Upon my oby gyn’s recommendation after a regular check up last Friday, I had a sonogram. The technician’s name was Lark. I could tell that she was measuring the length of something. I’m no doctor but when I got up out of the stirrups and looked at the screen, I could definitely see that I had some kind of cyst.
So, yesterday, after biking down to NPR to contribute to an interview about Chris’s Endgame project for RadioLab, I biked to teach my last Creative Exploration class.
I was in the back of the middle school auditorium at 5:15, when I saw that I’d gotten a message from my gyno Dr. Beth Simon. The message said, “You need a blood test and MRI.” My Creative Explorers’ performance was over and so I snuck out of the auditorium and left her a message to please call.
We talked by phone 20 minutes later. She said, the cyst was 4cm and part solid/part liquid, which is the kind they do not like to see.
“There’s a chance it’s benign. There’s a chance it’s malignant.” She was direct and unflinching.
When I said, “I’m worried,” she did not tell me not to be. She told me, “I’m sorry.”
She also said, “I was really on my game to feel that your uterus had gotten a little bigger.” I have to say that I loved her confidence and her possible early detection of something in me that is not so good, ovarian cancer.
So, this morning, before driving upstate, I am running back uptown for a a CA-125 blood test. If the number is elevated, then that’s not so good.
I debated about blogging about this, because I am unsure of the outcome and I am a little scared. But I process things through writing.
And my friend Jenny Allen wrote a play about her ovarian cancer, I Got Sick Then I Got Better. And also after seeing Chris Clavelli’s play this week, it seems the more we talk and write about the tough stuff, the less hard it is.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 