Turning the Worst Day Into the Best Day

When perspective—and a really excellent friend—is everything.

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Photo by Jen Steele

A few months before I was scheduled to go in for my second round of IVF in what seemed like an endless failed attempt to get/stay pregnant with a child, I had a health scare. Or more accurately, I had a bad mammogram. I was doing what I was supposed to do, getting all my annual health appointments out of the way—like seeing the dentist, the endocrinologist, the dermatologist—checking off all the bodily boxes in the hopes I’d be spending the next year gleefully watching my belly grow bigger and bigger. But instead, there I was, in the radiology wing after my mammogram, in my dour little striped robe, waiting—as everyone else had come and gone—for someone to tell me I was okay to go, too. Finally, I walked over to the front desk, a little nervously, to inquire about the delay. 

“I’m sorry,” said the receptionist. “One of the remote doctors would like to speak with you, we’re just waiting to get him on the phone.”

Shit, I thought…here we go. 

Eventually, she motioned to me to come back to the desk where she passed me the phone connecting me to a doctor somewhere in Wichita or cyberspace or the Moon, who began telling me about what looked to be calcifications he was seeing on my images, which might be an early-stage cancer called DCIS, and that I needed to get a biopsy soon. Three biopsies. 

I got dressed and called my husband from the sidewalk. It was hard to breathe, to walk, to think because, of course, I was worried I might have breast cancer. So many of my closest friends had it. And more and more people I knew but didn’t know seemed to be getting it, too. It felt a little like how Nora Ephron had described the prospect of death in one of her later essays…it was like a sniper, lurking—you’re always kind of wondering if you’ll be next. But I was mostly worried about something else, maybe more so…that my dream of becoming a mother was finally over. No more new fertility doctors or experimental treatments or side streets to maybe a miracle. Now, all I could think about was this…breast cancer. Treatment. Recovery. Or not.