Four months ago I was waiting for a yoga class to start when the teacher said hello to me. She’s one of my favorites — I think of her as a little light bulb that hardly touches the earth’s ground as she walks. She just floats through this world. No one else was in the lobby, so I decided to share my news with her.
“I just wanted to let you know that I have breast cancer, and I had chemo yesterday,” I said. “I’m not sure how I’ll do in class today.”
I wanted her to know that if I had to leave early or walk out in the middle of a pose, it wasn’t because I didn’t like her class.
“You have breast cancer?” she asked, and I nodded.
“Congratulations on your journey,” she said, as though I’d told her I had won the lottery.
If someone had a picture of my face at that very moment, I can tell you, it would have been epic. I wanted to say, “Lady, you need to quit smoking that incense you are always burning in here.” I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. I was so taken aback. During class, I was pissed, getting madder by the minute — but I stayed the whole time.
Four weeks earlier, I’d been at a sports bar in Oxford, Mississippi, where I live. Ole Miss baseball season ended with the Rebels in Omaha and it was an amazing game. About halfway through the game, I scratched my breast and felt a lump — a big lump. I made my friend Machelle come to the bathroom to feel it. I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was terrified.
Machelle met me at my gynecologist’s office the following Monday morning. We went into the room and Julie, my doctor, started to examine me. A very worried look came over her face. We talked about the mammogram I recalled having months earlier, and she went to look at the film. When she came back, she looked even more worried. “Elizabeth,” she said, “it has been 2 years, not 8 months since your last mammogram.”
Then she gave me the plan: mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy.
I was hearing the words, but they were not sinking in — I couldn’t let them. Julie sent me to get bloodwork but not before Machelle stood up, crying, and said, “Can we please hold hands and pray?” So we all stood there holding hands in the exam room and Machelle prayed. They were both crying, and I can remember thinking, “This is pretty dramatic, Machelle.”
Test after test, I was in more denial. I was in the best shape of my life. My career was flourishing. My daughter and I were driving to Memphis, where I had a big meeting — Goldbelly was interested in selling my cakes — when my phone rang. It was the doctor.
“Elizabeth, we have the results of the biopsy and you have invasive ductal carcinoma,” she said. (Invasive ductal carcinoma is the most common type of breast cancer, which starts in the milk ducts and spreads to nearby tissue.) She went on to explain that I was hormone receptor-negative but still waiting on the results of the HER2 test. That is all I remember. At that point, I went into complete panic mode. We turned the car around.
We got home and my husband, Luke, knew when he saw us back so soon. He knew from the look on our faces. I didn’t have to say the words “I have cancer,” but I did because I wanted to know what it felt like. I wanted to see if my brain could even let me form the sentence. Being told you have cancer is hard. Having to tell the people you love is near impossible.
Source: Today
