Panic

It’s a known condition of human nature that we appreciate what we have only when we’re faced with losing it. I’ve spent so much time bemoaning the lack of well-being that characterized my life BC (before cancer) that I failed to notice a gradual process whereby a facsimile of that well-being was developing in its place.

And then, that was shattered.

I’d become aware that my bra was pressing against my flesh, especially on the left side, but put it down to having put on weight. During the week, however, I realized that my breast was swollen. I remembered it had swelled during radiation but I’d had a vague notion that it had settled down to its normal dimensions some time over the last two months, since completing therapy. But now, my breast obtruded whenever my left arm brushed against my side, a situation that was not reflected on my right side. By the time I became agitated enough to call Hannah, my old companion, the churning stomach, was back.

Hannah told me to contact the surgeon. She said that the swelling could be due to the radiation, but it scared me that she could entertain any other possibility. (It’s unclear to me why she suggested I contact the surgeon instead of Dr. Sarid, my oncologist. She said that she didn’t know Sarid’s schedule for Wednesday, when he would be at the hospital, but I still wonder why she couldn’t have made an emergency appointment for me.)

Genuinely alarmed now, I tried to contact Dr. Sigal Librant and left a message on her voicemail. Next I made an emergency appointment to see her on Thursday afternoon (made possible by Nachum running to the doctor to obtain an emergency referral).

By the afternoon, I had calmed down. I’d surfed the net and spoken to Sally, my granddaughters’ former nanny, whose young daughter is a cancer survivor. It seemed that even months after radiation therapy, the breast can remain swollen. My problem was that I couldn’t remember if it had ever returned to its original smaller proportions.

I remained relatively calm until Wednesday evening when I noticed small black spots on the aureole around my nipple. Thursday morning, I ran a search for inflammatory breast cancer or IBC and what I read sent me into an unprecedented realm of panic (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/inflammatory-breast-cancer/DS00632). My symptoms met some of those of IBC, although they could just as well be related to the effects of radiation. IBC is rated as Stage 3B or Stage 4 if it has metastasized, and survival rates are low. I believed with my whole being that the fight was over and that I was now facing death.

We reached the clinic early and when Sigal arrived, she told me that she’d heard my voicemail message only that afternoon. She examined me, told me the swelling was indeed due to the radiation but that I had one of the best recoveries she’d seen, that the black spots were pigmentation, also from the radiation, and that I certainly was not suffering from IBC.

I wondered, and still wonder, why I wasn’t immediately lifted out of my sense of doom by a feeling of relief. I think it’s because I’d given up. I had cried with uncontrolled hysteria, I’d screamed with fright at the horror of imminent death, I'd rued the time I hadn’t spent feeling grateful for my life as a cancer survivor. Mentally, I had gone to the brink of the abyss and it took a while to step away from it. How fragile my ability to cope with it all is and how wonderful life is when I can.

The next day I drank in the beauty of the world, and was back to complaining to Nachum, dispenser of indispensable TLC during that horrible period, about his driving.