The Prayer Room in Never Say Never

There is a prayer room at the Darlene G. Cass Women’s Imaging Center. You can go there five times and not notice it. You can walk right in and sign your name, look at the magazines, look at the faces of men and women waiting. You can check out the coffee bar and wish that The View were not on the 58-inch TV. You can take a seat and watch the clock and never see the door to the space where people go to bow their heads and beg, “Please, Lord, not me.”

I got the call on a Tuesday.

“You need to come back in,” says a soft voice on the phone. She doesn’t say exactly why. She tells me to call my doctor. My doctor is out of town.

“I am not waiting till next week,” I explain forcefully to the person taking a message for a person who is not my doctor. There is panic in my voice. I will drive over there and act hysterical if I have to. Only I won’t be acting. Hysteria is rising. I am planning my funeral. There are two kinds of cancer patients: Those who bravely soldier forward singing “I’m gonna fight this thing!” and those who lay down in a puddle of their own vomit to die. Twenty minutes in – and no diagnosis – and it’s already apparent which one I will become.

I go back on Thursday.

That’s when I see the prayer room.

I keep thinking they are going to tell me this is a mistake. “We have made a mistake,” someone will say. “These films are clear,” someone will say. “We just brought you back because we have never seen such beautiful pectoral muscles,” someone will say. “We have you mixed up with someone else.”

But no one says that. Instead someone hands me a short, flowered smock and shows me where the lockers are, like at a spa. Stash your stuff. Take your key. Grab a chair and someone will be with you shortly. But this is not a spa. It’s an imaging center where people fill up with fear and then spill over in a prayer room.

Behind door No. 1, a young woman in pink scrubs explains that she will take four additional images of my left breast. She places a tiny, pink O-shaped sticker just above my nipple. This, she says, will help her know which way to turn the boob. “It could be nothing,” she says, saying what I am longing to hear. “It could be an overlapping of tissue.” I nod. I am sure that’s what it is. I don’t say it, but instead I tell her that my breast is unfeeling. “Squash it all you need to. It doesn’t hurt.” Get the best goddamned pictures that anyone has ever taken of anything ever, I think.

While I wait in my chair to hear more, I am more convinced than ever that this is a mistake. An overlapping of tissue. I am not planning my funeral. I am driving home in a wash of relief. Any minute now someone is going to open one of the many doors and say, “Miss Hatfield, you can go.”

But no one does.

Instead another young woman in pink scrubs stands in front of a screen in a darkened room behind door No. 2 and explains that there is definitely something. She shows me the pictures. And there it is, like a diamond in the sky. Even I can see that it’s something. I ask to see all the films from all the years. 2011. 2012. 2013. 2014. She flips through them. The shadowy pictures have my full name in all caps at the top. I compare each to each. Even the blind can see that a bright star has appeared in the Milky Way. This is no mistake. This is the birth of a new universe.

Whom will I tell first? When will I tell whom? Will I go on my trip? Can treatment be delayed till summer? Would I enjoy my trip knowing that I have cancer? Will I be able to continue to work if I have chemotherapy? Will I pull an Angelina Jolie as I have always sworn I would? Have I lied about how much I like my boobs? What an irony that of all the white-bread-eating, lunch-meat-scarfing people in my family, it’s going to be me who gets cancer. Me, who’s been working out six days a week and subsisting on broccoli and kale for months upon months.

You find out what your real concerns are when you stand topless in front of a sonogram machine. You find out that you would rather it be your mother.

I lie back. The lady in pink rolls warm gel on my left breast and then a paddle that shows us the insides. She rolls over and over. The blobs on the screen wobble. She captures still images. Takes measurements of one blob. Says very little until she does say, “A doctor will come back and do this again. A doctor will want to see for himself.”

I wait in the dark with my thoughts even darker.

A handsome man enters and looks at the images on the screen. He tells me that it’s probably a cluster of tiny cysts, but he wants to see for himself. He repeats the bit with the gel and the paddle. He looks and he looks. “So tiny,” he says. “Not much information,” he says. “Most likely nothing to worry about,” he says. After a long while of making the blobs wobble, he says, “I am 95 percent sure that these are tiny, fluid-filled cysts and nothing more. We can aspirate to be 100 percent sure.”

“Ninety-five percent seems like a good bet to me,” I say, thinking that now I can enjoy my trip, get back to the business of deciding whether I have lied to myself about loving my boobs.

I cite the studies that have shown that too much mammography has led to too much treatment of things that will never be cancer. I state that I believe the medical community is too quick to test, too quick to prescribe, overzealous in their approaches to diagnosis and treatment when they should probably just tell people to lay off the sugar and the coffee and the alcohol. I ask if I were his wife or daughter would he be comfortable with me coming back in six months to rescan. He says yes. “Even a year would be fine. I am willing to go up to 98 percent,” he says.

And he hands me a form. Which I fold in half and forget about for a week, before I find it in a book and look at it for the first time.

PROBABLY BENIGN. It says.

Last updated April 07, 2023