A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) (13 page)

W
hen Abigail received her assignment that night, I had the impression that she was less than thrilled at being suddenly drafted into Margot’s army. Part of me wondered if I’d ever see her again. But she was as good as her word, and her influence in the community of New Bern was unquestionable.

When Abigail Burgess Wynne showed up at the public library seeking information on breast cancer the next day, the research librarians must have clicked their heels and saluted. By midafternoon she returned to the shop with reams of information, all neatly cataloged with particularly important sections highlighted in yellow marker. I read it all. Nothing in what I read changed my situation, there was no magical cancer cure in those pages, but just having that information made me feel a little less powerless. I used what I’d read to formulate a list of questions to ask when I interviewed the breast surgeons who, again thanks to Abigail’s influence, all agreed to see me within two weeks’ time, an impressive response considering that the surgeon Dr. Thayer referred me to couldn’t fit me in for at least six weeks.

Ten days later, I was sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Deanna Finney, the third and last of the doctors on Abigail’s list. Liza was keeping an eye on the shop, and Margot had come along to drive. I told Margot it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted, claiming she wanted to visit an antique shop that was right around the corner from the doctor’s office.

Having interviewed two other surgeons, both highly recommended and obviously very skilled, I was now familiar with the drill—the nervous minutes pretending to read magazines until the receptionist showed you into a chrome and white and cold exam room, silence and more nerves waiting for the harried and brilliant surgeon to appear, going through my list of questions and trying to make sense of the doctor’s answers, and a quick handshake as the doctor moved on to the next patient.

So I was surprised when the door of the waiting room opened and a petite woman with short, spiky brown hair and a warm smile strode across the room and said, “Evelyn? I’m Dr. Finney.” She shook my hand and then Margot’s when I introduced her. “It’s nice to meet you both. Shall we go into my office and talk? Would you like Margot to join us?”

Sensing that I wanted to speak to the doctor privately, Margot said she was just going to run around the corner and visit the antique shop.

“That’s fine. Come back in about forty-five minutes. I think we’ll be done by then, though it could be a bit longer. No more than an hour. That’s when my next patient arrives.”

Again, I was surprised. “You’ve put aside an hour just to talk to me?”

The doctor smiled. “On a first visit, I like to give a patient plenty of time. I’m sure you have lots of questions.”

She showed me into a space that looked more like a cozy sitting room than an office. There was a desk shoved up against one of the walls, but that was the only businesslike piece of furniture in the place. Most of the room was taken up by four easy chairs upholstered in sage green chenille that circled an antique oak coffee table. There was an oak sideboard under the window holding a Christmas cactus just coming into bloom and a white ceramic tea service. After telling me to make myself at home, the doctor went to the sideboard and made tea. “All I have is chamomile. I hope that’s all right. I’m trying to cut down on caffeine.”

“That’s fine. Thank you.” I sat down in one of the chairs and noticed that two of the office walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of women, some smiling, some serious, all beautiful. “Who are these pictures of? Your patients?”

“Yes,” she said and placed two cups of tea on the table. “Those are my patients. Not all of them, of course. Just the ones who didn’t mind having their picture taken.”

Without thinking, I blurted out, “Are they still alive?” And then blushed at the frankness of my question. But the doctor didn’t seem to be at all fazed.

“Most of them, yes. And there’s every reason to believe you will be too.” She smiled, noticing my embarrassment. “It’s all right, Evelyn. It’s a perfectly fair question. When a woman finds out she has breast cancer, the first question that enters her mind, and the question she is most afraid to ask, is ‘Am I going to die?’ When I learned about my own cancer, that was exactly what I was thinking.”

“You had breast cancer?”

She took a sip of her tea and nodded. “I did. I had a mastectomy to remove my right breast six years ago and reconstruction after. The plastic surgeon did a great job, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t help but stare at Dr. Finney’s chest. Her breasts were perfectly even. “I would never have guessed if you hadn’t told me. Is that why you decided to become a breast surgeon?”

“No, I was already in the field, but having cancer myself completely altered the way I run my practice. Up until then, I was confident in my skills. I had excellent training and the survival rate of my patients was extremely high. As far as I was concerned, that was all that mattered. But when it happened to me, I realized that there is a lot more to this than removing diseased tissue and thereby saving someone’s life. Now I treat people, not cancer. When faced with the prospect of losing my own breast, I was shocked by how devastated I felt. I’d never realized how deeply I associated the image of myself as a woman with my breasts.”

I understood exactly what she was saying. Sitting across from another woman, a woman who knew what I was going through, who had felt what I was feeling and talked about it while we sipped tea, it felt more like we were just two friends talking over a problem than a doctor telling a patient what she must do. Before she said another word, I knew that this was my doctor.

“Not everyone feels that way, of course. Everyone comes to this with different life experiences and needs. Some of my patients want the breast removed immediately. Some of them want reconstructive surgery after and some don’t. Some choose to wear prosthetic breasts and others don’t bother. Every woman is different, and every choice is as valid as the others. I try my best to listen to my patients, present all the options, and work with them to find a plan of treatment they can be comfortable with. If a woman wants to conserve her breasts, I try my best to do so. It isn’t always possible, of course. In the end, I had to lose my breast to save my life, but I take comfort in the knowledge that I explored all the avenues before deciding on a mastectomy.”

“Do you think you can save my breast?” I asked. “The other surgeons I interviewed only talked about mastectomy.”

She tilted her head to the side and nodded. “Many excellent surgeons believe in pursuing the most aggressive treatment possible. In many cases, that is the best course of action, and, as I explained before, that’s how many women wish to proceed. It’s a perfectly reasonable response if that’s what you’d prefer. In your case, I think that it may be possible to conserve the breast.” She opened the file that contained my charts, medical history, and X-rays and spread them out on the coffee table where I could see everything easily. “Let me show you what I mean,” she began.

