The Goddess just saved my life, yo!

Wednesday 4th October
I go for my two yearly mammogram. 

There is a very friendly receptionist unfazed by me being flustered and a bit late. There is a small changing cubicle, and a pile of gowns. Some in beautiful Pasifika florals, some in bright pinks and blues. There is a machine with two big plates and dials and buttons. The radiographer or is it the nurse gets you to stand in a certain spot, this foot here, this arm above your head, lean forward. Rest your head here. She arranges your breast just so. Gently pulls and pushes it into place. Then the plates come together and squash your breast flat so they can take the x rays. Three photos for each breast. 

Tuesday 10th October
I get a message to call a number to arrange a follow up to the mammogram. That means the x rays have picked up something they need to look at closer. I am not too bothered. Two years ago I got a call back and had a panicked day or two worrying and thinking the worst. Back then Joe and I drove over the hill to the Breast Screening rooms near the Hutt Hospital. My breasts, I learn, are dense, meaning it’s hard to see what’s going on. On closer inspection the something they saw in the mammograms were harmless areas of calcifications. We go home smiling. 

This time there's an appointment available tomorrow so I take it. 

Wednesday 11th October
I figure it’s something similar this time and drive over the hill by myself. All the staff at the clinic are friendly. All the staff are women. This is women’s business, profound women's business. I am passed between female nurses and female doctors and female radiographers. All so careful with me, so filled with care. I am told there is an area they are interested in in my left breast.

There is a lot of taking off my bra and shirt and putting on a gown. Each time I enter a room for a procedure I am asked my full name and date of birth. Each time I am asked which breast is being looked at. It’s probably to check my understanding, check my consent, but I think of the legend of the man who had the wrong leg amputated. 

First they do another mammogram on my left breast from different angles to the one last week. The arms, and legs and leaning and jostling of the breast all over again. My cheek against the cool machine. The plates coming together. I hold still.  They take their photos. 

Then back into my clothes. A short wait. Next they do an ultrasound where they spread warm gel on my breast and pass a sensor over it like when they check babies in your womb. You can watch the whole thing on the screen.

'You have very busy breasts,' the doctor says. 'It’s hard to get the right images.' She gets them though. There’s a star shape she shows me. I see it. 'That’s something,' she says. 'We’re going to need a biopsy. I’ll send you to the nurse to explain.'

I get back into my clothes and go to an office and the nurse explains that the star shape is either a radial scar, something common in the breast or a cancer. They can look the same and the biopsy tells them which. And whichever it is, I’ll need an operation to remove it, because the radial scar can hide other things going on.

'If it’s a cancer,' she tells me, 'it’s disappointing but by no means a disaster.'
I ask questions. I sign more consent forms. I’ll probably get the results in two days. Another trip over the hill. Imagine if I didn’t have a car. Imagine if my work wasn’t flexible. Imagine if I was looking after little kids by myself. For me it’s annoying but not really problematic.

Back into a changing cubicle and into the gown for the biopsy. They numb my breast skin with something that stains it bright pink. Then an injection with the anesthetic. Then the biopsy needle. I can feel it but it’s not painful and I can watch it on the same screen as before. When the needle is in the right position the doctor takes the first sample, a bit of a jolt, a clunk, like getting your ears pierced. Painless. Odd. The doctor takes five samples, she leaves a tiny metal marker and a tiny ribbon so that the surgeon can find the area again. She shows me the samples floating in a test tube. Strings of something slightly yellow. I am shuffled to another room for a final mammogram that shows the markers are in the right place. I’m sent on my way. 

They have offered me tea and biscuits  during the day. They’ve checked I‘m not panicking, they've asked if my heart is racing but I feel fine. I drive home. I text Joe. I haven’t told anyone else. Why worry them? When Joe gets home we agree it’s unlikely to be cancer. We're optimistic types. I look up pictures of radial scars. Joe will take Friday off and come with me.I mean it is a thing, it could possibly be bad news.

I’m pretty unworried though. I go to sleep easily. Sometime in the night I am suddenly wide awake and certain it is cancer. I lie thinking about what I saw in the test tube. There was a lot of it. This means it is big. I know I don’t really know that but I think it all the same. I think about the star shape amongst all the busy-ness. I re-interpret everything any staff member told me and decide they are trying to tell me it is cancer without telling me it is cancer. Everything is a code. I think about my breast and what might be in there. I think about how cancer grows. The cells splitting. I read a book to distract myself. 

Thursday 12th October
In the morning the worry has shrunk again. 

My friend Riffka moved to the village a few months ago. We have known each other for decades. Weaving in and out of each other’s lives, we share feminism, she writes and makes art and is a musician. We talk words and womanhood. She’s very dear to me. Since she moved we have kept meaning to hang out. Is today the day? she texts. I’m between contracts. Today’s perfect I text back. I go to visit her in her new house which turns 100 years old next year.

For a long time Riffka's not been that well. It’s not the kind of suffering that’s visible. Being unwell means she’s lost a lot of weight and people give her compliments. You're looking so good. She knows it’s because she’s skinnier than she used to be. We rage. 

