All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,64
there were days when they were crabby and uninterested and those were the days when time felt as though it stood still. The difference is now oftentimes I feel nostalgic for those days, but I am pretty sure I’ll never feel nostalgic for this one.
Then, finally, the doctor comes back, and the news is good.
“Brooke, we got the lump out, it looks to be about a sonometer and a half—”
“How big is that in English?” I ask.
“About an inch.”
I like the look of this doctor’s face. Which is not to say he is handsome, but rather that he doesn’t look troubled. I am pretty sure his face would look different if he were here to tell me I was going to die.
“The important thing is all the lymph nodes appear to be negative,” he continues.
“That’s good?”
“Very good, yes,” he says. “You are probably only going to need radiation to prevent the cancer from coming back in your breast, which means we probably won’t need to do a mastectomy. What you will need to do is see a specialist to determine what other treatments may be options for you.”
“You say that as though I have some choice in the matter.”
“Of course you do,” he says, “you’re the patient. It’s your body and your life, so you’re the one who should make the decisions. Don’t ever forget that.”
I would not forget. In fact, those would prove to be the most memorable words I heard through this entire ordeal.
The next chapter takes place in a different office. Now I am listening to an oncologist who specializes in breast cancer explain what he means when he says “the breast, and the rest.”
“Your tumor is triple-negative,” the doctor says. “That means it does not respond to hormones, or a number of other drugs we commonly use, treatments you may have read about in the newspapers.”
I nod my head to affirm, even though I have never read about any cancer treatments in the newspapers. I avoid stories about cancer in the newspapers, and everywhere else as well.
“We are going to use chemotherapy,” he continues, “because that gives us the best modality to prevent this cancer from coming back somewhere besides your breast.”
“Wait, I think I don’t understand,” I say. “I had a small tumor in my breast. They removed that. It didn’t spread to my lymph nodes. Why do I have to have chemo?”
The doctor’s face changed, a little. He looked more professorial now, and I was his student. “Well, we know based on the pathology, based on the tumor’s size and other factors, that there is still the potential for the cancer to come back somewhere else. So we do the radiation for the breast, and the chemo for the rest. That’s why we call this approach ‘the breast and the rest.’”
I think about it for a minute, as clearly as I am capable of. I’m still not sure I understand. “But why do we have to do this now?” I ask.
“If we wait for the cancer to come back somewhere else, we have lost our window of opportunity. We can treat it if it comes back in your liver or your brain or your bones, but right now our goal is to cure it.”
“But . . .”
I can’t really think of what to say after “but.” Or maybe I just have so many things to say after “but” that I can’t choose one. So I ask questions, lots of them. And the doctor is patient and supportive, but he never tells me what I want to hear. He never offers to give me back yesterday and most of today.
Finally, he says to me: “Brooke, I’ll say this to you as directly as I can and I hope you’ll excuse my language but this is the best way I can think of to explain this: the time to shit or get off the pot is now. Not in a few years or even a few months. The best way to affect the behavior of this disease, to minimize the chance of it coming back, is to have what we call adjuvant radiation for the breast and adjuvant chemo for the rest of you. The chemo will be directed at any microscopic cells we currently cannot see, with the goal of preventing them from ever becoming an issue.”
It is at that point that I tell him I need to go home. It is just too much right now. I understand what he is saying and I