Finding the Breast Cancer

The day before my father dies, I find a lump. 

Well, not a lump, exactly. More like a giant, death-filled, grapefruit.

I have been on the Dr. Bernstein diet for less than a week and have lost almost ten pounds already. For the first time in years, I stand in my athletic top and sweats and examine the profile of my belly, to see if my "omentum," as Dr. Oz taught us to call it, has reduced itself. Omentum is belly fat. I examine the contour of my omentum.


What I see in the mirror, beside my flattish left breast, is a nicely rounded right breast, like that of a woman half my fifty years of age. (The age my mother was when she had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She went on to live another thirty-five years with a deep scar instead of a breast. "Thanks be to God, they caught it early," she used to say, "they didn't have to cut into my armpit, where the lymph nodes are." She saw other women having a terrible time moving their arms when the lymph nodes had been operated on.)


As I look at the nicely rounded right breast I see the left breast is really quite flat. I start at the collar of my gym top and push my finger tips down the right breast to see what is making it so full. My finger tips find the top of a cyst of some sort, like an implant. Spongey material like a liquid cyst begins half way down my breast. 

I am not afraid. I have heard of these pseudo implants. They are called cysts and they are non carcinogenic and inoperable. You leave them in and they eventually disappear.


The next day my father is in the General Hospital. I find this out because my brother phones me and asks me to go visit him. He says "touch and go" were the words the doctor used, and "the next 24 hours are crucial" so I do not think he is anywhere near dying, but that because he is elderly and frail, he would be subject to extreme concern and care.


I have to wait till my husband returns to the house with the sedan. He will need the van to transport the dogs when he returns to our house with the downtown dogs in the sedan. He will add them to the van with our three dogs, and Jaida. Then I will take the sedan to the hospital.


I arrive at the hospital fifteen minutes after my father has died. You know he has died by the way the nurses look alarmed when you tell them who you are. One nurse will not let me go see him until the other nurse gets off the phone, and finally she asks if she can take me into a small room to talk to me. 

A tear appears in my eye, blurring her face, as she tells me he has passed on only fifteen minutes ago.


She allows me my privacy alone with him, where he lies behind a curtained off barrier in the emergency ward. 

I am stunned by how cold his flesh feels. I huddle over him, trying to warm up his skin. I stay there praying over him, and talking to him, as if I can revive him with words and touch. 

I phone my sister, Adrienne, in South Carolina, where she lives, and break the bad news. She is crying and heartbroken. I try to phone my sisters in White Rock, British Columbia, but the calls fail. I can't get hold of my brother.


Eventually my brother and his older son arrive. The hospital had informed him before I got there. Thank God Barry is there as he knows what to do now, and he says the prayer for the repose of the soul while Brendan and I pray with him. He covers Dad's face with the sheet. I have earlier closed Dad's eyes.


The funeral is not to be for another week. It is Easter Monday when we go to the funeral. Adrienne has been staying with me at the house all week. We are all so very sad. 

The wake is on Easter Sunday, the funeral Monday, the cremation Tuesday.  

It pours rain for the internment ceremony and the canopy installed above us by the funeral home for the graveyard ceremony catches pools of it at the outer edges. Once in a while the pools just let go and fall on our backs.

My second eldest sister, Rosemary, cannot come at all as her husband, Bill, is in a touch and go health crisis involving cardio myopathy and heart fibrillations. He has had nine of them and is awaiting an ablation to his heart. He could go at anytime into another one, the doctor said. He cannot be left alone, and cannot travel. Neither can Rose.


Elizabeth, my eldest sister, is here from White Rock, and I haven't seen her in several years. She is a size 8 now, and although we haven't spoken in ages, falling out over some stupid thing or other, it is like she has never been away. We have grown up in Ottawa, and in general, it seems, we have grown up.


I decide that since Adrienne and Elizabeth will be flying back to where they live soon after the funeral, that I will host a luncheon after the cremation ceremony today, Tuesday.

It has been over a week since my dad died. The breast with the cyst in it is always on my mind, but I have firmly decided it is only a cyst, having read somewhere that cancer has rough edges and this cyst is most definitely round and liquid filled, if my fingers can be believed.


At the luncheon at my house I take my sisters' hands, both Adrienne and Elizabeth, and then Barry's, too, and I run their fingertips down my right breast, where the round ridge of the cyst begins, halfway down. They all say "get to a doctor asap."


They make me promise, as they leave in the rain, to go that afternoon. I say yes, but then am too tired after cleaning up the dishes, so I vow to go tomorrow.

The next day dawns with more rain. So many pockets of rain would fall after that.