May 20, 07. Sunday Morning

Sigal called a few minutes after 8.00. Nachum had woken me at 7.00 and I’d managed to down a cup of coffee. The recharged phone was on the bedside table. I couldn’t make any sense of the newspaper. My stomach was in serious churn mode and my body gave occasional spasmodic shakes.

Her opening words were an invitation to meet her at the clinic at 12.30. In a voice that was so steady I could hardly believe it was mine, I said, I guess that means the lump was cancerous. We need to talk face to face, she replied.

Nachum, Gabi and Yaniv and I decided to go out for breakfast before the appointment. The passion fruit seeds in Gabi’s order of yogurt and muesli looked exactly how I’d imagined the cancer cells - greenish with a black center – which Gabi said was pretty close. My negative thoughts are becoming the stuff of prophecy.

Yaniv had prepared a folder for me with section dividers for lab reports, doctors’ letters, and so on.

By the time we’d all piled into Sigal’s office, I was very calm – after all, my doubts were now resolved. There was no more fluctuating between dark and positive thoughts. Now I knew.

But the news wasn’t all bad. The lump was grade 2 and considered small, 1.3 cm (I don’t really understand why that is considered small, it felt enormous to me, like a mid-sized qumquat), and the surrounding tissue, from which she’d extracted some 3 cm. overall, was clean of cancerous cells.

The next stage will involve checking if the cancer has spread to the lymph glands. Lymph glands are conduits through which fluids are distributed throughout the body. If affected, the cancerous cells can then potentially spread elsewhere in the body and metastasize.