I Had a Breast Cancer Scare, and I Didn't React Like I Thought I Would

The troubles that you waste nights worrying about are rarely the troubles that actually strike.

This sticks in my memory from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich, offering advice to the class of 1997 -- one year before my own high school graduation. It became a spoken-word hit when Australian movie producer Baz Luhrmann inexplicably hired an actor to read it against some jaunty ambient music, and the single was released to radio in 1999. A bizarre pop-culture moment that landed in my quote book, it often pops into my head. 

Specifically the line, "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday."

It was probably closer to 10 a.m. for me, but the Tuesday part was correct.

On a recent Tuesday this month, I was standing in a mammography room with my left breast painfully trapped between two plastic plates while an x-ray machine moved in an arc in front of my face. This was my second mammogram ever, a follow-up to a January scan that was inconclusive. Dense tissue prevented the radiographer from reading it, so another was ordered.

This time, I had both 2D and 3D images taken -- the latter combines many image slices to create a more detailed picture, instead of a compressed image. Because my breast tissue falls in the "extremely dense" category, the 3D images better identify any unusual growths that could be cancer.

And it found one.

Sample image. My breasts were not
harmed in the making of this photo.

Things moved pretty quickly from there. Still wearing my stylish crop top hospital gown, the x-ray technician ushered me from the mammography waiting room into an ultrasound room. She explained that there was a "suspicious spot" on my mammogram, and it required an ultrasound scan. I hardly had time to digest the information before my left arm was pinned above me, warm goop was slathered on my breast, and a breast radiologist was coming at me with an ultrasound wand.

A spot. Several spots, actually. Two spots were lymph nodes, nothing unusual. Measuring roughly 1 cm square, the third spot was "suspicious of malignancy." Like a sketchy-looking dude running away from a burgled jewelry store with bulging pockets full of diamonds or cancer.

"It doesn't look like cancer," the doctor said. "But I can't tell what it is. Probably nothing to worry about, but I recommend a core biopsy so we can get a sample to send to pathology." 

This was not what I expected on my idle Tuesday.

The next available biopsy appointment was in two days. Forty-eight hours stretched before me, hours that could be fraught with panic and dread. I have battled anxiety since I was a young child. Not just nervousness or jitters -- a week of missed school after being yelled at by a hostile fourth-grade teacher, debilitating nausea while trying to dine in public in junior high, vomiting and panic attacks the morning I started high school. Decades of medication and counseling have given me the tools to I need to live a normal life. But a mass in my breast at age 40 was anything besides normal.

I'm not going to be able to function the next two days, I thought as I drove home. 

But I did. In fact, I successfully pushed most of the morbid thoughts and extreme worries out of my mind. Instead of trying to decide whether to write my children goodbye letters, I texted friends and family to ask for prayers. Rather than worrying whether I'd have the strength to shave my hair, I kept don't react to something that hasn't happened yet on repeat in my head. Instead of picturing how I'd tell my friends I had breast cancer, I told myself I didn't know anything more in those hours than I knew before the second mammogram, nothing had changed so far, and to breathe slowly. I stayed surprisingly calm.

On Thursday morning, a different breast radiologist shoved a large needle into my dense tissue while I laid on my side, eyes squeezed shut. It felt like she was trying to jam a dull nail into a tight ball of twine attached to my chest. She extracted three separate samples in three separate, forceful stabs. I left with ice packs over my blossoming bruises and advice to wait three-to-five days for a call from the lab.

In the whole of a lifetime, three-to-five days is a blink. To an anxious woman awaiting biopsy results, three-to-five days is a hundred lifetimes. It was a blank screen on which I could play each precious memory from my childhood to my children, moving toward dreamed-up scenes of diagnosis, courageous fight, physical breakdown, and devastating loss. It was living through my own death a hundred times every day.

And yet it wasn't. 

At times of extreme distress, your brain defaults to what's normal and focuses on that. When my mother died, I painted the kitchen. Unlike death, Cinnamon Brandy by Behr was something I could understand. 

When I had three-to-five days to ponder the possibilities of breast cancer, I took my son shopping for his First Communion suit and brought some broken metal to be fixed by a friend who welds. I texted friends that this was the first time I had ever hoped my breasts would be unremarkable. I repeated mantras and sent up small prayers in the moments in between. Despite how I thought I would react to carrying this weight, I didn't panic or break. I just kept going.

On Monday afternoon, four days after the procedure, a nurse called with news that the "suspicious spot" was benign. It is sclerosing adenosis - a hardened overgrowth of milk gland cells - with a tiny spot of calcification. It is unlikely this small mass will ever turn into anything else, and its existence doesn't significantly raise my chances of developing breast cancer elsewhere. 

I let out the breath I didn't realize I was holding, and felt my shoulders and jaw unclench in relief. No cancer. No additional layers of struggle and sadness to endure. None of those catastrophic things I could have worried about - almost worried about - would come, at least right now. 

I can't say that this experience has drastically changed my life or my outlook, besides amplifying my gratefulness. But it confirmed what Mary Schmich wrote, and what I've come to accept only recently - that worrying is something to do, but will not change any outcomes. The best you can do, sometimes all you can do, is manage what's in front of you.

Also, wear sunscreen.