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Illustration by Rachel Wada
Could it be weirder than that? Me, alone in a padded cell in the basement of a medical imaging center, writing my own mammography report? I stopped the tape on the dictaphone machine and rewound it to make sure it didn’t feel bad. No, there it was again, as clear as the first time. My own name, pronounced by the radiologist.
I hadn’t wanted this job in the first place. I was only here because the mammography technician suggested it. She had asked me what I was doing to make a living, giving a little talk while applying the vices. I grimaced and growled that I had my own business doing forensic transcripts.
I could just as easily have told you the truth: I sold my life for $ 10 an hour writing. Money was so tight in 2001, when our family was young and our expenses were high. My mother always said that anyone who knew how to write would never starve, but I had never wanted to try it.
When the technician said, “You should apply here. We need someone for the afternoon job,” I fell for it. A little extra cash is sure to come in handy.
Upon departure, I presented the application at the front desk. I didn’t tell them about my college education or my years of interpreting medical reports for a large insurance company. He was afraid of not getting the job.
So I was a few days later, doing a typing test in a soundproof room next to the X-ray machine. I put the tape in the slot and sighed. Do the right thing, and at least this job will allow me to be available during the day for my children.
When I heard my name on the tape through the headphones, I laughed, not for long, as it was a timed test, and I clapped as the radiologist continued to sound for two more pages. I was unfamiliar with the terminology: my experience was in traumatic injuries, not in disease processes. At the end of the report appeared the code BI-RADS (Breast Imaging and Reporting Data System, I learned later) which assesses the severity of the results. A score of 1 indicates a completely negative mammogram, 3 means there is a tumor, but most likely benign, and 5 is “highly suggestive” of malignancy. My score was 0. I didn’t know what that meant. The recommendation was to take the test again in a year, so I didn’t worry.
Half an hour later, I handed in the typing test, without saying anything about my report, and got the job done. A few days later, my doctor called to talk about the results of my mammogram.
“Well, let me tell you what it says,” I said laughing. She had requested a mammogram because she had dense breast tissue and wanted a baseline before entering menopause. He was 48 years old, at least a decade since most cases of breast cancer were diagnosed.
“Repeating in a year is good for me,” I said.
Over the next few weeks, I spent the nights at the clinic. I soon noticed a pattern: reports of normal mammograms were short and sweet, just a long paragraph: BI-RADS 1. Abnormal mammograms were long and talked about microcalcifications, architectural structures, cysts, and masses: BI-RADS 2, 3, 4, or 5. BI-RADS 0 meant they couldn’t tell what was going on: try again in a year.
Sometimes an idea goes into your brain without being advertised but it feels so right that it’s as if you’ve always known it: my mammography report hadn’t been normal.
I wasn’t worried, but I called the doctor’s office to tell him I wanted that second opinion after all. A few weeks later she was having “guided” views at the Mama Women’s Health Center in Ottawa. After that, it was a needle biopsy. I wasn’t worried yet, though if it had made some sense, it would have occurred to me that all these diagnostic tests plus a room full of technicians and a radiologist in front of a screen in the next room to guide me. the bear. it was probably not a good omen.
I was lying on my side with my arm over my head and one of the nurses apologized for making me uncomfortable. “Oh, it’s okay,” I joked. “It ‘s not like survive last night when the boy had to stand on a pole in the ocean with his arms over his head for hours. “
“This is the attitude we like to hear,” he replied absently, his attention on his work. That’s when the first shiver of fear jumped down my spine. “What did she say?” I thought. “Attitude? Attitude! Shoot, do I need to change my mind ?! “
Ridiculous as it may seem, when I met a surgeon a week later, it still hadn’t occurred to me that surgeons wouldn’t fill their days seeing patients who had nothing to treat, so I was grateful all the time. that was. Taking to educating me about the ducts and lymph nodes and the difference between in situ cancer and invasive carcinoma. Suddenly, there he was, “He’s telling me I have cancer.” This went through my brain like a subtitle.
My next thought was, “It’s funny. My mouth is so dry. I’ve always heard people’s mouths dry when they’re scared. Am I scared?” Yes, I was scared. He was afraid to die. It scared me even more to ask if he was going to die.
It was a second stage breast cancer, meaning it had already spread to the lymph nodes. If I had waited another year, well …
Every cancer patient will tell you that people are curious about whether cancer is really a disguised gift. Did it make me more grateful? Was he finding a new purpose and meaning in life? Did it strengthen my faith?
No, I’ve never considered cancer a gift. If God was there, God was there in the beginning, in the series of coincidences that led to my diagnosis and treatment. As if God were thinking, “This thing is going down the pipe for Irene. Now how are we going to get her attention?”
And the answer was, “We’ll make sure you have a doctor who pays attention to detail, a job that educates you to understand the implications of the results of your mammogram, and a medical system that treats you to the best they can.”
Because that’s what saved my life: the unlikely combination of very good medicine, allied with the doctor who asked for a mammogram at 48 years old.
And the job he hated.
Irene Templeman Walker lives in Ottawa.
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