Clues
The Ribbon

Mary Lorson

I gave birth to my son in July 2002. I started working as an administrative assistant at the College of Veterinary Medicine when he was four months old, with four newly-hired geneticists. At lunchtime my (now) husband and son would come to the Vet School drop-off area and I'd nurse the baby in the minivan. When he was around a year old, I started to think about weaning, but no sooner did I consider it than he did it himself, very suddenly. One day he tasted the milk, wrinkled his nose, turned his head away and cried, and while I offered it at the usual intervals for another two weeks, he never accepted milk from me again. It made me sad, to have this gentle, intimate relationship truncated so abruptly, but my kid had made his decision and there was nothing I could do to change it. "Get used to being a parent," said a lab manager co-worker of mine. "My son did the same thing."

A month or two went by, and I realized that I'd never had a mammogram. You're supposed to have one when you're forty, but I'd skipped it because I was breastfeeding. My long-term temp job was coming up for review and I wasn't completely confident that I would be renewed, so I scheduled the test. There was no history of breast cancer in my family; I made the appointment because I was afraid my insurance would run out. But, looking back, I have to admit that in the month or two prior to my diagnosis, I had been filled with unease, some psychological dread I couldn't attribute to any one definite cause.

I'd been taking an undergraduate English class at Cornell. As an employee I'm allowed to take 4 free credits per semester, so I enrolled in English 355, Decadence. Poe, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Wilde, Masoch, the literature of the aesthete. The lecturer's grasp of the material was impressive, and he brought an entertaining flair to the material, reminding me of my undergrad days and those button-pushing college professors who were instrumental in busting up my own youthful suburban ideas. But I didn't really take to the course; I couldn't identify with the reading, was distracted by something unidentifiable. My strolls home from class at 9:00pm on Mondays and Wednesdays were filled not with aesthetic stimulation but anxiety. In my city-dwelling days, nighttime walks were plagued with fear of rapists and muggers, but that fall my brain struggled with inner troubles. I felt guilty about the extra hours the class took away from my child, but it was more than that. I sort of chalked it up to a combination of things: generalized anxiety from being a new parent; career frustration; money worries; relationship issues; post-breastfeeding hormonal changes (a variation on the post-partum depression theme? Perhaps now that my son no longer needed my nourishment, I was less in control of his wellbeing?) No one explanation felt definitive. The semester progressed. I went for my mammogram, and suddenly the fear made real sense.

"See, that's the thing," said the radiologist. "That's what I don't like." A crystalline speck on the mammogram twinkled like a little star, white, bright, undeniable.

"That?" It looked kind of pretty.

"That lesion is what I do not like. We'll do a biopsy to confirm, but in the meantime we'll put you in contact with a surgeon so we can act quickly."

"Why do we need to talk to a surgeon if we haven't even done the biopsy yet?" I barely choked the words.

"Honey," said the radiologist, realizing that I didn't get it, "all I do, all day long, is read mammograms. I'm telling you, I know what I'm looking at."

You sit there and you're cold inside and out because you're wearing a thin printed gown and because in one short minute you've gone from late-to-work to afraid-for-your-life. If you are lucky like me, you have a partner there with you who holds your hand and asks intelligent questions while you cry, who hugs you in the parking lot and tells you he or she is with you all the way, who is the right combination of stoic and vulnerable which lets you know that you can lean on them but also that they feel the gravity of the thing. And, if you're lucky like me you have a vibrant and singular 15-month-old son who reaches for you and learns something you have taught him every single day and who grips your heart with a will to live, which is indeed a gift though it's also he who makes you so afraid (that is, the fear of missing his life, of him not even remembering you), that makes the whole thing so awful.

I was told that I would probably lose my left breast, but that the extent of the cancerous activity could not be known until the mastectomy and other tests were done. We left the office, put our son in the car seat, cried a bit in the parking lot, and went home. I had been all but diagnosed, but final laboratory pathology results would need to confirm the radiologist's findings before treatment plans could be pursued. So we had to wait another day, and I had to work that day because Dr. Robert Weiss, a faculty member I support, was submitting a grant proposal to the American Cancer Society.

Grant deadlines can be pretty heated around here. Busy faculty often can't find the time to focus on their proposals until the submission dates are imminent, and the pressure is intense for them to succeed; grant money is survival money for researchers. Submission guidelines are stringent, and University protocol requires multiple internal approvals of each proposal, so the days leading up to submission are busy and serious. I arrived at work on time that day, and informed Dr. Weiss that I'd be receiving a phone call at some point that day confirming or denying my breast cancer diagnosis. A respectful and gracious person, he let me know that he understood the gravity of the situation, and then we got to work.

I'm a writer and musician, with an undergraduate degree in Art. Being a word person can be something of a lifeboat when one is immersed in patently foreign intellectual waters, so I'd picked up some terminology here and there, but I'd never before tried to really understand what my faculty members do. On this day, looking down at my screen, I noticed that Bob's grant proposal was titled, "The Hus1 Cell Cycle Checkpoint Gene in Mammary Development and Tumorigenesis." I smiled sheepishly to myself, for never having noticed this connection before. Suddenly there was an almost humorous irony to the task at hand, an uncommon link between my job and the very emotional drama taking place in my life. I wanted to say, "Dr. Weiss, is one of us gonna have to make a joke about this?" but I didn't, since I didn't want to seem macabre. I wanted to be professional, and I wanted to savor these last few hours of normalcy. My lab-manager friend stopped by to ask about my news. I said I'd had none yet. "I'd be going crazy," she said. "I'd just want to know." "I can wait," I said. "I feel like that one phone call's going to change my whole life."

I did my best to stay on task, typing and cutting-and-pasting information into the form pages of the proposal to study a potential genetic cause for the genesis of breast cancer tumors. I kept making mistakes I should have spotted-inconsistencies in punctuation, spaces, font-sizes and biosketch formatting. I kept wondering whether, right across the hall, Bob could actually be developing a key to the understanding of how breast cancer begins and helping to create a mode of prevention. I wondered about my son, if he could tell how upset I was; I wondered about my husband's emotional state; my poor mother. I was deeply afraid inside, but functional on the surface. The grant went back and forth between Dr. Weiss and the grant contract officer's office until all parties agreed that it was suitable for submission. We finished a little early, and the only calls I'd gotten were from home. Finally, the grant done, I called my doctor's office, the 4:00pm sky already darkening. They put me on hold for a few minutes, and came back. "Mary, can you come in and talk with the doctor this evening?" I said yes, and we did. They don't give you bad news over the phone.

I had a mastectomy, and six months of chemo, and am now proceeding with my life. Early detection has provided me with a completely justified optimism. Did my son taste a difference in my milk? Did he save my life by sending me that clue? I will always wonder about that. Since my own diagnosis I have known eight women diagnosed with breast cancer. I'm outwardly hopeful for my own future and inwardly cheering my employers and their colleagues on in their efforts to determine what it is that makes this such a common disease. I really do see them as heroes, working in those labs every day - or as detectives, looking for clues.

Mary Lorson was an administrative assistant in the College of Veterinary Medicine from 2001-2005. She will begin teaching high school English in Fall 2005.

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Clues The Ribbon

Clues
The Ribbon