In August of 2007 I went to the doctor for a checkup. My doctor recommended a mammogram because my mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time. I was 43 and at that point they were only giving women in their early 40s mammograms if there was a family history of breast cancer and both my mother and her sister had had breast cancer. When my mother was first diagnosed, in 2001, she had a lumpectomy and radiation, which was the standard treatment for what they called breast cancer, but what I’ve now come to understand was DCIS, or ductal carcinoma in situ, which they also …
In August of 2007 I went to the doctor for a checkup. My doctor recommended a mammogram because my mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time. I was 43 and at that point they were only giving women in their early 40s mammograms if there was a family history of breast cancer and both my mother and her sister had had breast cancer. When my mother was first diagnosed, in 2001, she had a lumpectomy and radiation, which was the standard treatment for what they called breast cancer, but what I’ve now come to understand was DCIS, or ductal carcinoma in situ, which they also call stage zero, but may or may not be correlated with invasive breast cancer. It’s looking more and more like it might be its own animal, that it might be a marker for cancer, but that it’s not in fact cancer.
My mammogram looked problematic, so in early September, just before my mother’s mastectomy, they did a needle biopsy on me, which is a horrifying and extremely painful procedure. The needle biopsy was inconclusive so I was scheduled for a surgical biopsy. I said to my doctor, “I can’t do this. I can’t. I don’t want to know. Can I put it off to go be with my mother for her mastectomy?” She said sure. So I didn’t yet have my diagnosis when I flew from Los Angeles to New York to be with my mother and have the very life-altering experience of being with her through her surgery and helping her with her drains after the surgery. My father is very squeamish — he couldn’t do it. So I’m doing this very intimate work, intimate for obvious reasons, but also because of what the drains are — they’re these plastic vials that fill up with blood and fluid and have to be dumped at intervals until the breast loses all of its excess tissue and liquid. It’s intense. It’s gothically intense. It definitely shaped my decision to not have a mastectomy. I think women faced with the decision of having a mastectomy would feel differently if they had seen one up-close and personal. It’s not an easy recovery. It’s radical surgery that takes a great deal of time to recover from at any age.
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