The volunteer coordinator holds four slips of paper and offers them in our direction. “Who wants Cancer Diagnosis?” she asks mildly.
No takers.
“Ok, how about Suspicious Test Result?”
I pull my sweater tighter around me.
“I’ll take the diagnosis,” I say.
It’s not that I choose cancer so much as I choose certainty. Here, at the five-year mark from my own diagnosis, I still live with a daily low-level terror that my cancer will come back. I stew in uncertainty.
I am one of four volunteers helping medical students learn to deliver bad news by role-playing scenarios with them. It’s my first time here. What I know about the other volunteers is that, like me, they all have or had cancer. Right now, we are cancer patients pretending to be cancer patients for students pretending to be doctors.
The volunteer coordinator hands me a slip of paper with a description of the scenario I will role-play. My character has been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common type at 80 percent to 85 percent of all cases.
I let out my breath. Not breast cancer.
The others choose from what remains: Initial Suspicious Test Result, Suspicious Test Result Following Treatment, and Recurrence. We have been through variations on these conversations before, in real offices, with real doctors. We have felt real shock, real fear, real dread. I can tell by the way one volunteer picks at the fuzz on her sweater, and another stares intently at his slip of paper, that those feelings are rising in us again.
We settle into our stuffed chairs around a table covered with bagels, coffee, pamphlets. It’s March in Boston; the windows let in a weak gloom. There are probably dust motes. This is the kind of room with air that’s filled with dust motes. We sip coffee and wait. It’s almost cozy.
The hallway door bursts open, and the teacher and her students file in, crowding onto the couch and filling the empty chairs. One of the volunteers, Walter,* balding but with bushy white eyebrows, tugs lightly on his suspenders. Nina, barely ninety pounds, grips the purse in her lap. Elizabeth smiles widely, but her hand holding the coffee trembles. I brush at imaginary crumbs on my
