Kelly Corrigan's
memoir of growing up—
the first time,
and the second time. [Click here] ....................................
by Kelly Corrigan,
36 years old, Stage III Breast Cancer Survivor
Kelly writes a bi-monthly column on everyday life. If you'd like us to email her columns to you, click -->
Monday came. The luxury of the weekend was over; we might actually get a call now. Edward stayed home, just in case. We called the doctor's office at 9am, not expecting the biopsy results but wanting to remind them that we were here, a mile away, in suspended animation, waiting for the good news that would release us into motion again. Emily wasn't in yet; one of her partners explained: "We do not have results yet but I will call the lab again around lunch time to see, and I'll call you either way. But I wouldn't expect to get the report today."
We spent the morning as you might a snow day, a day you didn't think you would get. Edward took the girls to the park for a while; I putzed around moving things from here to there.
At 1pm, Emily Birenbaum called and said these exact words, "Kelly, I understand that you called in this morning. I have the biopsy report and Kelly, it's cancer." I called out: "Edward!" and he came to me and we crowded around the phone, politely asking the simplest of questions. "Is the test always correct?" "Does it say how much cancer there is?" "Could it be a false positive?" After a very short conversation where we learned the phrase 'invasive ductal carcinoma', we hung up. The girls were at our knees, needing to be fed and put down for a nap. There was so much to do, on so many fronts, that the only thing to do was to start doing.
Edward starting making cream cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for the girls. I called my old friend, Mary Hope. I don't know what I said, how I phrased it, but I could hear her close her laptop. "I'm on my way." She didn't wait to be invited or expect me to know what to do next. She just hit the highway, headed north, driving an hour, straight to me. I hung up and told Edward, "Mary Hope is on her way. Should we call Chad-O and Sarah?" He handed me a beer and said, "And the Prendies too. Call them all."
I looked at him for a minute, really looked him in the eye, and I said, "I'm sorry Edward. I'm so sorry I'm defective. You don't deserve this. You shouldn't have to go through this." He shouldn't. He was a good man who had himself survived brain surgery and his mother's open heart surgery a year later. He was a decent man who loved his family. He was not a sucker for a dollar or a fool for praise. What might he have to learn from this? What wake up call did he need?
And because he is occasionally perfect, he said, "Better or worse Kel. Sickness or health. Won't trade this defective body for anything."
