, in which people found themselves in ominous situations that appeared at first glance to be normal, such as locked after-hours in a department store where the manikins are secretly alive.

Late that night, after John was asleep, I sat alone at the top of the stairs, feeling scared and irrational. My fear wasn’t fully justified by the incomplete information I had. But it nonetheless clutched at me like bony-fingered spook I couldn’t shake away. Moonlight streamed through the windows and made the house pale, like an old photo left too long in a drawer. I could see gray frost matted on the grass outside, each blade stark and bent low in the cold air. I thought back, unable to stop myself, to a stretch of years, when month after month after month after month, I signed consent forms for infertility treatments, brushing aside the plainly spelled risk of ovarian cancer. I wanted a baby. It didn’t matter. And it didn’t happen, either. There was no baby. The whole experience had ended with a miscarriage and the sudden death of my husband. I remembered finding in the basement, sometime after he died, a large paper bag full of used syringes, left there, I guess, until he could take them to the hospital for proper disposal. Each represented about five hundred dollars worth of a drug which made my ovaries swell to the size of oranges, sore and bulging with follicles.

A few days later, John and I entered glass doors under a looming sign, CANCER CENTER, apparently meant by the size of the letters to serve as a trailhead for anyone who might be lost in the maze of city streets and adjacent buildings sprawled out over most of downtown Richmond. The center was a labyrinthine affair which took off in different directions—down to the basement, up to the wig salon, right to radiology. I felt light-headed and panicky. While we waited, we played a word game, The Minister’s Cat, to keep me from bolting back to the car, if I could have found it.

Thus began a long succession of tests, during which I struggled not to bite my nails and become clingy with John: a CT scan, an MRI, ultrasounds, a bone scan, blood tests. You name it. Mid-stream of all this, the ugly, vascular, lumpy, hard mass inexplicably vanished. At one point three physicians were standing in a radiology suite, staring at a huge digital rendition of it flashed onto an enlarged screen, scratching their heads in perplexity. “It can’t just be gone,” one of them said.

I don’t know why I was spared. I could be dead now, had it been the ominous thing it first seemed. I do know that the experience, dragged eventually over almost a year’s time, made me understand as never before the terror of a deadly diagnosis, how hard it is to face the prospect of invasive, painful treatments and a complete loss of privacy. It also showed me, once again, plainly and directly, the life-sustaining value of friends. My parents are plagued by old age infirmities—I never told them what I was going through, for fear they’d hobble out to the car and try to drive the 300 miles that separates their house from mine. I couldn’t imagine trying to take care of them and myself. The few friends in whom I confided, though, asking for prayers and help, were true friends. As I recall the events of that spring, I’m brought back not only to the feelings of fear but to the warmth of their love, comfort and readiness, even eagerness, to help.

Someone suggested that perhaps I should ditch this All-Weather Friend idea, lest fate, as its contribution, throw at me some version of most things a person can suffer. But instead, I redoubled my efforts, letting go of horses, and music, and many other people and activities I love, to try to get it right. I think it may take the rest of my life just to get it off the ground, but I plug doggedly away at it, profoundly grateful that I still have this life.