Nadine, 2015

Nadine, 2015 – I am sitting with a doctor at the Breast Center at St Thomas Medical Center. She's explaining a procedure that she's about to do on my left breast. 

“The procedure will take about one hour and then we will do the biopsy with ultrasound”, she says. 

I wake up from the fog that has taken over my mind ever since this nightmare started. 

“Wait! What did you say? One hour?”

“Yes,” she says before she continues to explain the procedure. 

“No! I can't wait that long.” I burst into tears. “I have to take my dad to his appointment.”

The doctor is startled by my sudden outburst. 

“No, Ms. Wondem. We can't do it any faster. We have a standard operating procedure we must follow. Is there anyone who can take your dad?”

“No! There isn't! It's just me. You have to understand. He's waiting. The cancer is back and I need to take him to his appointment. He's waiting for me.”

Right on cue my phone dings. I glance at the phone. It's a text from my dad. I glance at the phone. It’s a text from Daddy.

“Popsy! Don’t forget my appointment.”

By now, my face is all snort and tears. 

The doctor gets up and hands me a box of rough hospital issued tissues. Where do they order these things?

By now the doctor is losing her patience. She tosses the blue gown on the strange looking biopsy bed from hell. 

“I'll give you a minute to get into the gown. Then we will do the initial mammogram.”

She walks out and I grab my phone to text Daddy. 

“I haven't forgotten your appointment Daddy. I'll be there soon.” 

He doesn't know where I am. And I'm not going to tell him. I just want him to get better.

I start undressing and get into the blue robe. 

Daddy is understandably nervous. His cancer is back with a vengeance.

After a confusing experience with the oncologist in St. Thomas, we decided to fly him back up here to Vanderbilt for further tests. Henok picked him up at the airport. Daddy looked so old and tired when he stepped through our front door. My heart sank when I saw him. He is dying. There was no way he could have deteriorated that quickly in two months. What happened? I arranged for him to visit his doctor at Vanderbilt and resolved that I would have to take care of him while hiding my own health situation.

Breast cancer is often portrayed as so sterile on television. The lady feels a lump. She goes to her sexy doctor. An equally sexy tech does a quick mammogram. Then the lady is back in the doctor's corner office having a small meltdown with her husband at her side. A cancer diagnosis is so much more. First, there's the discovery. Most people discover a lump. I didn't. My first clue was a random drop on my t-shirt. I could have ignored it but, like the scientist that I am, I decided to reproduce it. I squeezed and tugged on that poor boob but nothing happened. The next morning, there was a quarter-sized bloody spot on my night gown. The sight of it knocked the wind out of me. It took me two days to convince myself to call the doctor. Then the whirlwind began.

First, there was the doctor's visit where she reassured me that she didn't think it was anything to worry about. However, she wanted to get a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound to be sure everything was okay. She scheduled my appointment at the Breast Cancer Center at Saint Thomas Medical. It was October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the center was decorated in pink. There were pink ribbons everywhere. It was like stepping into a giant world of breast cancer. 

I sat fighting the urge to run away but then a short black nurse came into the waiting room and called my name. I walked back with her and sat down as she took my information and vitals. By the time she took my blood pressure, and I had read all the information about breast cancer taped up on the walls, I was in tears. 

“Don't let your mind go there sweetie,” she said to me. 

Then she took my hand and started to pray. I wanted to tell her about Daddy and about the terrible experiences I have had so far this year. But, I just sat there as she prayed prayers that to me hit the ceiling and bounced back down. 

“Amen,” I repeated after her. 

“Don’t let your mind go there,” she warned me again.

“Ok.” I lied. I knew it was too late. My mind was already there.

I felt so lonely sitting in another waiting room dressed in a paper hospital gown and my jeans. The lady who was called in before me was getting a CT scan in the next room. Suddenly, I heard the sound of violent vomiting. The nurse rushed out of the room and consulted with one of her colleagues. I heard words like “nervous” and “excited” and I figured that the lady had freaked out in the machine. This just heightened my nervousness.

There were two sisters sitting in the room with me. One of them was also dressed in a paper gown like me. She pulled on the gown nervously. Her sister looked over and started speaking to me. She said that they do this every October. They schedule regular mammograms and accompany each other to the doctor. I thought that was sweet. It made me sad.

Soon it was my turn. A diagnostic mammogram is more thorough than the regular mammogram and can detect more subtle problems. It also means that the technicians try to defy the laws of physics. They pulled and pressed as it was being scanned. Then they sent me back to the waiting area in my paper gown. After about 15 mins another radiologist came over to get me. 

“Ms. Wondem,” she said. “Please come with me.”

She took me to an ultrasound room and after covering me with a thick gel, she proceeded to move the wand over my breast. 

After about fifteen minutes, a radiologist guided me to a consultation room. 

“Ms. Wondem your tests are inconclusive,” she said, holding up a copy of my mammogram against the bright light. The image on the film looked like someone had sprinkled rice in my breast tissue. Multiple spots all over. 

“Microcalcifications,” she said. 

“You will need to follow up with a needle biopsy,” she explained, as I stared at her stilettos. “It may be nothing but we do not have a previous scan to compare it to. It’s hard to say.” 

I started to cry as she walked out of the room. My daddy was flying back up here to get more scans and they were talking biopsies. 

“I do not want to be sick! I can’t be sick!” I cried as I headed to my car.

So, here I am a week later. A needle biopsy sounds rather simple. Stick a needle in, get crap, send crap to lab. Well it's not. I should have read up on it. 

The technician comes back into the room and takes a mammogram image as a baseline. She then takes me back to a large room with a large table in the center of the room. The table looks like a massage table but the hole for the face is in the wrong place. A short woman with hip glasses enters the room and introduces herself as the doctor.

“Alright, Ms. Wondem! We’d like you to climb up on this table and we’re going to thread your left breast through this hole in the table.” 

She lowers the table and I climb on. I lie on my belly and do as she says. You would think that I exaggerate when I say she threaded it but she did. She pulls on the breast and threads it through like a needle. At this point, I have given up on the stupid thing. If it’s not broken already, they’ve surely messed it up by now. She clamps it with a vice.

She picks up a needle and injects a numbing agent into my breast. She takes a series of images using a high-powered camera. Satisfied that the breast is numb enough, she pulls a machine over that looks like R2-D2 from Star Wars. She uses the machine to extract some pasta-sized tissue out of my breast. 

“Why does she need to show me what’s on the Petri dish?” I say under my breath. “It looks disgusting! I may never eat pasta again.”

The tech takes the Petri dish over to a microscope to determine whether there is enough calcification in the sample to get a good diagnosis. The doctor then inserts a titanium marker in the area where the tissue was removed for future reference. I hate the fact that there is going to be a need for future reference. What happens if they determine that everything is ok? Would I need to repeat this whole scenario again in a year? Two years? I want this to be over.