My friend’s cancer turned mammograms from a routine into something ominous

EWithin a few months, one of my former college roommates sends a mirror selfie to the group chat, taken at a hospital or doctor’s office. Now that we’re all about 45, we mark annual mammograms with these shipments, which we call Mammo Moments.

We compare the coverage that our healthcare providers offer for the procedures. Mine is the most stylish, a medical blue cropped bat sleeve poncho with silver snaps. My friend’s clinic provides what we call, in vintage Project Runway parlance, “a tortured garment”: a stiff rectangle of synthetic fabric with exaggerated shoulders and stickers to secure it in place. We send mammography posts from celebrities on Instagram (that we liked Padma Lakshmi‘S facial expressions and reminder to get your “ ta-tas ” checked and Chrissy Teigen‘s bragging about “free titty lotion”) and churning out a bestselling coffee table book of mammogram selfies.

Strikingly ridiculous power postures in cold, sterile locker rooms make us feel less alone. By reminding each other to do breast self-exams, we can bond with another middle-aged disgrace.

Underneath all our texting lurks the real but vague threat of breast cancer – until suddenly it’s not vague at all.

At the end of the summer, one of my good friends was diagnosed with breast cancer. The slapping of our breasts went from something we shared lightly to something sinister. Instead of the inconvenience of a morning or afternoon, the procedure became a potential gateway to torturous weeks of uncertainty, waiting and appointments.

I witnessed my friend go through a biopsy, diagnosis, tests, eight-hour days in the hospital, and minor surgeries. I listened as she calculated impossible decisions: when and how much to tell her children, the risks and benefits of aggressive chemotherapy with a drug nicknamed ‘the red devil”.

My friend has a long road ahead of her, although the protocols of her treatment are well established and her care plan is as clear as you could hope for. I turn to data and statistics to fill my knowledge gaps, for cold comfort. According to the American Cancer Societyone in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. The death rate has fallen by 42% between 1989 and 2021, thanks to better detection and treatment. I am equally encouraged to see that Asian and Pacific Islander women have the lowest mortality rate, but am sickened to read that black women, at any age, are more likely to die from breast cancer than any other racial or any ethnic group.

“We get sick, and our illness falls under the heavy hand of science, falls on slides under confident microscopes…falls into new pages open in the browser and new books on the shelf,” writes Anne Boyer in The Undying, her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about having breast cancer. “Then there is this body (my body) that has no sense of uncertainty, a life that breaks open under the strange terminology of oncology, and then falls into the chasm of that language.”

The real possibility that my friend will not survive is painful to bear. I feel like I’ve fallen through the floor (or maybe I’m still falling), into an inescapable level of humanness that I momentarily fooled myself into thinking I could avoid.

Fear isn’t the first feeling I have when I think about mortality. I’m lucky: so far my direct experience with death has been minimal and merciful. My parents, who worked closely with death in their careers as hospice nurses and pathologists, raised me to believe that it is a natural inevitability, something to be dealt with with mindfulness and grace.

My mother-in-law, whom I never met, died of cancer when she was 51. Her absence casts a long shadow; it often feels like a presence. When my husband turned 50 in July, we discussed his concerns and ambivalence about the coming years of his life. How it may feel like a huge relief, but also somehow wrong to reach 52.

I’ve been looking at photos of me and my boyfriend in our 20s: old Polaroids and sepia-toned photo booth strips. I see the glowing skin and the sloppiness of youth, joyful defiance, a little pride. These photos give me a physical tingle, something bordering on hope.

I don’t know if I would have called it hope then – possibility perhaps, or maybe just faith in the future. The next day, the next year, the next decade would dawn. It was in front of me. All I had to do was show up.

More from Halfway There by Angela Garbes:

It’s not that I have no energy or confidence anymore. But midlife is especially brutal in tuning your body to a register of pain and mortality. Every year brings new tests and procedures – mammograms, colonoscopies – and an exponentially growing list of aches and pains – frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis, arthritis. I recently went with my parents to my father’s angiogram, shocked to see him so small and vulnerable in his hospital gown. My best friend currently manages her father’s hospice care, and last month we celebrated the four-year anniversary of her mother’s death.

Although mortality is not easy to deal with, I accept that it overwhelms me and that it can be tender and even sweet. Because our time together is finite, I want to spend as much of it as possible caring for my people. What could be more important?

When I think about the many months – if all goes well, years – of treatment my friend will undergo, I get scared. But I am determined. I am filled with hope, a richer iteration of hope that has evolved as I have.