Her fingers probe my breasts with expert hands and I am surprised and relieved to discover that her hands are warm. She then asks me to lay on my back, arm over my head and I oblige and she talks nonchalantly about my life, my kids, their ages, and that my tummy is nearly stretch mark free; how nice for me. She goes on to check the lymph nodes under my arm and apologizes for any discomfort I may feel from the ever increasing pressure of her fingertips. After we are finished she asks me to get dressed and to join her in the room across the hall.
Her office is cozy, and the chairs are comfortable. She starts off by saying that the lumps are not cysts, and from the ultrasound on my left breast's lump, she believes them to be fibroadenomas - benign tumours. The odds are - she tells me - a 99% probability that the lumps are not cancer. Immediately she knows her mistake, we had just finished talking about my youngest son, the 100 to 1 statistic - the Congenital heart defect baby.
"That is to say - I feel really good that you have nothing to worry about", she corrects herself. "But I would still like to have them biopsied, as much as for my own charts as for your peace of mind".
I agree to the procedure because if there is a small possibility that it's cancer, then it's still a possibility that needs to be investigated, no matter the likelihood. That being said, I'm not too worried. No matter the outcome, I can't predict the future, nor can I prevent it from happening. I used to be a person so hung up on the "what ifs" of life, so worried about what tomorrow would bring, that I never enjoyed 'today'. So now I try not to waste the "todays" I have, on the things I can't control.
These bothersome lumps are probably not cancer, I won't know for sure until the biopsy results are in, but either way it goes, one day at a time still seems like the best mantra to have.
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