I Want Off This Merry-Go-Round

A day and a half went by. Even though I was still at home recovering from surgery, we had hope.

Until the phone rang Friday around lunch time. It was the surgeon. My stomach fell. you know that feeling when you are riding a roller coaster and your stomach drops. Yeah, that feeling.

It is never good when the actual doctor calls you on the phone. If everything is fine, the nurse calls and tells you “Your results look good, see you at your next appointment.” You can even hear the smile in the nurse’s voice. But when the doctor calls….that is completely different.

I heard him inhale deeply before he said “I’m afraid I have bad news. You have cancer.” My housekeeper, who just happened to be working that day, could see the color drain from my face. I sat down in the nearest chair and waited for the rest of it. “I would like you to come in this afternoon to discuss your options.”

My ears were ringing. My heart was racing. I felt like I was about to pass out. (In fact as I write this, my hands are shaking and my heart racing just thinking about it). I agreed that I would come in that afternoon and hung up the phone.

I sat there in the chair for what seemed like hours, but was probably more like 90 seconds, while I processed what the doctor had just told me.

This can’t be right! They must have messed up the pathology reports. How in the world do I have cancer? 

My husband had gone to work that morning believing everything was going to be fine. Now I had to call him to come home and take me back to the surgeon’s office to hear from the doctor that I have cancer.

I somehow managed to call my husband. While my heart was still racing, and the doctor’s words were still ringing in my ears, I told him what the doctor said. You could have heard a pin drop.

How do you tell the person that you love that you have Cancer? You just blurt it out when you are still spinning from the news yourself.

He calmly told me everything would be all right and he was on his way home.

Next I called my mom. No parent wants to hear that their child has cancer. Even if that child is 37 years old. She, too, agreed to meet us at the doctor’s office.

A word of advice to anyone going through this right now: Take people with you to the doctor’s appointment. You will not be processing information about what the next step is and what your options are because the words “You have Cancer” will be ringing in your ears. Having more than one person to listen to what is being said is the best piece of advice I can give you.

At 3:00 that afternoon, my husband, my mom and I sat in the doctor’s office feeling numb.

The doctor was gentle and apologetic about sharing the news with us. But the biggest piece of news wasn’t so much that I had cancer, but the fact that the margins were not clear. For those of you fortunate enough not to have dealt with cancer before, when a tumor is removed, they test it to make sure there is enough healthy tissue around it to make sure the entire tumor was removed.

In my case, the margins (or the healthy tissue) was not clear. It was time to make another decision. So three hours after I learned that I have cancer, I was being asked “Do you want to have a mastectomy or lumpectomy?”

This was all so insane. My head kept repeating silently “obviously, they got the samples mixed up at the pathology lab, THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.”

My mom and my husband were both there listening to the options. Taking in all of the information the surgeon was spewing out. And I’m there with my head spinning around. It was like an out of body experience. I could see all of us sitting in the room, me with a blank look on my face; my husband, watching me and trying to listen to the doctor; my mom trying her best to listen to the doctor and figure out the next course of action; the doctor standing by the door, shifting from one foot to another as he looked at the shocked expressions on each of our faces.

Four hours ago, I was home recovering from a surgery that I had two days ago, now I’m having to decide between a lumpectomy and a mastectomy.

It was now Friday, October 10, 2003 and I was scheduled for another surgery on Wednesday, October 15. Somebody, please stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off.