About a week after my mammogram, I listened to a voice-mail message from my doctor’s office.
“Please give us a call,” the woman said.
It was Lou, the kind technician who always takes my blood pressure and frowns when I refuse to be weighed for a sinus infection.
She recited the office phone number and hung up.
I was in the back of a New York cab on my way to a flight home. The window was rolled down a bit to welcome the warm breezes of an extraordinary winter’s day, and I was still grinning from an afternoon’s celebration for a friend.
Then I heard that voice-mail.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to decide what to do. I would return home too late to call. Could I wait another day? Should I?
I am telling you this because of my friend, Sandy.
Last year, a mammogram caught her breast cancer early. Quietly, she endured surgery and six months of radiation that wore her down but did not break her.
Not so quietly, she started pushing all her friends to get mammograms.
She pushed me to do more.
“Could you please write about this?” she asked me last fall. “Could you encourage women to get their mammograms?”
Well, that was an uncomfortable moment between friends. I couldn’t very well encourage other women to do what I had put off for three years.
She was on me like gnats on a screen door.
“Please get your mammogram,” she said. I said I would.
Two weeks later, she was back: “Have you scheduled your mammogram yet?” I said I would.
After the New Year, she was back.
“I don’t want to be a pest,” she said.
That wasn’t true, of course. A pest is exactly what she wanted to be, and it worked. She smiled wide when I announced that, yes, I had scheduled my mammogram.
“Just for you,” I said.
“No,” she said, smiling. “For you.”
It was during my last mammogram that I was forced to face just how scared I am of breast cancer. The technician slid my breast between the cold metal plates and asked me to look to my left. I did and found myself staring at my own reflection in the glass of a framed print.
It’s something to see the look of terror on your own face.
I’d had one breast cancer scare myself and lived long enough to know too many women whose worst fears were confirmed with a doctor’s solemn nod. And there’s no getting around it: The odds for getting breast cancer seem to increase with every year that passes, every new report that’s released.
Is my risk one in seven now? One in eight? One in 10? Does my diet matter at all? I used to think my odds were better because I had no immediate family members with breast cancer. Now I’m told that’s not true.
So many questions with answers I don’t want to hear.
Here’s what we do know: Avoiding mammograms can kill us.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say a mammogram can detect breast cancer an average of one to four years before a woman can feel a lump. The earlier the diagnosis, the greater the chance of survival. Every woman 40 years or older should have a mammogram every one to two years.
If your health insurance doesn’t cover it, or you have no insurance at all, federal funding may cover your mammogram. Contact the CDC at (770) 488-4751 or go to www.cdc.gov/cancer.
You may be expecting me to tell you that I waited too long, that I want you to learn from my mistake. I did wait too long, but I got lucky.
“You’re fine,” Lou said when I called from the back of that cab. “The tests were negative.”
I was so relieved I cried.
I leaned back into the seat and rolled the window down all the way, hoping the wind and the traffic would muffle the sound.
Still, I heard it, the sound of that bullet whizzing by.
I dodged it this time.
But I am still afraid.
Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.
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