And Then It Happened

Four years ago today, this 11:00 appointment grabbed a hold of the cushy rug beneath my life and snatched it away.

Maybe you’ve had a day like that. A day that started just like all of the ones that came before it. A day where you snoozed your alarm too many times, packed the car for the road trip, stopped for coffee on your way to work, had lunch with a friend.

And then it happened.

I don’t know what your “it” was. I don’t know if it was an appointment, a phone call, an accident, or someone at your door. I don’t know if it came as a jarring impact or a slow unraveling. But I know that you didn’t see it coming. I didn’t realize that rug had even been there until I fell face first on the floor along with all of the expectations and plans I’d had for my life. As I sat there surrounded by the shards of the life I had expected to have, I had no idea what to do next. And a journey of being remade continued, one that had begun years earlier but that I thought was complete, tied up nicely with a ribbon. I have written on my blog about some of the things that I walked through that year, but most of what I wrestled with in those first months was written from a hindsight perspective since I didn’t begin sharing until I’d been walking this road for several months.

Now I want to share with you what it was really like in those first days and weeks. As I share some of my most vulnerable and raw emotions through my journal entries from those days, my hope is that you would not see only how difficult things were or how desperate and broken I was, but that you’d be able to see even more clearly the One who provided every bit of strength and hope to carry me through each next day.

At some point in 2014, though I don’t remember exactly when, I noticed a lump in my breast. I wasn’t alarmed by it; at the time I was 28 years old, in great health, and had no family history of breast cancer. I dismissed it and said that I’d be sure to have my doctor check it out at my next annual appointment in a few months. Life continued on as normal. I turned 29 and got engaged that December. Then the next month, January of 2015, I’d asked one of my parents to come in and help me with something at school. She let me know that she wouldn’t be able to because she was having a biopsy that day of a lump she’d found. Her email made me stop and think, and I started to wonder if I should get mine checked out as well. Maybe I shouldn’t wait until my annual exam.

On Thursday, February 5, 2015 I called my Ob-Gyn from work. I was told that I could come in that same day at 2:30. My doctor felt the lump as well and said it was most likely a fibroadenoma, a noncancerous lump common in young women. She told me to cut back on the caffeine to ease the pain and she would schedule a mammogram and an ultrasound just to be safe. I scheduled those for February 16th since I had that day off of work. I told Adam about the upcoming appointment but didn’t mention it to anyone else. I didn’t want my family to worry for the next week so I decided it was best not to tell them unless it turned out to be something serious (which I was certain it would not).

Life continued on. I wrote lesson plans, tasted wedding cakes, and worked on invitations. The weekend before my appointment we went to Savannah to celebrate my MeeMee’s 91st birthday. That’s the last weekend that I spent in my old, “normal” life without breast cancer. These pictures are from that Sunday, the day before my appointment.

Below is what I wrote in my journal after my Monday morning appointment.

Monday, February 16, 2015

Today I had my appointment for the mammogram and ultrasound at 11:00. Adam went with me and waited in the waiting room. They called my name soon after we arrived. The nurse asked me a lot of questions and then had me put on a gown and then I waited in a small room by myself until she called me back for the mammogram. It only took a few minutes and then we walked to a different room for the ultrasound but there were no rooms available so I went back to the small room. While I was waiting, the nurse came in with some paperwork for me to complete. It was giving consent to biopsy, she said, just so we’d have it ready if the radiologist decided that he wanted to biopsy after reading the ultrasound. She said he would probably want to biopsy it and would most likely do that today. She was very calm and I couldn’t tell that she seemed alarmed, so I just signed the papers. I was in the room for about 15-20 minutes by myself. I texted Adam and told him I was waiting for the ultrasound and that they might want to do a biopsy.

The longer I sat there alone in the room, the more I thought and the more I began to wonder if signing that paperwork wasn’t a routine thing and if there was something she’d just seen during the mammogram that sent up a red flag.

When the room was ready, I went back and the same nurse did the ultrasound. Then the radiologist came in and did the ultrasound himself. I laid there and stared up at the ceiling, waiting for what he would say. He said he wanted to do a biopsy and asked me if it was ok for him to do it today. I told him yes, of course.  He said I could go get some lunch and come back in about an hour. I got dressed and walked out into the waiting room, confused about what was happening. Adam assumed we were leaving I’m sure, and as we started to walk out I started sobbing as I began to realize what all of this might mean and told him the new turn of events. We have to come back in an hour. My mind was spinning. Why did he want to do this biopsy? What had he seen? Surely he must be mistaken. Yes, he’s got to be wrong. I just cried and didn’t talk anymore after we got in the truck. I couldn’t process what was happening. This wasn’t what I had expected at all. I had expected to go in, have the mammogram and ultrasound, have them tell me it was something benign and harmless, and be on my way home by now.

Now we were on our way back to the hospital for a second time. 

Adam got something in the drive thru and we were back at the hospital in less than half an hour. I was called back quickly and went back to the same small room. I put on the gown again and then was taken back to the same exam room where I’d had the ultrasound. “Did anyone tell you we might do this today?”, the nurse asked me. I think by now she could tell how terrified I was. No. I never expected this and neither did my doctor. I asked her if the radiologist had seen something that indicated he should do a biopsy. She told me that she couldn’t answer that but if I asked him, he would tell me. Soon after, he came in and explained the procedure to me. There would be a numbing shot and then he would stick a hollow needle in through the bottom of my breast into the lump. I would hear a clicking sound each time he snipped a sample of it. I couldn’t wait for him to stop talking so that I could ask him my question. He finally finished his explanation and asked if I had any questions for him. Of course I did. I asked him my burning question about why he wanted to do this biopsy and if there was something he could see that made him think this was something serious. “Yes”, he told me, “there are signs on a report that can tell me one way or the other.” Then he walked over towards the bed and took my hand. “Are you going to get upset if I tell you?” I of course told him no because I was afraid if I said yes he wouldn’t give me an answer. I assured him I wanted to know and I could handle it. 

“I’m worried that this is cancer”, he said.

I think he went on to explain to me some of the characteristics of the lump and more of the reasons why he suspected this, but I didn’t hear anything else after the word “cancer”. I stared at him and pretended to listen, nodding my head as he talked. I felt like I was in the middle of a nightmare. I turned my head and faced the wall as he began the procedure, using all of the strength that I had to hold back my tears. I don’t even remember if it hurt. It seemed that time stopped and everything was moving in slow motion. It was over in just a few minutes and the nurse showed me the jar that had little slivers of the mass floating in it. She told me that they would have to sit for exactly 24 hours, so I could expect a call tomorrow between 2:00 and 3:00pm. The radiologist squeezed my hand and told me goodbye and that I was going to be okay, but I could see it in his face. He knew. That’s when I cried the first of thousands of tears. I got my things and went back into the other room for another mammogram. It would show the small titanium chip that had been placed at the biopsy site. The nurse told me that the radiologist that I saw today agrees to do many biopsies in a day and late into the afternoons because he has said if it were his wife, he wouldn’t want her to have to wait. I am so grateful that he is the person I saw today.

The next few hours were hard. Should we tell our families? But we really didn’t know any more for certain than we knew that morning. We decided that we didn’t want them to worry until we knew something for sure so we decided to wait until the results were back. We were anxious and afraid, but we prayed for good news. That night we had our first pre-marital counseling session at church. We went with the events of the day and this potential diagnosis heavy on our minds and wondered if we’d be up against a whole lot more in our first year of marriage than what we were covering in our workbooks.