Reflections from Manchester
My mother has breast cancer. We are only now beginning to realize what that actually means. Of course, other women have gone through this through varying degrees of difficulty and with various outcomes, but that was always someone else, not entirely real or at least quite separated by "distant friend" or "friend of a friend" or "oh, she was old anyway and likely to get something like this." We all know it's an awful disease. We all see the pink ribbons, the walks against breast cancer, the survivors on TV, and we think that it's great that they fought this creature and won, but it likely won't touch ME. MY family won't be sitting in the waiting room listening to the doctor's details of what was taken out and what you do next.
I've been wrong before, but rarely have the consequences been so problematic. Perhaps the most difficult part is that the news comes in stages, with waiting periods in between. The first bad news comes when the surgeon tells you that the sentinel lymph node was positive for tumor. That means that the lymph nodes had to be taken along with the lump. This necessitates another waiting game, to find out if the other lymph nodes are also positive or negative. This will determine the course of further treatment. So the patient (in this case my mother) has to wait about a week wondering what stage the cancer is in, how aggressive, how invasive, and how badly the upcoming treatment is going to poison her body as well as hopefully kill the monster growing inside her.
So the waiting game begins, along with the often destructive pain of "what if?" Only this time, no longer does one think that it can't happen to them. Reality sets in. Hopes change from best case scenario towards a hope for something down the middle. And you realize somewhere inside that this could indeed be you, your sister, your mother, your aunt going through that week of hell, with a petrie dish determining your fate, asking their husband or daughter or you to empty their surgical drain and go pick up their medications. And then you look at the reflection of yourself in their eyes and you know that you both have changed in ways you have yet to imagine.