REPRIEVE
By Peggy Varnado
The wait to hear the verdict for the
rest of her life was punctuated by two sharp beeps, every fifteen
seconds, as she held the line. Once she had read that life is made up
of two kinds of lumps: lumps in cereal and lumps in the body--words that
provided perspective in coping with water dripping through the ceiling,
crumpled bumpers, orthodontic bills, and other annoyances that kept life
from being smooth and creamy.
Fingers glide over smooth, soapy skin so the shower is the best place,
supposedly, to undergo the tortuous ritual prescribed by the phases of
the indifferent moon. Let’s get it over with, fast and matter of factly,
she always told herself, forcing her fingers to move in concentric
circles over the swell of her breast, zeroing in on the target of the
nipple, the place of highest risk for malignancies. If she could make
it there without any new discoveries, she felt that she had indeed won
the game against fate and age and made it safely home. It was a
procedure performed with her eyes closed – hot water pounding her back,
forgetting to breathe.
As she approached the final target on
the left side of the line of symmetry, it made itself known. At
first she kept her fingers moving lightly over the skin -- trying hard
to ignore the tiny mass that was not there during the last half moon.
But the intellect cannot control the visceral. As soon as her
fingers felt the irregularity, the familiar sinking in her stomach and
the tingling at the top of her scalp began. Since the discovery of
the first lump twenty-five years ago, she had undergone a dozen biopsies
and at least that many aspirations, always benign. But she knew
very well that time was her enemy and like a seasoned gambler, she
recited the odds in her head.
The overall 1 in 8 risk for breast
cancer was spread out over a woman’s lifetime. The first lump when
she was a twenty-five-year-old grad student had only a 1 in 1,000 chance
of being malignant. It changed to 1 in 50 at thirty years of age,
then 1 in 20 at forty. And while she had dined out on filet mignon
and opened the pearl necklace from her family on her fiftieth birthday,
the numbers morphed to 1 in 15.
So she simply waited for the tingling
of the scalp to spread over her head, accompanied by a flush of heat
that made cold sweat drip down her sides from her armpits. She could
feel it even in the shower and she could smell it—it was the smell of
fear—acrid and animal-like.
Then the mind games began. Don’t
acknowledge the lump as real just yet.
Allow yourself
the luxury of finishing the shower, rinsing the shampoo from your hair.
Maybe the result will be different next time.
Long
after the last residue of soap had swirled down the drain, she stood
there with the hot water numbing her back, wishing it were numbing her
mind. Now she had to investigate again before the temperature of
the water dropped. She couldn’t bear to be standing there with cold
water pouring onto her skin. So she willed her fingers back to the
breast and started all over, speeding up just a little when she got to
the worrisome place, hoping to glide over it quickly and smoothly.
It was still there. No bigger
than an English pea, a tiny rock in one’s shoe, but as ominous as
anything she had ever known in her life. Until it was cut out,
minced onto a slide, allowed to proliferate, and examined under the
microscope, no lump was a safe lump. She had watched her aunt
“keep an eye” on a lump for over a year while it spread to her liver,
turning her waxen yellow before she gave up the fight, leaving two kids
and a husband.
Now she stepped out of the shower and
reached for a towel, but there were none. Her youngest daughter
had showered in her bathroom and must have used the last towel… or two.
Now the vulnerability overwhelmed her. She used the gown she had
meant to put on to blot at her face and her arms, then she closed the
toilet lid, put the damp gown on it and sat down hard.
She folded her arms over her wet
breasts and held herself tightly, shivering as the air conditioner vent
began to blow. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that
before she held the gown to her chest and made her way to her dresser in
the dark bedroom where her husband slept. By instinct, she found
the drawer with her skimpy summer gowns, then closed it, and pulled out
an old tee-shirt instead. It was very big on her and
its soft opaqueness felt comforting against her wet skin.
The
house was quiet—everyone asleep but her. She usually looked forward to
this hour—her time to reclaim the house-- the computer, the television,
the kitchen. On a normal night, she would pour a small glass of wine or
make a cup of Earl Grey and grade papers, watch the end of some old
black-and-white movie, maybe order things for birthdays and Christmas
from twenty-four hour catalog departments, giving her a childish delight
that she was making good use of time that everybody else was wasting.
She would always read something she had saved for these hours—the latest
Atlantic Monthly, a chapter from a novel, or book reviews of
books she would probably never get to. On the best nights, she would
write, sometimes staying up till sunrise yet feeling exhilarated and
renewed. The nights were her stolen time—the only time she found to do
what she wanted and she cherished them.
Tonight, however, she knew what she
had to do. She went downstairs and got her calendar. She
looked over the upcoming days filled with classes to teach, board
meetings, volunteer commitments, church, PTA, dental appointments, and
made note of what could be cancelled and what could not. She
looked up the number of her surgeon and wrote it carefully on a post-it,
stuck it to the calendar, and put it by the phone. It was much
better to find a lump during business hours, she had discovered early
on. Now there was a night to be endured before she could make the
call.
She poured a glass of wine and tried to
drink it fast. The essays to be graded would have to wait. She climbed
the stairs and looked in on both of her daughters, long teenaged legs
poking oddly out of covers, complexions dotted with zit medicine, and
yet so lovely, they took her breath away. She brushed her teeth, and
looked at her face in the mirror. Even in the dark, she could see the
strain on it, making her look older than she had that morning. She
looked away, swallowed the vitamin E pills that are supposed to protect
against what she had just discovered, and eased into bed without a
sound.
It would be nice to have company at this moment, she thought--to have
someone wrap you in strong arms and tell you it would be alright.
