The Lump

September 24, 2009

This blog is for everyone to read, but it is intended specifically for the audience that I met at the Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope and Healing in Maine, U.S in 2008. Here's why: 

At that screening, after we showed the film The Breast Cancer Diaries, my director Linda Pattilllo and I sat in on a panel Q and A. In the audience of at least 60 people were doctors, nurses, cancer patients, survivors, family and friends, and a young woman I'll call Y.

Everyone asked questions: how am I doing? How is my family? And questions about how the film came about and the dynamics between me and my director, who is also my sister-in-law and my friend.

And then Y stood up, and she asked me a question that stopped me cold. It went something like: Ann, how do you deal with the fear of recurrence of your cancer? It's such a scary thought, does it haunt you? (I am paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of her question.)

I stood there with the mike in hand and in the bloated pause that followed, this went through my mind: 

2 days earlier, I was at dinner with my husband and kids when I rested my chin in my hands and felt a lump on my neck. Oh sh-t. What is THAT? Four years and countless procedures and prescriptions later, it was the first lump I'd felt since the one in my breast. I didn't let on to my husband at dinner. I didn't want to scare him.

But the next day, I told him, and I asked him "Can you feel this?" and he felt it and said "yes." And I was off to my general practitioner like a shot. He confirmed it was a weird lump. I should get it looked at. 

That was a Sunday, this was a Monday; and I hadn't told anyone, not even Linda. But there I was in front of this crowd of people who already knew my fear before I spoke it. They undestood this weird world I live in now, this post-cancer "Boo! Scared you!" feeling I get every time I have a simple headache or a neck ache: is this a muscle pull or a tumor? Is this normal or am I dying?

So I couldn't believe I did it, but I guess my fear wanted to come out: so quietly I answered Y and to everyone else, I said: "Well yes, to be completely honest, I do live with the fear. And this very weekend I felt a lump in my neck, and now I have to get it checked out. So we'll see." 

I think my sister-in-law almost fell out of her chair.

I called my oncologist and got an appointment--but couldn't get one until the following Friday (she's out of town and I had to arrange things at home.) As you can imagine, it was a very long week.

The thing that hit me all over again those long 5 days was that fuzzy, distracted feeling that comes to me when I think I might be dying of cancer, something I hadn't felt in 4 wonderful years. I'd part my daughter's hair and brush it, thinking 'will I still be here to do this when she's 12?' My son would come in and not find his little league glove and his lack of organization didn't bother me in the least. The refrigerator broke (literally) and I dealt with it in a parallel universe; yes sour milk is not okay; oh, please, sour milk is not important. 

And worst of all, I watched my husband with our kids in the other room, just the three of them, and I'd push away that scary thought that this is what it would look like if I wasn't here.

Now I'm taking you down, and I know it. I promise you it won't last. And it doesn't last for me, either. Because it can't. When you live with cancer, that fear is a part of life. But it isn't your whole life. And you can't make it your whole life, or cancer wins before it ever takes you. And I'll be d-mned if I let that happen. 

You give the fear some room and then you take it back. You move through and go on. It's just the way it is. 

So after 4 mind-numbing days, that Friday I saw my oncologist and after a thorough exam I am here to tell all of you, and especially Y, that there was NOTHING in the lump that said cancer! 

And I can also say that if you are a cancer survivor and have a worry, see your oncologist before you really get worked up. My doctor told me that she sees cancer every day, and she could tell that lump was NOTHING! 

Nothing being a relative term, of course. Because her 'nothing' is my whole world: it's parting my daughter's hair for many years to come; it's finding my son's glove and helping him organize himself. It's joining my husband in the other room with no ugly pictures in my head. 

It's knowing I get to keep going and fighting and living with cancer. Just like the women and men I've met in the years since I was diagnosed and all the years I'll show my film. And especially to all those people in the audience at the Dempsey Center that Monday night; it was nothing, I tell you, that lump was nothing! 

Which for me, of course, is everything.