We talk about a higher spirit. Riffka thinks she believes in one but it’s the wrong words. I say I believe in the earth and in bodies. Riffka says yes that's what I mean about the wrong words. We talk about maybe the higher spirit being in our bodies, in the earth. We eat cheese and crackers and some kind of pesto on her doorstep where we can see a strip of ocean through trees. It's kereru season. We eat tart black olives and throw the pips into the garden.  

‘It might be the time to think about the divine feminine,’ says Riffka.  ‘I’ve always cringed at the goddess thing, but maybe it’s the right time. Maybe it’s important. The female spirituality thing,’ she says. 

'I think maybe my goddess is all the good things." I say. 'All the good people doing good things.'

We’re part of nature, we agree. Just another mammal. Our animal bodies are us. Part of the problem is when we try to separate humans from the rest of nature. There is a kind of arrogance in deciding that we are something else. 

I tell Riffka about the biopsy. She's the only person other than Joe to know about this. I tell her I will be finding out the results tomorrow. I tell her about the night time worry and the daytime pragmatism.

‘Day and night, they’re like two completely different planets,’ she says. It’s true. I often can’t sleep at night and each time I find myself awake it is like I am returning to the same dark garden, to the same patch of quiet. A garden I forget about in daytime. 

Riffka walks me home and we have another cup of tea. We decide she should stay for dinner. Joe makes most of it and Riffka makes the salad. She re-meets my children. We talk for hours more. This is what makes sense with Riffka and me. A kind of punctuated equilibrium, long periods of stasis interrupted by deep interaction. Maybe this will change with her living nearby. Riffka says this first time of us talking is part of landing in her new home. It’s been a rough road. 

‘It’ll be okay,’ we say. ‘It’s going to be a beautiful summer.’

She’s just discovered Anne Clark. If I ever knew about her I’ve forgotten. We listen together to her. She’s an 80s punk performance poet who breathes her words out over experimental electronica. She’s still going strong. How did we miss her? we ask each other. She’s awesome. ‘We should do this,” I say. 'Your music my words, your words. We should try.'

I lie awake in the dark garden. I think this might be the last night of me being someone who has not had cancer. This might be the last night before profound changes in my life. This might be the ‘before’ and tomorrow night I may be someone who has cancer. I am not sad or angry or stressed. I am just intensely aware. The night, the sheets, my skin, my breasts. 

Friday 13th October 
Joe drives. We drop the kids off to school and appointments. We go on the new expressway and motorways. We talk so hard we miss a turn off. ‘I have,’ I tell Joe, ‘decided to treat all the possible outcomes as alternative plans. It makes me feel more in control.’

Plan A is that it is the radial scar. I have the operation and all is well.

Plan B is that it is a small removable cancer.

Plan C was only demoted because it's very unlikely, is that it’s nothing at all and I need no operation.

Plan X, Y and Z are right down the bottom but all involve the cancer having spread and me  writing one magnificent final book before I die. One a diary of my last months and weeks so closely observed, so luminous, it is heralded as a great celebration of life. One a book of exquisite poetry. One a book of political and feminist essays so beautiful and accurately observed the hopeless dinghy of the progressive left sees sense at last and rights its course. I am known, posthumously Joe offers, as the woman who saved women. I decide this book is called This hill to die on. My versions of death are very glamorous. 

‘It is surprising that cancer is not more common,’ says Joe as we drive.

‘Explain,’ I say.

‘Cells evolve to divide. They're going to try and divide as often as possible.' says Joe.

'Most life is single cell organisms that control themselves. Multicellular organisms like humans are freaks because our bodies have to take control of the cells . They have to override the cells' tendencies to keep dividing. In cancer the body has just lost control, the cells stop responding to it, and revert to type,' he says. I think about cells dividing and dividing again. 

The appointment is at 10am. We arrive at 9.58. I know the multidisciplinary clinical team was to meet at 9.30 to discuss results. They run over time but just as I am checking with the receptionist if they have forgotten me I’m called in by the 'disappointing not a disaster' nurse. 

We’re back in the office and I’m introduced to a specialist doctor. He tells me that they have unfortunately found a small cancer. He tells me the process from here. I ask a lot of questions. He answers them. He leaves. The nurse tells me more things. I ask more questions. She stays with us until I am finished. Until I have asked all the questions I want to. She gives me her card so I can call her and ask more questions.  

The nurse says the disappointing not a disaster phrase again. I say you said that last time and it’s a good phrase. 'It is a good phrase,' she says.