But she was past that now. It seemed cruel to interrupt someone
else’s peaceful sleep for her own comfort. And anyway, she had
been through this so many times, it was like the little boy who cried
wolf. The last time, her husband had forgotten to ask her the
results of the biopsy; but it was ok. When the reports came back
good, she put it behind her as quickly as possible and jumped back in to
make up for the lost time – except for one thing. She tried not to
lose that sense of being grateful for the time that she might not have
had, for the normalcy that she could resume.
It was the normalcy she was thinking
of while the electronic beeps continued to strip her nerves—eight per
minute, two at a time. Funny how she longed to be doing the most
mundane chores—folding the endless laundry, wiping the countertop for
the tenth time today. Even the most dreaded job, slinging the cold
cuts onto sack lunch sandwiches at 6:30 AM, would be welcomed if she
could only be assured that she was healthy and that life would continue.
She remembered discussing that very
feeling soon after her best friend Margaret was diagnosed with breast
cancer the second time. The memories of Margaret were still raw. She
had watched that woman fight cancer for almost twenty years after
discovering the initial lump days before her long-awaited first child
was born—an event so cruel it seemed preposterous. But it didn’t shake
Margaret. She fought her way through surgery and radiation and
chemotherapy with an infant in her arms and earned herself six cancer
free years before finding the second lump, days after her second child
was born—the one she was nursing with her remaining breast, until the
chemo poisoned her milk.
The kicker was that Margaret was the
best person she had ever known – generous wife and mother, fiercely
loyal friend. She held degrees in music and mathematics, played the
flute, and was drop dead gorgeous—one of those women you could have
hated her except that you couldn’t because she was down to earth and
funny and had read every book you’d ever heard of.
Margaret opted for the full triple
threat the second time as well, —looking at her bandaged chest when she
came to and saying that she preferred symmetry anyway. This time
remission lasted twelve years, but apparently the cancer was simply
hiding out and gathering its strength.
It came back in her mouth and grew
toward her brain—stealing the sight from an eye and twisting her lovely
smile. She fought it for over a year, then died with a
gracefulness and dignity that was a testament to her lifelong beliefs.
Unfortunately, it didn’t do much for her best friend’s faith. She
had issues to take up with God if she ever got the opportunity.
Suddenly the voice of the bitchy
receptionist cut in between beeps. “The doctor needs to speak with
you. He’s with a patient now. Can you hold?”
Oh God…. this was not going according
to the script. The doctor had never spoken with her before on a biopsy
report. She knew what it meant and she almost threw up, barely able to
squeak out, “Yes, I’ll hold.” She could hear the blood whooshing in her
head and she felt that she might faint. She hated being this scared.
And she hated the people making her wait. She imagined that female
doctors and doctors’ wives and daughters were not put on hold, and she
was disgusted with herself for thinking such drivel and for her lack of
courage. Her heart was pumping hard and throbbing in the incision where
the biopsy had occurred.
She had actually gotten in to see the
doctor in a week. He had first plunged a six inch needle directly
into the mass and attempted to suction fluid out of it. After
several plunges and no fluid, a biopsy was scheduled, performed under
local anesthetic, and she was home by supper that night.
That was two days ago. Someone
had known the results yesterday, but the doctor’s office didn’t get them
in time to call her during office hours. Someone else had known
her fate last night when she couldn’t sleep at all. She wondered
why that person couldn’t have called her and told her—unprofessional,
perhaps, but more humane than this.
She didn’t know what to do but pray.
She had been a believer all her life, but she truly hated this
compulsion to bargain with God. She felt like Woody Allen in
several movies where he thinks he has a brain “tumah” and makes deal
after deal with God if only he can live, then forgets all about it when
he finds out he’s okay. But she couldn’t help it any more than
Woody could.
Please don’t let me have cancer now. I’m almost through raising these
kids and I can feel freedom around the corner. You know I love them
more than life itself, but grant me the time to rediscover who I am. I
want to climb the mountains that the children were too little to try. I
want to sit on the beach and not count heads in the water. I want to
dance like Leslie Caron on the banks of the
Seine and sit for hours in outdoor
cafes. I need the time to make love under trees and in sailboats and on
kitchen tables like in Bull Durham before I’m too old. Please
give me the days to write at least some of the stories in my head and to
read a thousand more books. If You’ll just spare me the knife and the
cobalt and my hair falling out, I promise I’ll chair the damn Missions
Committee; I’ll quit cussing and I’ll have more patience with my
children. Look favorably on your handmaiden, O Lord. Let this cup pass
from me…even though You made Margaret drink from it.
“Are you still there?” It was the
bitch. “I’m sorry we’ve kept you waiting. We seemed to have lost your
pathology report, but now we’ve found it. Your biopsy was benign.
Don’t forget your mammogram and do self exams every month. Any
questions?”
Yeah,
she thought. I have a few. But you wouldn’t know the answers. “No
questions. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
She put the phone down and walked a few
steps to the sofa, but instead of sitting, she slid to the floor and put
her head on the seat cushion. She felt the sobs rising into her throat
and she let them come. She cried with relief; she cried in anger for
the hell she had undergone so needlessly.
She wept for Margaret and Sarah and a
dozen others she knew who were not pardoned by that single word
“benign.” She wept for her daughters and the fears they would
have to face. She was already on her knees, and she felt that she
should offer prayers of gratitude, but the words wouldn’t come. She
moved her face to a dry spot on the cushion and let her mind drift.
She remembered her grandmother’s kitchen and the framed verse that hung
above the little breakfast table: “This is the day which the Lord
has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
It seemed as good a prayer as anything she might compose.
She opened her eyes, rubbed at the
smeared mascara with her finger tips, and caught sight of the old mantle
clock that she kept ten minutes fast. With a little luck, she could
make it to the drive through at the bank and still pick up milk before
supper.