It is March 1st 2012. It is my oldest son's birthday. It is also the day I hear it said out loud. "Your preliminary test results are in, you have cancer." It is most likely ovarian or uterine." This is what Dr. W. tells me on the evening of March 1st.
He has called me in the evening with the results as he had promised he would.I am lying on the bed . Dave is next to me.I remember asking "What is the next step?" I remember Dr. W. telling me he wanted to refer me to an oncologist/gyn in Boston.
He also wants me to come in for an internal pelvic ultrasound. We say other things. Polite and correct responses. He is not surprised at the test results and deep inside neither am I.
We hang up and I turn to Dave and tell him out loud what he too already knows.
We hold each other.
I think too that exactly 2 years and one day ago I lost my younger sister Beth to breast cancer.
I cry for her. I cry for me. I decide to keep this terrible secret from everyone else for awhile. I will tell my children sometime over the weekend.
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. ~Marcel Proust
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