Other things I learn. It is the most common kind of breast cancer. It is slow-growing. They found it early. They know how to treat it. The cancer looked from the ultrasound that it is 12 millimeters but the mammogram showed possible changes up to two centimeters. They need to figure that out. There will be an MRI to get more information and confirm the star shape they found is the only cancer. The MRI makes sure the surgeons have as much information as possible. They do not expect the MRI to find the cancer has spread. I hear the specialist’s voice saying that, and lock in my memory so I can recall it. His intonation. His slow careful way of saying it. After the MRI there will be the surgery, then radiation therapy every day for three weeks. Five minutes a time, because if you did more than that your skin burns. If the cancer has spread (looks unlikely, not my expectation, says the specialist) it will be a mastectomy and no radiation. The course of radiation is a one time thing. If the cancer comes back in the same breast it will probably be a mastectomy. It is the kind of cancer that feeds on estrogen. After the radiation therapy, I will be on estrogen blocking pills for five years and possibly for five years after that. The chances of it coming back are only slightly more than if I had had no cancer. 

I ask "why, if it feeds on estrogen, are women more likely to get cancer as they get older and their estrogen has dropped?'

‘We don’t know,’ says the nurse. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know.’

‘But you’re a woman' she says. 'Even when your estrogen goes down you’re always going to be a woman. That’s never going to change and you keep producing estrogen. Even the lower levels of estrogen will feed the cancer.

'Suppressing estrogen can reduce the risk of the cancer coming back. It’s negotiable,’ she says. ‘If you hate the effects of the pill, we'll just talk about it.’

We discuss times, and appointments, and which hospitals do which things: the logistics of it all. 

I feel fine about it.  I wonder if I will feel shock later. Right now I feel grateful that the screening picked it up. I feel grateful that the logistics will be annoying to me but not debilitating. If I am not working in the city it will be a 90 minute commute each day to the city hospital but we will be okay, we have a car, we can afford public transport. I am not doing the kind of contracts where losing a bit of work time means not enough money for food, or it means being sacked or losing my shift. For some, on the edges of things, occupying that space of just enough to get by, this disappointing diagnosis would be a disaster. 

We’re done. Joe and I find a café and hot food.

I try the words out inside my head. I say I have a small cancer in my left breast. I am not saying I have Cancer, roaring with its capital C, which feels big and amorphous and life changing, which sounds as if my body is beholden to this new thing forever. which sounds incurable and deadly and sad. Instead I am saying, the words, still so new, that I have a small breast cancer. Something discrete and singular. Something annoying that can be plucked from me and removed. It’s likely true and it's manageable. 

I keep thinking about how, at every step, the thing I don’t want to happen has happened. The call back from the regular mammogram, the ultrasound prompting the biopsy, the biopsy showing the cancer. We humans think in patterns. I have to remind myself that it is not a trajectory. This is not a cascading series of events each triggering the next bad thing. The MRI will probably find nothing. That is my expectation says the specialist in my head. The regular screening is doing its job. It found an early stage cancer that can be removed. 

I want to tell someone else. I need to announce it so I am glad Riffka knows. I text her. She writes back. Oh dear Maria. Holy Moly. So so good you found it early. Cup of tea soon eh? 

Thanks love I write back. Yay for the power of feminism fighting for breast screening! The goddess has just saved my life yo! 

Joe and I look in op shops. We look at nice pottery in Japan Mart. I love some small bowls with blue and brown stripes together. I compose a text to my family and when we get home I send it. I have just got the results of a biopsy that showed a small cancer in my breast. I explain it’s been caught early, it’s the common kind. It’s treatable. No phone calls I say. Don’t panic I say.

My siblings all write back nice messages. And I had a funny feeling this might be going on says one sister. Four nights ago I dreamt I had breast cancer says the other. My older daughter arrives home. I tell her. It’s fine I say. They can get rid of it.

While I am telling her my Mum arrives at the door. When she’d got the news she’d jumped in the car and driven for most of an hour to come to me. ‘It’s very lovely but you didn’t need to come,’ I say. ''I'm fine. ‘

I know, I know’ she says. ‘But you would have come if it was one of your daughters’.

My other daughter arrives home. I tell her. I want my daughters to know cancer can be a small thing, and it can be taken away. 

Later: ‘Is plan E it's a small cancer but I blog about it all?’ I wonder aloud to Joe. ‘Is it ghoulish to blog about it? It doesn’t feel like suffering, it's worrying and interesting but it's not grief and it's not suffering. But is it suffering porn?’

‘Not if you don’t let it be,’  says Joe. 

‘I don’t want this to be a dramatic story,’ I say. ‘Narrative-wise, I want this to be a bit boring. Doctors find and successfully remove a cancerous growth, and so on and so on,’ I say. 

But I want to write about it because it’s mine. It brings me to my animal body. I am my body. Biology and evolution are wonders to me. More complex and delicate and profound than any religion. The body is miraculous and mundane. It's all body. Mind, brain, soul, body are all held in the body. Body too are my breasts that fed my babies, is my estrogen, are my cells: the ones that know when to stop dividing, the ones that don’t. 

Public Service Announcement
All New Zealand women between 45 and 69 can sign up to free mammograms. If you've moved around a bit you might not be in the system and might have missed reminders. It really might save your life. I think it's very likely that it just saved mine.

Sign up for breast screening! help the Goddess save you!