I had a morning last week that felt like Christmas morning. Or like the memory of one of my teenaged days when I woke up and my Mom and I would get in the car and drive to town and spend the day together, maybe go shopping and out to lunch, and there wasn’t anything tremendously special that happened, it just was that we were together, a golden ordinary day.
Funny that I am tearing up a little as I write that.
I had a day like that last week because I went to an imaging lab and had a second set of scans performed on an area of my left breast. I had gone in for a mammogram the week before, a procedure that always sends my hypochondriac-prone self into spasms of anxiety. Because it’s a thing that you are supposed to do every year, but you never know what will be discovered. Will everything be fine like it’s been for years or will there be a shadow, something amiss that will change the trajectory of how your life is going, suddenly veering you off in a new unwanted direction with appointments, an oncologist, unplanned expenses, new kinds of pain?
There is a sign on the wall of the mammogram changing room that says you should receive results in a week to ten days. Sometimes it can take longer if they have to hunt down scans that were taken at other facilities. I remember that last year I received my results quickly, much quicker than I thought possible, and everything was fine. Of course, this year, I hoped that would happen again.
It did not. My mammogram was on Saturday. I did not hear anything until I got a voicemail from the imaging lab on Thursday, asking me to call them back. You do not want to get calls from doctors after scans like mammograms. It generally does not mean good news.