As Dr. Finney explained, breast cancer comes in many different forms. Previous tests showed that I had DCIS, Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, a non-invasive cancer, which meant that the cancer b-cells had not yet broken through the duct walls—a good thing. In fact, the doctor explained, some people consider DCIS to be a pre-cancerous condition, but I had a high-grade DCIS with markedly abnormal cells and that meant it was much closer to becoming an invasive cancer.

“However, as far as we can tell right now, the cancer appears to be contained,” she said, holding up one of the mammography films and pointing out the suspicious area. “Which makes me think you’ll be a good candidate for a lumpectomy. That’s where we only remove the cancerous breast tissue, leaving the rest of the breast intact. It can actually be done as a day surgery.”

“Really?” This was the first good news I’d had in a long time. “You mean you’ll just scoop out the cancer and that’s it?”

She smiled. “It’s not quite that easy. The surgery will be over with fairly quickly, but you’ll need some time to recover. You own a quilt shop, is that right?” she asked, glancing at a sheet of personal information in my chart. “Do you have capable assistants in place to help run the business until you’re fully healed? It’s crucial that you have a good support system in place and people you can count on to help you through the rough spots. Do you?” Dr. Finney looked up, waiting for an answer.

I bit the inside of my lower lip, thinking. I really wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I don’t have any family in the area, if that’s what you mean. I only moved here a few months ago. And I don’t really have any paid assistants in the shop. I can’t afford assistants until I start to show a profit, so I’ve been doing everything myself.”

“Really?” the doctor asked incredulously. “You run your entire business yourself? No paid employees?”

I shrugged. “Well, my original business plan called for me to hire some help within the first month, but things haven’t gone quite as well as I’d hoped, at least not yet. Sixty hours is a short week for me. There are a few women from my quilting classes who volunteered to help with a big event I had recently, but they all work during the week. There are some others though. Margot, whom you met in the waiting room, has said that she’ll help however she can, and there are two others, Liza and Abigail. I only met them recently. They sort of appeared out of nowhere, and they’ve already done so much for me. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay them. I’d feel funny asking them for more.”

“Don’t,” the doctor said emphatically. “You simply can’t work the kinds of hours you’ve been working while you’re dealing with this. If you’ve got friends, new or old, who are willing to come alongside you, don’t be shy about letting them. I know it can be hard, taking help from strangers, but believe me, there will be ways for you to pay back those kindnesses in the future. But you can’t do that unless you get well. Right now that is your first priority.” I knew that what she was saying made sense; if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have said exactly the same thing, but still…

“Evelyn.” She put down her teacup and took my hand. “I hope this will be as easy as going into the breast, removing the cancerous cells, and you going on with your life experiencing nothing more than some postoperative discomfort, but that may not be the case. The diagnostic equipment and tests we have today are excellent, but I won’t really know what the situation is until I get in there. After the surgery, we’ll do more tests to make sure we’ve gotten clean margins; that means that there’s an area of healthy cells surrounding the place where the cancerous cells were. That’s what we’re aiming for, but it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we have to do another lumpectomy or follow up with chemotherapy. Sometimes it becomes necessary to take the whole breast.”

“Oh.” Instinctively, my hand rose to cover my chest. “I see.”

Dr. Finney reached for my hand and looked me in the eye. Her gaze was warm and understanding. “Listen, Evelyn, you’ve just got to take this one day at a time. If I didn’t think we could save your breast and get all the cancer, then I wouldn’t bother with the lumpectomy. But it is important that you have all the facts and are ready for what
could
come. You need to plan for the long haul, Evelyn. The better prepared you are, the wider your support network, the easier this will be. If God has sent you three ministering angels to see you through this, don’t question it. You need all the help you can get right now. Nothing about this is going to be easy.”

A month later, I was feeling more in control of my own destiny and actually impatient for the two weeks to pass before my surgery would take place, anxious to get it over with and get back to normal.

In the weeks since I’d met Margot, Liza, and Abigail, fall colors had peaked and passed. The stream of New Bern tourists became a trickle and then slowed to a wholly unpredictable drip as the weather grew colder.

I ate, slept, ran errands, cleaned house, paid bills, went to work, and taught classes, just like before. Cancer or no, life marches on. There were a few times, for minutes and even an hour altogether, when I forgot to remember that I had cancer. But then someone would say something, or not say something, or there would be a momentary calm in the busyness of the day, and I would remember that my own body had betrayed me. Somewhere within my breasts, the breasts whose appearance I had anxiously awaited and proudly welcomed as a girl, that had drawn my husband’s eyes and known his caress as a woman, that had suckled and nourished my son as a mother, there was a terrible and slowly growing secret that, left unchecked, would end my life.

Sometimes the truth of this was almost more than I could bear. If it had not been for Margot, Liza, and Abigail, it would have been. Where did they come from? Why did they appear when they did? Maybe it was like Dr. Finney had said, that God had sent me three angels. I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed possible. What would I have done without those three? I don’t want to imagine it.

Which is not to say that everything was hunky-dory since those three angels entered my life, far from it, but without them I would certainly have lost my business and possibly my sanity.

In Margot’s case, the title of angel seemed perfectly apt. She was darling; endlessly optimistic and giving. On top of that, she was a marketing genius. Not only had she streamlined my accounting and inventory process, her plan to get more papers to run the article and set up a Web site had indeed brought in new business. And while she didn’t wear her religion on her sleeve, I knew her faith was an integral part of her being and that she prayed for me, which I found comforting. Yes, the words angelic and Margot just seemed to go together.