November, 2008
I do not have a family doctor. Cannot find one. Have been through all the lists given by the community centre, on How To Find A Family Doctor in Ottawa. Common knowledge that it is almost impossible to find a family doctor in Ottawa. It is time for a mammogram.
I finally decide to start going to Appletree Clinics. When I go to their website they say you can request a family doctor there. I sign up with one. I never end up seeing him, though. I book my mammogram and they have me doing it at Merivale Medical Imaging, a place so jam packed it is to women's health care as McDonald's is to fine dining.
Not long after that a letter comes in the mail. My mammogram has unusual results so they want me to do another one. I go through a lot of anxt and put it off. My sister, Rosemary, is visiting me. She makes me go. I repeat the mammogram and wait. Rosemary is as worried on my behalf as I am. She goes with me for the results to the Appletree Clinic. We huddle in the wee room, both of us nervous and holding hands.
The doctor I have never before met enters, reads the results. We breathe a sigh of relief. There is nothing wrong at all with my right breast. We are good. We leave. He tells me to get another mammogram the following autumn.
The following autumn, 2009, comes and goes without my getting another mammogram. After all, I had that follow up mammogram within the past year. They are painful and yucky enough to avoid anyway.
Looking back now, in May of 2011, I realize the initial mammogram was correct. It was the follow-up mammogram that was wrong.
My breast cancer is at least two and half years old and will have spread to the lymph nodes by the time I find it, two and a half years later.
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