That First Moment (#1 in the Cancer Series)

On Monday, February 28, 2022, my phone beeped with the notification of a new e-mail message that would forever change my life. I had just left the house to run an errand when I heard the Roadrunner “Beep! Beep!” I assigned to that alert. I quickly pulled into the first parking lot I found, only four blocks from home. It was 4:08 pm. I held my breath and dug out my phone to see if this was the message I had been waiting three days for. It was. In between my shallow breaths, my trembling hands logged into my medical account and opened the test results file.

Atypical complex hyperplasia with focal features suggestive of endometrial carcinoma.

 
I immediately made a phone call to my LMT and friend, Tim, one of the few people who knew I’d had the test. I also thought he might have a better understanding of medical terminology since he worked in the healthcare field. I think what I really wanted was for him to tell me I was wrong when I thought this was bad news. He didn’t answer. Alone with this information, I had a choice to make. Let fear sweep over me or take things one step at a time. My eyes darted back and forth between the word carcinoma, scaring myself, and the phrase suggestive of, which told me it might not be bad news.
 
After updating my family, I turned to my small inner core of friends and sent out an e-mail asking for prayer support. I had planned to go through this alone, but it was clear in less than four hours that I needed a few good friends to walk with me.
 
When the phone rang early Tuesday morning, I discovered I now had an oncologist, Dr. D. I wasn’t prepared to hear that word and it knocked the wind out of me for several hours. Their office had a note to get me scheduled immediately, and the head of the department was going to be my doctor. This is when fear first entered, and with a vengeance. In television shows and movies, you don’t get in that quickly to a specialist, much less with the head guy, unless it’s bad. This was all I could think of as I sat through my leadership class at church that night, hearing nothing that was being spoken.
 
To prepare for my appointment, I made a list of questions. At first, I had 13, but Tim joked about maybe adding one more…just in case. It was nice to laugh. Neither of us is superstitious, but it did feel better when I ended up with 17 instead.
 
I was surprised when a few people said they wanted to go with me. They weren’t available but believed I needed someone there. My husband, Tracy, was on the list but we thought it would be better to have someone not quite as close to it as him. Besides, we both knew he wasn’t going to be the best choice for calm and level-headed since he was worried already.
 
Tina and Carmen were two of the friends who offered to go with me and were going to move mountains to make sure I wasn’t alone. I know they wanted to provide comfort and distractions if I needed them. Most of all, they wanted to make sure I asked questions, and they could help me clarify and retain the information I would receive. I told both I had my list of questions, would record the doctor, and was fine on my own. Neither would accept that. I then tried telling each of them I was talking to the other one, hoping they would both think I had it covered, which would have let me go alone without them knowing. They were too smart for that. While I was in my class at church, my phone was busy receiving messages. My favorite series was from Tina when she sent me these:
 
“No one would recommend you do this alone. No one.”
 
“Please let me come.”
 
“If you decided to defend yourself in a murder trial, I would also try to talk you out of it.”
 
I’m not sure what to think when my friends use a murder accusation as a reference for possible future events. I’m pretty sure it was just an illustration of what she perceived as a crazy notion. Carmen had bypassed text and gone straight to a phone call. I missed it, but her voicemail was precious.
 
“Hello there my dear friend. Now is not the time to be all independent and all that. You have two friends willing to be there at a time when you need somebody. Be ready for someone to be there with you.”
 
They had been talking to each other and formed a plan. After I finally succumbed to Tina and Carmen's insistence, I got this message from Tina:
 

“Honestly, I had planned to just go, and then text you to say I was already there so you might as well tell me what building/room.” 

At least she brought snacks!

Dr. D was phenomenal as he explained the initial biopsy could not confirm the exact status of the cells growing inside me. One certainty was that they would become cancer if they were not already and that they were growing wildly. He told me the treatment was going to be surgical, a full hysterectomy including an open-ended description that would allow them to take care of anything else they might find during the procedure. The hope was that it would remain precancerous after the full pathological workup, with no further treatments necessary. They would call the next week to schedule the surgery. We wouldn't know what we were dealing with until a week after that.

 
“Suggestive of” were the words I clung to for seven weeks while I waited for surgery and the pathology report. Those two words would become a source of hope. I understood the last two words in the report, endometrial carcinoma, and I didn’t like them. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to ignore them and rest in the hope.

One More Thing...

I knew I was going to be blogging about this journey someday, but June is National Cancer Survivor's Month so you can look for more pieces of this story throughout the month.

I will be sharing a song each day on my Facebook page that is part of this story as well. You can find me at facebook.com/LoisFloresWrites

Take care, and I'm always here to pray for you if you have a need or request.

Lois Lynn

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