Seven years ago, my surgeon has moved my appointment ahead by two hours. Shawn booked the time off work to go to the appointment with me and this last minute change means I’ll be going alone. “It’s fine,” I tell him. “It’s not cancer.”
I’ve seen a lot of doctors and specialists over the last six months, and though there is some contradiction on how low the odds are (some say there’s a 2-5% chance and others say 5-10%) what everyone agrees on is this: the lump in my neck that has steadily grown from the size of a pea to the size of an orange is probably not cancer. In fact, one baby doctor is so sure it’s not cancer that he congratulates me, says, “you’ve had two biopsies, we’ve looked at seven samples from seven different areas of the nodule,” (it’s still a nodule at this point, not yet classified as a tumour,) “you don’t have cancer.” When his I-don’t-know-the-right-term-for-a-baby-doctor-supervisor returns and he tells her what he’s gone over with me, she speaks in a voice that is ice cold, tells him they don’t know what is growing in my neck, and shares her opinion on what my various test results mean to her. She’s the one who convinces me I should have diagnostic surgery, she’s the reason my cancer is found.
Shawn doesn’t listen to me and rearranges his schedule so he’s with me when I get my results. My surgeon is quirky, a sort of Dr. House / Sheldon Cooper hybrid. Biting and sarcastic but also awkward and a bit nerdy. He tells me I have cancer and it’s the opposite of what I expect to hear. I don’t hear anything he says after that. My brain takes a minute to fully realize what he’s said, and then I wonder if he’s joking which, yeah, in hindsight is not a reasonable response but I’m not sure there is a reasonable response to being told you have cancer.
My surgeon schedules me for another, more extensive surgery in three weeks. I have a longer wait when I book a cleaning with my dentist. Time speeds up and then slows down completely as I recover. I am thirty years old. Grady is one. I spend a lot of my time trying to mother him as deeply as I can, just in case. He’s too young to have specific memories if something goes wrong in my treatment but I want him to remember the feeling of being loved. It’s a lot to carry while I’m going to appointments and meeting new doctors and taking new meds and trying my hardest to get well.
I wish I could go back and tell thirty-year-old me that in seven short blink-and-you’ll-miss-them years, Grady will be a sensitive, creative, kind eight-year-old and he’ll have a precocious, powerful woman of a three-year-old sister. That time doesn’t erase cancer but it makes it softer. Scars lighten, memories fade, and seven years feels like a celebration. My cancerversary isn’t a celebration of being diagnosed, but of living these last seven years with as much gratitude, hope, and grit I could muster.
