A tale of two biopsies

My mother had her first breast biopsy when I was in high school. As I drove her to the hospital that morning, I asked if she was nervous. "I didn't think so," she said. "But then I had this dream. . ."

In her dream, she was in a waiting room with a bunch of other people. The nurse came in and said, "Okay. Everyone with an A operation, come on back." Mom stood up in her dream and said, "That's me. I'm here for an autopsy." Then she said she realized that she was there for a B operation instead - a biopsy.

We learned a couple of things from this dream: She was scared that this lump in her breast might lead to death. And she was a librarian. (Of course, we already knew that last bit.)

The biopsy proved that the lump was benign. Mom had several more biopsies over the years, and they were always benign. After a while, she stopped even telling us when she was having one, because they were no longer a big deal to her.

Fast-forward a bit. In June 2006, Sandy found a lump in her underarm and we agreed she should have a doctor look at it. But we didn't talk about it all that much. We were focussed on the cat crises (Pico had a life-threatening pyothorax - a chest infection - and Grumpus was missing for an entire week), Pride (I was deeply involved with Equal Rights Washington and we were both working shifts at Pride festivities and walking in the parade), Sandy's job search, Sandy starting grad school, and several other things. I was so unconcerned that I don't even remember her having a mammogram, though I know she did.

Sandy ran the North Olympic Discovery
half-marathon a few weeks before her biopsy

They'd found the lump in her armpit and two in her left breast. She went in for a biopsy and came home angry. Because there were multiple lumps, they took samples from several locations, and they'd somehow failed to anesthetize one of the areas. She was pissed off and in pain, icing that area for a few days. The drama was in the pain of the biopsy, not the wait for results. Kind of amazing, when I look back at it now.

With the 4th of July holiday, there was a delay in learning what they'd found. I should have known that meeting with a surgeon was a bad sign, but I didn't know how these things were done. So as we walked to the appointment on the morning of July 5, I was a little anxious, but I expected to receive good news. Both cats had returned home and were recovering; Sandy was set to start a new job that afternoon. The part of me that is way too superstitious believed we were on a lucky streak.

I was very wrong. Sandy was unfazed by the news; she said later that she'd assumed it would be cancer. I was in shock; she'd never told me her assumption, and I had long since internalized the belief that biopsies are always benign.

We asked a lot of questions and gathered the information we'd need for making decisions about surgery. Then she went off to start her job, and I went home to scream and cry.

Throughout the initial cancer treatment and the metastatic disease (and the period in between when I feared recurrence), I was so afraid of mortality, and she was always focused on the inconvenience. When we first heard the phone message from the oncologist last year, saying there were areas of concern on her chest X-ray, I turned to her and said, "Oh my god, I could lose you!" She said with a sigh, "Oh damn, they'll probably want to do a biopsy or something."

My fear, as it turns out, was well-founded. But thinking about her knack for understatement still makes me smile.