What It's Like to Find Out You Have Cancer, Part 3

This is Part 3 of a series. In Part 2, a biopsy under a table with two holes in it confirmed what the kleenex-box room had predicted.

Part 3: The News and the Aftermath

After the biopsy is over, I’m told that they’ll call me with the results in 5 days. I resume the trouble sleeping and eating, and resume some anxiety-filled crying from the never-ending waiting. The day that I should get the call with results comes, and every time the phone rings, I jump. Of course, today I’ve had a handful of calls from telemarketers, more than average. I have to answer every call, because I don’t know what the cancer center number is. So every time I pick up the phone expecting to hear if I have breast cancer or not, I’m met instead with an emergency message from my car’s supposed warranty center. It’s a surreal emotional roller coaster and is utterly exhausting.

It’s almost 5pm on a Friday and I’m thinking that I will lose my mind if I don’t actually hear from someone today as promised, but the phone suddenly rings and it’s the call that I’ve been simultaneously dreading and waiting impatiently for, and it’s the radiology Fellow that did the procedure. I’m alone when the call comes in, and I sit down on my bed and grab a pen and some paper to take notes. The biopsy did, in fact, come back as cancer - two types in fact! I couldn’t even process that detail at first. I honestly don’t remember how he said the news, but I do recall that he tells me that I’ll need to start making some appointments to initiate the next steps, including an MRI to look for any metastases. I hang up and am completely stunned, despite the fact that I was expecting that very news. My brain is so overwhelmed that I’m torn between crying and screaming, but instead I sit alone on my bed, in complete silence, staring at the wall. I thought I was worried about these biopsy results, but now I’m worried about the MRI and the idea of metastases. Being a physician myself, I know what can go wrong, and am cursing my knowledge right now and trying to ignore the statistics flooding my brain.

I feel like I cannot lift my arm for some reason to call my husband. There’s no reason why that arm shouldn’t be working but I think that maybe my brain doesn’t know what to do with all of this terrible news so it’s shutting down non-essential systems for a minute. I look around my bedroom and wonder how long I have left to live. I imagine my husband sleeping alone in our bed, which seems even sadder because it’s a King size bed and it will feel so empty. This is what happens when you find out you have cancer: your mind goes into an uncontrollable, often irrational frenzy of thoughts and worries and questions. Things that were important 5 minutes ago no longer matter. I now have worries that I never anticipated having. Everything shifts on the drop of a hat, or a phone call in this case.

In the days that follow I realize that I have to take one of the hardest steps in this process, which is telling my kids what’s going on. Because it was fall of 2020, my kids, then 16 and 14, were home like most everyone else’s, attending school virtually. Which meant that they were around me 24/7. My husband and I had decided to not tell them anything until we had a definitive answer. Why load on more worry than they have already with Covid? But now it was time. I knew I would not be able to hide my emotions for much longer, and honestly don’t know how I was hiding them even this far.

I made a plan to find a relaxed, quiet, private moment to tell my daughter, but then unintentionally abandoned that plan and told her spontaneously during her lunch break, which was ridiculous. But again, cancer makes you not think straight. I broke down before I could even speak, even though I had been certain that I was ready to tell her from a stronger place than that. She cried, we hugged for a long time, and then she fell silent, and quietly cried more. Looking into your child’s face and telling them that you have something that can kill you is probably one of the worst things in the life of a parent. I’m having to balance the fact that I need comfort and support right now, but they do as well. I’m amazed that my brain and my heart allowed me to find strength to do both, at least for a while. I told my son later that night with my husband present. He had a look of crazy surprise for a split second then burst into sobbing tears. Throughout the night he wavered from sad, to clingy, to quiet, to really angry, which involved lots of hitting and kicking of couch pillows, helium filled balloons and popping packing bubbles. I cannot imagine how they can handle such stressful news.

The following days are a complete blur, but I was aware that it was hard for me to find private spaces to go and break down sobbing without them hearing, since they were home. I went on a lot of walks with sunglasses on. As I walk, I start crafting letters to the kids in my mind to keep somewhere in case I die. I want to tell them that whatever depth they descend to when I’m gone, they must fight their way back up and out of it. They must see that it will be possible someday to hold me in their hearts and memories, to see how I’m still with them even in my absence, and to find peace with that. I want them to find a way to dull the pain, but NOT through drugs and alcohol (always a Mom, even in my despair). Do it through finding a passion that you can get lost in. Or fall in love. Get a dog and name it after something I love - trees, forests, ice cream! Write about your feelings. And, talk with your family. The three of you are the only ones who will truly understand what the other two are going through. I cannot believe that I have to be thinking all of this, but I cannot stop it. I don’t want to leave without saying these things to them.

A week later it’s 4:30am and I’m up. This is again the loneliness of cancer – I know everyone is just as scared as me, but I’m the one who’s up. I have the MRI to look for metastases this morning at 7am and I’m laying awake imagining both breasts lighting up like Christmas trees and it being a death warrant for me. I’m terrified now. I recall that for the first 24 hours I was in a crazed sort of go-mode, just making appointments and understanding that this will be just one step at a time to even figure out how bad things are. But now I’m getting worried. How can one body handle so many things wrong with it in one lifetime? I feel as though years keep getting carved off my life with each new diagnosis.

I get to the hospital for the MRI and it was so early in the morning that no one else was around. I think I even fell asleep in the waiting room for a few minutes. Roslyn the nurse finds me and takes me back to the changing table and I am so thankful for her. She talks a lot which keeps my mind occupied: how this will work, what will happen, what it will feel like (I’ve had dozens of MRIs over the years, so I know all this, but I love hearing it this morning as a distraction). She gives me a gown and ridiculous footies to change into and says “I’ll be back to pick you up in 7 minutes”. It throws me off because I’m in such a strange mental state this morning, and because it’s such a specific amount of time. How did she come up with 7 minutes? Is that the average time it takes people, or the longest possible? But she’s true to her word and returns in 7, then takes me to the procedure area where she places an IV in my arm to be ready to receive the contrast injection. I’m brought back to the MRI scanner, which seems like the standard set up – a long narrow bed that slides into a donut hole imager. But for this MRI, she explained, I had to lay face down, and let my breasts drop through the two holes that were carved out of the table. Again with the table holes; ridiculous but also brilliant and also serves as more distraction to my racing mind.

When I sat up to get off the bed, I looked down and saw a huge shatter-type crack in the concrete floor and wondered what had made that. I asked, but none of the nurses knew, but I kept wondering – patient falling off the table? Maybe during installation? It felt good to focus on something so mundane and impersonal.

Stay tuned for Part 4, What Happened Next