My name was called and I passed through the portal of hell between not having sex cancer or finding out if I did. I was pretty sure by the way my doctor spoke to me at her office and subsequently (numerous times) on the phone, followed by the urgency of the oncologist’s call late in the evening to see me as soon as possible, that the news would not be good.  I felt it.

She couldn't have been more compassionate or honest.  She offered to come down and take me in for my biopsy (she lives almost three hours away from me).  She told me what to expect in terms of pain and offered for me to come and stay with her if I needed treatment.  She lives in a city with one of the best records for breast cancer treatment.  With all that she had going on in her life, she took me on as a cause to champion.  I will forever be grateful to her for her kindess and compassion.  Thank you DR for that.

I was placed in a small room and told to put on the requisite paper moon gown.  And then I was told that I might be waiting for quite awhile because I had been squeezed into his appointment schedule.  No man doctor is that anxious to meet me by daylight without having spent a couple of nights with me.  The panic officially set in.

The oncologist’s nurse came in and showed me the mammogram and what they were most concerned about.  There was kind of a “duh” moment in my head; I knew the little thing was causing me big problems.  I could feel it and had felt it for what was now the 11^th day. I really didn’t need further confirmation that an uninvited guest without a penis attached to it  was living inside of me.  I wanted that thing taken out of me and gone.  I was taken by surprise to learn that there were secondary issues of another kind on the other breast that they wanted to look into further.  But not right away.  WTF?  How’s your Monday?

It took about an hour before the oncologist finally came in apologizing to me for my having to wait so long.  Polite and good looking? He had kind eyes and a fun, playful demeanor, which meant he had dating potential the world to me.  I felt at ease immediately. We shook hands (and yes, his are VERY large as I had been “warned”) and he got right down to business. He rubbed his very large hands together and closed his eyes (“wow!” I thought, “men should try this trick in real life”) and methodically began examining my neck, armpits and breasts.  He began with my left, which was not the one with the lump, almost as if he was trying to determine “normal” for me. Don’t even go there.  I’m a lot of things, but “normal” isn’t one of them.  

He informed me that my breasts were quite dense and the only thing I could blurt out was, “better my breasts than my head.”  He laughed and moved on to the one with the Wasabi pea and searched almost everywhere in a way that resembled foreplay.  “You’re so close, just go THERE, god dammit!” I was thinking in my mind.  I almost wanted to push it right in front of him, but eventually, he found it on his own and spent a good minute pressing, manipulating and circling it.  What he could teach a man or two and apply it downstairs, if ya know what I mean.

“There it is,” he said matter of factly.  We looked at each other and it seemed like my eyes were saying, “I told you so,” and his were responding, “you’ve come to the right place”.

“Let’s go across the hall and do an ultrasound,” he announced.  Those rooms are cold to begin with and I had brought along a cashmere shawl to keep warm.  I could feel my heart racing.  Not in a good way. An assistant was setting up everything when we walked in and he had me lay on my back.  He ripped open the paper gown (in almost a movie scene, sexy kind of way) and began applying gobs of cold gel.  He made me put my right arm above my head, where it remained for the next half hour.  It fell asleep in the process.  If only I could have, too.

The wand probed deeply around and over the growth.  It was uncomfortable and as I had indicated originally to my own doctor, radiated pain throughout my chest wall.  This was confounding to my doctor and the oncologist.  He turned the screen towards me and said again, “There it is,” and explained that he was going to perform a biopsy right then and there.

He put a ton of anesthetic on my breast and informed me it would take about ten minutes for it to set in.  He told me that the density of my breasts and the location of the lump would make it uncomfortable for me to lie in the position that he needed to do his work and that if I needed to rest or move, I should inform him.  I could not believe his thoughtful bedside manner and wondered if he was this good in a real bed.

He took out an enormous 13-inch needle and told me I would feel a little pinch.  I asked him how soon after the anesthetic wore off I would be screaming, “son of a bitch”.  He told me (honestly), “about eight hours”. He knew that I was asking the right questions and I demanded honest answers.  I think we were both relieved at the doctor patient dynamic.  No bullshit, peppered with some fun.

Then, he began to insert that needle.  Deeply.  The radiating pain began immediately.  For the next forty-five minutes, I watched this poor doctor struggle, squeeze and sweat as I listened to what I can only say sounded like a glue gun punching and squeezing tissue samples that sometime spurted out of my breast onto whatever they put them on to send to pathology.

When the procedure was over, the upper right quadrant of my body was completely numb from the anesthesia and the position I had been placed.  He gently wiped off the gel and said, “I’m so sorry for the discomfort I caused you and that you are going to feel for the next several days.  If every woman’s breasts were as dense as yours, I never would have taken up this field of medicine.”  I suddenly felt a combination of guilt, sadness and gratitude.

“What happens next?” I asked.  He told me to go home and put ice packs on my chest and rest as much a possible.  He told me that I would come back on Thursday for my results and we would discuss the whole thing further then.  But I wanted to discuss it NOW.

“Look, you’ve been at this thing for like 25 or 30 years, right?” I asked.  He nodded his head.

“I am not asking you to make a diagnosis without the pathology, but you have done enough of these procedures and seen enough of these things to have a sense of what’s coming next.  All I want to know is this.  Is Thursday the day that I have to come in with a big box of Kleenex?” I asked.

“We buy Kleenex in bulk,” he responded and gave me a genuine, warm hug.

I was closer to becoming a member of the club.  So I had three more days to wait.  And wear ice packs.  And watch my breast swell and turn completely black and blue.  I could not lift my arm or carry my bag.  I could barely reach into the mailbox, let alone hold the phone to my ear.  Sleep was uncomfortable, if not impossible.  And I was still waiting.  I had told none of my in town friends what I was going through.

Wednesday night at about 9:45, my phone rang and I saw on the caller id it was my surgeon.  I picked up and he said, “I have good news and bad news and I didn’t want you to wait one more night.  You deserve to know the results since I already have them.”

My heart was pounding wildly.  “Give it to me straight, Jim,” I said.  It went rather rapidly, like this:

“The pathology has come back negative.” (Big sigh of relief on my end)

“But I don’t trust it.” (Excuse me?)

“I cannot with good conscience give you a clean bill of health and let you go off in the world thinking there is nothing wrong.   I’m afraid I didn’t get deep enough or to the right tissue and I need to be sure.  I think that both you and your doctor were prepared for completely different results and quite frankly, so was I.  I’m so sorry.  When you come in tomorrow afternoon, we’ll discuss our options.”

Another waiting game was about to begin.