* * *
Nine months after losing my teaching position, I came home from work to find Rita sitting in the darkened living room. “Honey, are you all right?” I asked. “Where are the kids?”
“They’re at Andy’s house.” Andy and his wife, Mary, had two little kids of their own and the cousins often had play dates together.
“That only answers my second question.” I sat down on the sofa next to her and saw the worry on her face. “Is something wrong?”
Rita stared at me for a minute before she covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Michael. I found a lump in my breast.”
I felt like someone had slugged me in the stomach. I reached for her hands and held on tight. “It might not be...anything.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word cancer. “We won’t know until you see a doctor.”
“I know. I already called my OB/GYN. I’m going in for an appointment tomorrow. She’ll run some tests and based on the results recommend the next step.” She gently pulled her hands from mine and leaned back into the sofa cushions, crossing her arms. “Like you said, maybe it’s nothing.”
I stood up and walked around the room, turning on some lamps, but it didn’t do anything to lighten my mood. I tried not to think about the worst case scenario, but I couldn’t dismiss my fears. A life without Rita wouldn’t be worth living. I couldn’t lose her. I walked back to where she sat and reached out my hands. She took them and I pulled her up from the sofa. I held her in my arms. “We’ll get through this, sweetheart. We have each other. Nothing can break that.”
The next day, I went with Rita to her doctor’s office. We were still sitting in the waiting room a half hour after the appointment time. I got up and walked to the receptionist’s desk. She was on the phone and, from what I could hear from her end of the conversation, it sounded like a personal call. I rapped on the glass and she looked up. “Hold on a sec, okay?” she said into the mouthpiece. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, our appointment was a half hour ago.”
“I’m sorry for the wait. Dr. Davies squeezed your wife in between her other appointments today. I’m sure she’ll be with you as soon as she can. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
I glared at her, but held my tongue. I knew my anger wasn’t really directed at her or the doctor or the wait. My anger was directed at the universe and yelling at a receptionist wasn’t going to do anything to alleviate it.
I went back to my seat next to Rita. I sat and stared at nothing. I didn’t realize my foot was tapping the floor until Rita put her hand on my leg and squeezed. I put my hand over hers and relaxed my leg. We sat that way for another five minutes until the nurse called us back to the examination room. Where I had been impatient to see the doctor, suddenly I didn’t want to get up. I dreaded the idea of finding out Rita was sick. She was a twenty-eight year old mother of three. I needed her; our kids needed her.
Rita stood first. She turned and looked at me. “Would you rather wait here?”
“No, of course not.” I stood and put my arm around her shoulder. As we walked toward the nurse, I felt like a death row inmate headed for the electric chair.
We followed the nurse to the examination room where she weighed Rita and took her blood pressure. We watched as she jotted a few notes, then looked at us. “Dr. Davies will be right in. You can slip off your top and bra and put this on.” She held up a paper shirt. “It opens in the front.”
Rita nodded and waited for the nurse to leave. She flashed me a brave smile before she stripped off her clothes and put on the paper shirt. She sat on the examination table and wrapped her arms tightly around her body, shivering. “God, I hate these shirts. As cold as they keep these rooms, they ought to make these in fleece.”
It was another ten minutes before the doctor arrived, but I kept my mouth shut. Dr. Davies was going to be our ally in this situation and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Besides that, she had done a great job delivering our three kids.
She shook our hands and sat on a stool. She had our undivided attention. “First off, you should know that about eighty percent of lumps found prove to be benign.” She smiled at us reassuringly. “So there’s no need to panic. First I’m going to do a breast exam and you can point out to me where you feel the lump. Then we’ll do an ultrasound since that usually gives us an indication of what we’re dealing with. We’ll be able to see whether the lump is a solid mass or filled with fluid. If it’s filled with fluid, we’ll aspirate it and as long as the fluid is clear and the lump flattens out, that should take care of it.”
“And if it’s a solid mass?” I asked.
“The lump still may not be cancerous. We’ll do a biopsy to determine whether it’s benign or malignant.”
I looked at Rita. I could see the glimmer of hope in her eyes. She was the optimist in the family and eighty percent odds sounded pretty good. I, on the other hand, was the glass half empty type and even twenty percent had me scared.
It turned out I was right to be scared. When the results of the biopsy came back, they showed Rita had Stage Two cancer. With treatment, there was a seventy percent survival rate. Rita needed surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy and none of those were cheap. Without medical insurance, I needed to get my hands on some serious money. And I knew exactly where to look.