Illustration by Christine Wei
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It takes weeks before I can bring myself to look at the space my right breast used to cover. I stare at ribs I haven’t seen since puberty. Decades long past.
A few months ago, I had been called back after a regular mammogram to repeat the imaging – several times. Then an ultrasound. Finally, a biopsy. I was convinced that the biopsy would reveal nothing but the same old calcifications that mammograms had been flagging for years.
When the call with the biopsy results didn’t come within the promised five to seven days, I relaxed, my husband and I assuring each other, “They’d call if it was something.” Another week with still no word from the hospital, I phoned my family doctor – “Just to close the loop,” I said.
“They didn’t call you? They should have called you!”
She spoke quickly as if her speed could mitigate the hospital’s slip-up. I could hardly follow, anxiety blocking my hearing. I caught “stage zero.” I pushed out a huge whoosh of air. “Okay, so I don’t have cancer?”
“Well, yes, you do. But it’s very early stage.” My hearing went again until I heard “DCIS.”
“D-what? What is that?”
“Ductal carcinoma in situ,” she said. Carcinoma rattled around in my head. That, I knew, meant cancer. I retained almost nothing of her explanation so I checked online when she finished. There it was: an early-stage cancer that’s confined to the layer of tissue from which it started and that has not spread to surrounding tissue or other parts of the body.
After our dog died, walking became a small way of remembering him
And so, it began. Medical history. (Did everyone but me keep a record of when they had their first period? Older than most of my friends is all I could remember.)
Heart test, blood work, an MRI. Then a mastectomy. Sometimes, medical people miss the first “t” in the word. I don’t. My mother taught me to say it when I was 11 and she had her surgery.
At that moment, I was grateful she was dead. Guilt would have been her response to my diagnosis, convinced she “gave” it to me.
She had opened her dressing gown to show me a scar that sliced her flesh from under her collarbone to her waist. I think it ended there. I’m not sure for I had turned away. I can’t remember if she asked me if I wanted to see it. Probably. And I probably said yes, sensing that’s what she wanted. Maybe she needed someone besides my father to witness the loss. She had held her robe open with both hands and looked at me. She said nothing. Neither did I. I remember the red of her Viyella dressing gown matching the red of the scar. I hope she didn’t see my upper lip curl against the bile my stomach was churning up as I left the room.
Her later references to her mastectomy were jocular. There were never tears even when an airport security officer marched her off for a full-body search after noticing something was off. Maybe the odd shape of her left breast or the way she crossed her hands over it. The bra holding her breast prosthesis didn’t cover the indentation under her collarbone, so she did with her hands. “The look on her face! Serves her right,” my mother muttered as she recounted this incident. “Wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain. As if I was hiding something in the falsie!” That story and the memory of the groove cut into her shoulder by the heavy prosthesis decided me. No silicone breast stand-in for me.
We’d immigrated to Canada from Ireland three years earlier when my mother was told she had breast cancer, so aggressive that even a radical mastectomy – pretty much de rigueur at the time – was unlikely to give her more than six months. “Nine if you’re lucky,” the surgeon had said.
I carried some anxiety about contracting the disease for decades only for it to subside when told I had to have a mastectomy – reality easier to face than the imagined threat.
My breast cancer connected me to my mother, now long dead. Recalling her stoicism, humour and resolve to overcome her cancer strengthened me. And she contended with it when the word itself struck fear, whispered as if a sin, the victim’s fault. At least now the word, not to mind the disease, no longer carries shame. On receiving the recommendation for a mastectomy, I didn’t particularly fear what lay ahead – not that my gut didn’t pitch for weeks before the surgery. But once under way, with the assurance that there was no need for chemo or radiation afterward, my heart resumed its normal beat.
Some friends said I wasn’t facing things, was too blasé, was hiding my anxiety. What they couldn’t see was the image imprinted on 11-year-old me when my mother exposed her scarred, once-breasted left side. The thin, straight tracing across my breastless right side was like a transparency I laid over my mother’s image. It didn’t eradicate my wound completely but rendered it benign.
Jo Sorochinsky lives in Ottawa.