Department of Lost and Found by Allison Winn Scotch

Author:Allison Winn Scotch [Scotch, Allison Winn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women, General
ISBN: 9780061161421
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

THE NEWS COULD not have been better. Dr. Chin actually said this. “The news could not be better.”

The tests indicated that the chemo was having the desired, even better than desired, effect. My tumor had markedly declined in size, and my lymph nodes were virtually cancer-free.

“Your progress is remarkable,” Dr. Chin told me, after I’d gotten dressed and was seated in his office, clenching Sally’s hand and trying with every healthy cell in my body not to explode into a waterfall of tears. He flipped through some pages in my chart. “Better than we could have hoped for. So what I’d like to propose is that we do the mastectomy sooner rather than later. The tumor is of operable size, and I think the earlier we get it out of you, the better.”

I inhaled sharply and squeezed Sally’s hand tighter. I knew from the original diagnosis that there was little choice, that this moment was coming, and that hacking off one part of me to save the rest seemed like a reasonable compromise. Still though, when he said it, when the time crept up on me before I’d really given myself a chance to say good-bye to my breasts, I felt my heart break in the same way that it had that morning when it all started, the morning that Ned discovered the lump. But I didn’t tell Dr. Chin any of this. Instead, I nodded and told him that was fine—that he could take my breasts whenever he felt necessary.

“You need to consider whether to have a single or double,” he said, clearing his throat. “Obviously, there are pros and cons to each. Because you have a family history of breast cancer, there is a greater chance that it could reoccur in the left breast. Of course, you have to weigh the odds of this against how much you’d like to keep a part of yourself intact.” He fell silent. “Many women opt for reconstructive surgery at the same time that they get the mastectomy. I suspect that it helps to get something back when we’ve just taken something else away. If you’d like, we can certainly schedule that as well.”

I nodded again and didn’t speak.

“I’ll give you some time to think about this. If possible, we’d like to get you in next week. Why don’t you take the night to consider your options and call me tomorrow.”

I stared out the window the entire cab ride home and wondered whose life I was in, how it was possible that Natalie Miller, the supposed future American president and current feared and revered aide to a powerful senator, had been demolished into this. How an otherwise healthy thirty-year-old found herself in the position of choosing how many breasts to surrender.

“What would you do?” I asked Sally when she dropped me off at my building. She was already distracted by an e-mail on her Palm from an editor she was trying to impress.

“Oh sweetie,” she said. “I can’t make this sort of monumental decision for you.

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