I Have Cancer. I Can’t Put My Kids First Anymore.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
In February, two months before my 40th birthday, my left breast became swollen and painful. I chalked it up to the catchall pile of indignities known as perimenopause. But March and April came and went, and my breast seemed worse. May arrived, and I scrambled to schedule a mammogram. I feared the worst, but a mammogram proved harder to come by than I’d imagined. When I finally secured an appointment, I brought my sister because I was so certain that something was very wrong.
It turned out, crushingly, that my worry had not been prophylactic. The radiologist was nervous and somber; she told us that she was “very concerned” by the mass in my breast and my lymph nodes, but that the hospital couldn’t offer me a biopsy for weeks. Basically, I had cancer, but no one could tell me anything more about it. Patting my arm as if I were a recalcitrant dog, she sent me to a
