November 11th is the day I recognize as my cancerversary: the day I squinted over my phone and read the words “invasive ductal carcinoma” in my MyChart app while standing outside of the food hall on my lunch break at work.
If we’re being honest, I knew what the results would be nearly a week before I actually got them.
I was a voracious reader as a kid. I think many people my age had a fascination with the more morbid stories in those Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books. I was no different and I often picked through those books solely to consume the stories about death.
I don’t remember a lot about my childhood, but I do have a hazy-but-firm memory of me in the kitchen of our house on Bristle Bark Court, using a magnet to pin a piece of paper to the refrigerator. On it, I’d written “I don’t want to die.” I have no idea whether that really happened or if it’s just some vivid dream that’s outlasted the memories of my actual youth. I’ve never asked my parents about it. What I do know for certain is that I was completely terrified of death. I’d be in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, only to suddenly remember that I would one day die. The waves of dread and helplessness would hollow out my stomach and I’d flail around under the covers, hoping that the sudden tossing and turning would be enough to remind my brain that we’re still alive and that we needed to calm down. The fear was so persistent that it followed me into adulthood, causing panic attacks that medication and therapy eventually helped get under control.
Despite my fear of death, I continued to seek out stories about it. I discovered Lurlene McDaniel’s One Last Wish series, 12 non-sequential books that dealt with death and dying, terminal illnesses, and organ transplants. I read as many of them as I could get my middle school hands on and consider them to be a staple of my adolescence. I’d daydream about being in one of her novels, about being sick and having my crush show up to my hospital room and profess his love for me.
I say all of this to say that in the two years since my diagnosis, I’ve spent a not-insignificant amount of time wondering whether, deep down, I might’ve always known something like this was going to happen.
In October of 2024, I went in for my annual physical and presented my PCP with a small lump in my left breast. I’d first noticed it in the shower over the summer, but the internet advised to wait an entire menstrual cycle before freaking out to account for any completely normal cycle-related changes. I waited and the lump remained, but by then I was planning for a surgery to remove an ovarian cyst and endometriosis. Only having the bandwidth to tackle one issue at a time, I scheduled my physical for one week after surgery.
My PCP felt the lump, believed it to be a cyst, but then felt something in my right breast that I hadn’t noticed. Because of this, and because “you know your body better than I do” (a direct quote that I will remember for the rest of my life), she ordered a bilateral mammogram and an ultrasound. Both were scheduled for November 5th.
Compared to November 11th, 2024, I remember very little about November 5th. It was Election Day. I was 30 years old and getting my first mammogram – an entire 10 years younger than the recommended age for routine screening. I was the youngest in the waiting room.
I remember thinking that the pink gowns were cute (hence the pic below) and that the experience of being positioned for the mammogram was awkward. I kept covering myself up between images, embarrassed to potentially have a stickered nipple peek through my gown. The same innocent, unnecessary shame that makes you hide your underwear at the gynecologist.
After the mammogram, I was taken to a sub-waiting room to sit until time for the ultrasound. In this smaller waiting room sat more women who were much older than me, all dressed in the same pink gowns, all busy (or pretending to be) reading a magazine or scrolling on their phones. Nobody spoke. I see that now as an act of compassion: unlike the main waiting area, it was impossible to know whether the person across from you was perfectly fine or about to have the worst day of her life. The silence was a kindness.
The woman who did my ultrasound was chatty and kind. It was sheer luck, I guess, that she started on the right side of my chest. She made small talk while she wiggled the doppler around. I remember her looking at the screen and saying cheerily, “oh, this just looks like normal breast tissue!”
A few months prior, I’d had an ultrasound for the ovarian cyst. It was my first ever ultrasound, and the tech explained before she started that she wouldn’t be able to tell me what she was or wasn’t seeing. I was able to follow along on the screen and she could orient me (“here’s your left ovary” “that’s your IUD”) but she wasn’t allowed to tell me if something looked abnormal.
I know that “this just looks like normal breast tissue!” was intended to be reassuring, but with the knowledge from my last ultrasound and how you’re not supposed to do that!, it was actually disorienting. I was confused when I should’ve been thankful. Suspicion stole the space reserved for relief.
She moved on to look at my left side.
I’ve worked in public health research for nearly a decade and would consider myself to maybe be a little more health literate than the average person. I’d also describe myself as sensitive, intuitive, and observant. These qualities have certainly helped with navigating the health care system, but I don’t think any of them were necessarily crucial to being able to understand what happened next. The tech, who had been so reassuring and talkative just minutes before, had promptly stopped speaking. She kept her eyes glued to the screen. Something was obviously very wrong.
And that’s when I knew.
The next several minutes exist in my memory as a single thought, “well, that’s probably not a good sign” repeated several times in rapid succession, each time louder than the last: first, when she stopped speaking; again, when she chirped that she was “just going to check one more spot!” (in my left armpit – it seemed random at the time, but my armpit had been hurting. I’d find out later that the pain was where the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes), something she hadn’t done on my right side; and finally, when the doctor came in, explained that I needed to have a biopsy done, and scheduled it for two days later. The urgency of it all was (forgive me) the nail in the coffin.
I went to work the next day and managed to appear just as sad and anxious about the election results as everyone else. This was of course partly true, but I was mostly preoccupied by the events of the previous day and by trying to figure out how the fuck I was going to tell people that I had cancer.
I know the eldest daughter trope gets a lot of flak, but I do think there’s a bit of truth to it. I learned early on not to worry other people. I have a tendency of putting others’ feelings before my own. I’d only told a handful of my family and friends the general results of my imaging, but even then, I often omitted the most concerning detail I’d found while poring over the results report in MyChart: a BI-RADS score of 5. Highly Suggestive of Malignancy. I simultaneously listened as they tried to convince me (but mostly themselves, really) that it was probably nothing and came to terms with the fact that they were probably wrong.
Six days after the imaging and four days after the biopsy, I got the confirmation of what I’d already known. Invasive ductal carcinoma, grade 2, stage 2 (I’d be upgraded to stage 3c a month later), ER+ PR+ HER2-.
I do wonder how November 11th, 2024 would’ve gone if there’d been no November 5th, if the ultrasound tech had never made small talk to begin with, if I were less observant, if my PCP hadn’t taken me seriously, if I’d never read Lurlene McDaniel, if death hadn’t been the monster under my bed for as long as I can remember. Maybe it would’ve all been the same anyway. I’ll never know.
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