How It Began...

After He Said Cancer | A Memoir

It had been two weeks since the biopsy, which was far too long, and I was starting to get nervous. Pathology results would usually come back within three to five days. I had worked in the hospital for nearly 20 years and biopsy results were released like clockwork. Unless the answer was bad news, but that wouldn’t be the case.

The small, soft, roundish lump in his chest — excuse me, breast — had been biopsied, along with a lymph node in his armpit. Men have breast tissue too.

I would have been more worried about breast cancer if he was a woman, because it was so rare for men to get breast cancer. The ones that did often had many family members with breast and ovarian cancer. These men were carriers of a genetic mutation called BRCA2, a piece of medical trivia that often showed up on standardized tests in medical school.

My husband’s grandmother, mother, and two sisters had never been diagnosed with breast or ovarian cancer. His aunt on his father’s side had breast cancer, but she was just one member of his extended family. My mother and her sister both had breast cancer, so this didn’t seem too out of the ordinary.

When I asked him about the biopsy results earlier in the week, he had called the office. The results will be ready soon, they said. Now, it was nearly Christmas. If the results weren’t released today, we would be waiting for another week. I didn’t want this lurking in the recesses of my mind.

He was standing at the sink when I approached to ask him about the biopsy. He was doing dishes and loading them into the sink.

“Did you hear the results?” I asked touching his back softly, and lovingly. But his back hardened at my touch.

He turned to me, slowly. But his eyes were wide, and mouth slightly open. Instead of speaking, he stood there in silence for a few seconds.

Suddenly, I knew. He didn’t need to tell me. His face told me everything. And then, he said it.

“Every biopsy was positive”, he said, “including the lymph nodes.”

Pain started spreading from my ears into my head. My ears began to ring and I couldn’t breathe. My chest tightened.

Suddenly, I couldn’t feel my body anymore. I could see him standing in front of me, eyes glistening, and looking at me with the kindest eyes. He was thinking more of me and the girls than of himself.

Something was wrong. My husband was too healthy for this to happen. No relatives with breast cancer. He was young, exercised, and ate healthier than anyone I knew.

My mind and body no longer felt connected. A void around me began growing and I grabbed the counter to steady myself.

What happened next? I don’t think I will ever know. That part of my memory is black. I have tried to remember, but nothing comes. When I think of that time, what surfaces feels phony. I don’t trust these memories that my brain made up.

The next thing I remember with certainty is running to the bathroom and crying, a day or two after he told me. I needed to be somewhere that I could lock the door so that the girls wouldn’t find me.

I can’t swear, but I don’t think I cried until then. My eyes and legs and hands wouldn’t cooperate. Even if I wanted to cry, I don’t think I would have known how.

The strangest thing is that I must have known it would be cancer after he told me about the ultrasound. The lymph nodes looked like they were ‘matted’ down in a clump. Anyone in the medical profession would know that this was cancer.

But, not me. He was a youngish, healthy man with close to no family history of breast cancer. I was an obstetrician-gynecologist, who had done thousands of breast exams in my career. His lump was soft and round, like a benign, fatty growth. I had examined it and immediately dismissed that this might be cancer. I hadn’t even felt for hardened lymph nodes in his armpit.

Go ahead and see your primary care physician if you want, I had said weeks before his biopsy. But it won’t turn out to be anything. We were getting older and getting strange fatty lumps and skin moles.

This couldn’t be happening, I told myself. No, no, no. We had young girls.

And then, the memory went black.