Benign?

There’s a bomb in my chest. Lodged inside me. Growing, forming, ticking. But is it ticking? There’s a bomb in my chest that could explode and kill me slowly. Maybe. The radiologist says “come back in six months to see if it changes.” But there’s a bomb in my chest. Is a bomb even a bomb if it will never go off? Do harmless explosives exist? Is the fuse lit? Is the flame slowly inching its way towards detonation? Or will the thing just sit there, stuck inside me? Innocent and innocuous, loitering and taking up space? Not a ticking time bomb but a harmless piece of junk? Only time will tell. This mass in my chest doesn’t come with a countdown clock. I can’t relax. I can’t trust my body. I can feel it through my skin: hard and round and nefarious. Next week they’ll remove it. I’ll never know if it was really a bomb, but it won’t have time to kill me.

Density

The jelly-stuff was surprisingly warm to the touch. This surprised the patient, as she assumed that it would be colder. She put her right arm over her head, as instructed, and tried to think about what she would have for lunch after this ordeal was over. Chipotle? Panera? Hmm…

Despite the fact that her right breast was being thoroughly examined by the nurse administering her ultrasound, she didn’t feel particularly exposed. Having two hands-on breast examinations in the past week and a half will have that effect. You learn how to feel distant from yourself. You can’t feel exposed if you aren’t in your body. Maybe it also helps that they dim the lights in these rooms while the ultrasounds are in progress. Unlike at the doctor’s office, there are no harsh florescent lights shining down on your nakedness.

“The density of your tissue could have made it more difficult for doctors to determine the nature of the mass,” the nurse explained.

She was the third medical professional to tell the patient that she had especially dense breast tissue, which, apparently, is not unusual in teenagers. It made the poor girl feel like a badly-made cake. A puff pastry before it’s been put in the oven.

The patient stared at the ceiling until it was time for the nurse to switch sides. She put her left arm above her head, put her right arm to her side, and waited for the nurse to get to the main event: the grape-sized growth that the patient found on herself a few weeks ago. Once the nurse began running the transducer on that area, the patient turned her head to the monitor. There it was, it all its glory. The blob that had been the cause of two breast examinations, a referral to a specialist, and now an ultrasound. All to find out if this little thing inside her was going to ruin her life for the foreseeable future. Or end it.

If we don’t want to park, we can just hit a drive-through. Chick-Fil-A would be nice. God, I hope I don’t have cancer.

After several long, silent minutes, the nurse covered the patient’s chest with a towel.

“Okay, Miss. I will show these scans to the radiologist and she’ll come in to give you your results. Stay like this just in case we need to take more scans.”

“Oh.” The patient looked up at the nurse. “I didn’t realize I would be getting results today.”

“Yep. It will just be a few minutes.”

“Oh okay,” the girl replied. “Could you… could you get my mom, please? From the waiting room?”

She’d wanted to be an adult about this. She’d wanted to be an adult so bad. To handle her own shit and get through this part without someone holding her hand. Bringing her mom in meant admitting that the results might not be just fine and that she might not be able to go along on her merry way after this was over. Regardless, more than anything else right now, she just wanted her mom.

“Of course. I’ll get her now.” “Thank you.” The patient gave her a small smile as the nurse stepped out of the room.

The waiting was agony. It’s a strange thing to be laid on a hospital bed – under a towel, shirtless, with ultrasound goop on your boobs – waiting to find out if you have cancer.

Once the appointment was over, and the results explained, the patient and her mother had lunch together. They even stopped for expensive coffee after they ate, both overwhelmed with feelings of intense relief. The patient had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the following week to discuss the removal of a non-cancerous tumor.

Life remained blissfully the same.