Bad News, Better News

Two days after the van died, I sat down with Paula, a close friend at work. She is 40 years old, with a two-year-old girl (who is very cute), and she had gone for her baseline mammogram that morning. When I asked about it, she said she had not done the test. I assumed that she had somehow been detained (maybe her car died?), but no. Her doctor had found a lump, and she had been rescheduled for a more extensive mammogram.

We had a weird conversation that ranged from genuine concern to morbid speculation to gallows humor. By the time her next appointment rolled around, all the fears brought up in that first conversation seemed pretty overwrought. There was still a good chance the lump was nothing. But it wasn't nothing; it looked like cancer, and a couple of days later, that was confirmed.

It was a bit of a shock. Someone that young, you just never think they might die, but breast cancer is a scary phrase, and suddenly you are forced to acknowledge that it could happen. We both knew someone at work, younger than my friend, who died from breast cancer a few years ago.

I began to look up breast cancer topics on the Internet and set goals of a sort for Paula: maybe she could avoid chemo, maybe it hadn't spread to her lymph nodes. Mostly, I hoped the staging would not be any worse than 2B, which has a very high survival rate.

At first, the news was going in the wrong direction. There was cancer in at least one lymph node, a mastectomy is unavoidable, she has to have chemo, likely radiation too, treatment will last about a year (yikes), and reconstruction won't happen for another year after treatment.

However, at some point the news seemed to hit bottom and start to get better. She should get to keep one breast; her scans didn't show any further spread. Most importantly, it looks like she is stage 2A or 2B, and her doctor told her they are going to cure her.

I know it gets to her sometimes, but she has kept a sense of humor and seems in reasonable spirits, all things considered. It's going to be a tough haul, and I may not be there to share the experience [that's foreshadowing -- see my next post], but she's going to be OK. I'll settle for that.