Getting a Normal Result

It’s been a year since my breast cancer diagnosis.

While I feel like I have finally recovered from treatment, that doesn’t mean my cancer experience is over. I am on medication to prevent a recurrence, and of course, I still need imaging.

My wonderful surgeon told me to be prepared for abnormal imaging this month. Calcifications are common in post-surgical healing but they have to be biopsied because sometimes they are a sign of breast cancer. That is what happened to me last year: a biopsy of calcifications found cancer.

“We might see calcifications in the same place we did the surgery,” she told me, “but none of my patients have ever had those calcifications indicate a recurrence of cancer. Just be prepared for another biopsy.”

Have you ever heard of scanxiety? Scanxiety is the anxiety people feel before, during and/or after imaging scans, and it is very common in cancer patients. I’ve always felt a little nervous waiting for the results of my annual breast imaging, but after my abnormal mammogram last year it got worse. Waiting for the results of every scan has been nerve-wracking.

I was scheduled for a mammogram and MRI on October 3rd, and my scanxiety was slowly ticking up for the week before. Then I tested positive for COVID on October 2nd and had to reschedule. Fortunately, I got a mammogram appointment for just two weeks later (my MRI will be delayed until December).

Two more weeks wondering if they would see calcifications. Two more weeks of thinking that I might need a biopsy again. Two more weeks of tamping down my fear of cancer recurrence. My thoughts would race: I am just getting my life back now. I can’t go through this again.

I am very uncomfortable with uncertainty, and I have a vivid imagination, so I tell myself all kinds of stories about what will happen. One of the practices that got me through the past year is going one step at a time. I am learning to slow down and hold the empty space where information will eventually go, instead of filling that space with catastrophic thoughts. There’s no point in worrying about cancer treatment when I don’t even know if I need a biopsy yet.

Two more weeks of reminding myself that I can only go one step at a time.

I had my mammogram last week. My scanxiety is most intense before a scan and while I wait for the results. On the drive into the city, I completely shut down and turned inward. David didn’t tell me not to feel scanxiety, and put his hand on my knee to reassure me that we are in this together.

When you’ve already had cancer, you get a “diagnostic mammogram” at follow up, which means that you wait while a radiologist reads your scan. My hospital has a separate waiting room for people getting diagnostic mammograms, and I sat there for a long time. Every once in awhile, a woman would be called into a separate room and not come back, which meant she had an abnormal result and was getting an ultrasound.

Waiting is the worst. I cannot be distracted, not by the annoying home improvement shows on the waiting room television and not by thinking about normal day-to-day stuff. My mind wants to play out possible scenarios: how long an ultrasound will take, how soon they could do a biopsy, what my surgeon would say, how upsetting it would be to rearrange my life around treatment again. Scanxiety for me is not an anxiety attack, but I feel a tightness in my body and my mind is intent on predicting what could happen. Over and over, I have to remind myself that there is no problem to solve yet. I need my scan results first.

After what felt like hours but was probably closer to thirty minutes, the radiologist called me into the little side room. He didn’t even ask me to sit down, but just turned to me and said, “You’re fine. The mammogram is normal.”

I had to ask him to repeat himself because I was partially stunned. A normal result?

“There are no calcifications anywhere, and we don’t even see post-radiation damage,” he said.

I had been so certain they would see calcifications and I would be back on the cancer conveyor belt of more tests and appointments. Instead, I got to leave the hospital and start texting the good news to my family and friends.

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to have a medical test go well and produce a normal result. I am so used to having symptoms that doctors don’t understand, weird side effects they’ve never seen. My body does not respond normally to pretty much anything. Since I got sick thirty years ago, my body has not been my ally. Most days, I struggle mightily against my body and its limitations. If I could transplant my brain into a healthy body or robot, I would do it. I would leave this body behind.

Now I am getting used to being in this body that responded perfectly. My surgery removed the cancer, and I healed so well you can barely see the scar. My radiation treatment was so well designed that it did not cause corollary damage. Despite how deep my post-treatment crash was, I climbed out of it and got back to baseline. And now I know that–at least on mammogram–there are no calcifications or masses anywhere in my breasts.

My body healed. It is such a strange feeling, to think that this body that has frustrated me so much can still function and respond normally–even to cancer treatment.

It gives me hope.