There to Catch Me

Let’s get this out right away: I have breast cancer.

I just learned that I have a mass. It’s less than a third of an inch, it appears to be slow-growing, and its markers suggest it’s highly treatable. There’s still more to find out about it, but it appears that if you have to have breast cancer, this is the kind you want to have.

But still.

I had a screening mammogram, and then I got called back for a diagnostic mammogram and an ultrasound. The ultrasound technician of course wasn’t allowed to tell me what she saw, and it felt eerie, sitting in silence as she moved a wand around my breast and scrutinized the screen. When she paused to adjust the equipment, I broke the silence by asking her how she got trained to do this. A two-year program at the community college, she said. In high school, she had done an externship at the hospital, getting a tiny taste of the variety of medical professions. She spent a year as a medical assistant to make sure she really wanted to go into healthcare, and then she enrolled at the community college, where she was trained with lots of clinical work. I thanked her for her expertise.

When I returned for the biopsy, John came too. He couldn’t hold my hand because the doctor was on one side and the ultrasound technician was on the other, so he stroked my foot. As the doctor poked at my breast, explaining each step before he did it, I focused on the sensation of John’s hand against my skin, remembering waking up from my first surgery years ago to that same sensation, that bit of goodness grounding me then and now.

I felt a rush of gratitude, for John but also for so much more. Imagine all the human effort that went into creating this moment! The ultrasound technician who had done her training. The program that had been built at community colleges around the country for her and so many others. The science that allowed the ultrasound machine to be dreamed up, and then the thousands of steps to bring that idea to market and produce it at scale. The people who had built that building that was safe for me to be in. And on and on and on, more people and more effort and more ingenuity than I could possibly imagine, all to create a system I hadn’t had to think about at all, ready to catch me at the moment I needed it.

Of course, there are endless things to complain about with our healthcare system, all kinds of ways it fails, some of which I’ve experienced all too well. But still — it’s a miracle! Even with our immense human flaws so loudly on display these days, when we work together, we can make the mind-blowing ordinary.