Mother’s Milk
Count All This — Chapter 3: one of five sisters
Just when Jo Kasten’s adult son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the third chapter. Find the first chapter here.
The mammogram I got a week later didn’t go well from the outset. When I checked in at the Women’s Center, the receptionist wanted paperwork I didn’t have.
“Do you have the referral from your primary care physician?” she asked cheerfully. She was young and blonde and wearing blue scrubs, as if she’d just come in from an operating room. I wondered with a twinge of foreboding if they were performing surgeries in back.
“No, I don’t,” I said just as cheerfully. “The person I made an appointment with said she would take care of that.”
“Who did you make the appointment with?”
“I don’t remember.” I scanned the room behind the small window that separated her domain from mine. Besides her own, there were three other desks, but one was empty and the other two harbored women who were busily talking on the phone.
“She said since I was having this symptom…” I leaned my head through the window and whispered…Liquid came out of my nipple…that there would be no trouble getting the referral. She said that she could just call the office and they would fax it over.”
“Let’s see.” She looked at her computer screen. “Nope,” she said cheerfully, again. But now it was annoying. “It says right here that the patient will get the referral.”
“Well, that’s not what she told me on the phone. She said she would take care of it.”
“She wouldn’t have told you that.”
“But she did tell me that!” I raised my voice a little and called on my inner English teacher. “Does it say there whom I spoke to? Is she here?”
“Unfortunately, she’s not here today.”
The receptionist wanted me to go away and come back another day, after I had made my appointment properly. But I didn’t want to do that. I was persistent. I mentioned my employment status at the hospital. I mentioned Mandy, the vice president of Planning and Marketing and my boss and personal friend. I said I didn’t want to wait another week to find out why, at 45 years of age without a baby in sight, my breast was leaking milk.
Eventually, I was brought to a small office containing a skeletal woman with white hair piled high on her head like spun sugar. She wore a sickly-pink jumper over a long- sleeved white blouse — the uniform of the Sisters of Infinite Beneficence volunteer. She allowed me use her phone while she filed index cards in a small metal box — were they still using index cards for data storage?!?! Her heavy gold bracelet and long, artificial fingernails tapped unnervingly on the desk as she worked with mottled hands.
After several minutes, I got hold of someone in my doctor’s office who said they would fax over the necessary form, and soon the receptionist was once again cheerfully patronizing me as she herded me into a back room where she told me to take off my shirt and put on a white and blue print gown.
Once I was changed, I sat in a room with other gowned women, waiting. There was an air of camaraderie not present when men are in the mix. “I dodged the bullet on that one,” one elderly woman remarked to the room at large as she came back from her procedure. “I was worried about a lump in my breast, but he said there was nothing wrong.” I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair with several beautiful women in evening dress on the cover and started reading an article about Marlon Brando, who had recently died. He had always been troubled, it told me. He couldn’t accept his talent. He didn’t want people to treat him like a star.
When my name was finally called, I found I liked the mammogram technician better than the receptionist. She had reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair with bangs, and wore a white lab coat over black pants. When I told her about my symptom, she put me at ease, saying she’d experienced the same thing, and even had to have a biopsy, but the results had turned out fine. “What color is your discharge?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t seen it directly. I just noticed a spot on my shirt.”
“You haven’t tried to express it?” she asked, using a breastfeeding term for squeezing the breast rhythmically to urge out the milk. I shook my head. But as she positioned my breast on the machine, squeezing it between two plastic plates, a little liquid emerged. “Oh, there it is,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just milky white. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
She took several shots, repositioning my breast each time, placing my arm high and then low, moving the massive machine this way and that, inserting new plates of film, and always remembering to step back behind a protective shield before pushing the button to take the x-ray. Then she asked me to sit and wait while she took the plates to the radiologist. I sat in the darkened room, reading about Marlon Brando’s private island in Polynesia where his son shot and killed his daughter’s boyfriend. His son went to prison. His daughter hung herself. I glanced around for something else to read, but there weren’t any other magazines in the room.
When the technician came back, she said she needed two more shots. “I didn’t do it right,” she joked. I felt suddenly nauseous.
“Does that mean something’s wrong?”
“Not necessarily. I know it’s scary, but most of the time, it’s just that the patient moved, or the angle wasn’t right, so something isn’t clear.”
We took two more pictures and I was sitting back on the chair reading more morbid details when the doctor came into the room with the technician close behind him.
“We’re seeing something suspicious on the film,” he said, standing before me in a pressed white shirt and tie. I felt at a disadvantage — seated, near-naked, my upper half covered only by a flimsy hospital gown.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of calcification, which could be a normal result of aging, or it could be the by-product of a particular type of pre-cancerous condition.”
His tie was electric blue. I started to cry. We both pretended not to notice.
“What you’ll need to do next is schedule a biopsy on the way out so we can determine exactly what is going on in the breast.”
The technician tried to comfort me, squeezing my arm as she walked me back to the lockers where my shirt and jacket were restored. The woman scheduling biopsies was also supportive. “Don’t worry,” she told me. “It’s probably nothing. Eighty percent of our biopsies turn out to be benign.”
But that particular number didn’t comfort me. Eighty percent. Since my grandmother had breast cancer, and my mother died of it, it seemed likely that one of Mom’s children would get it, too. And there were five of us. Five daughters. So I calculated that Claire, Jane, Jean, and Francine were the 80 percent who would have benign biopsies, while I was the chosen — the sacrificial sister.
I was the 20 percent.
That was the third chapter of my novel, Count All This. To continue, follow the free chapter links below or buy the whole digital book on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.
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