Featured Story

A Sudden Shift

by Joanna Walters

It had been only two hours since my midwife appointment, where I had asked about the strange rash and lump that had appeared. I was with a primary care physician being introduced to inflammatory breast cancer, a distant foreign concept. I had never heard of breast cancer looking like an infection. I never heard of a tumor growing as quickly as what I carried in front of my heart. Maybe it existed in the periphery, but at 29 years old, I never heard much about breast cancer at all. The doctor said she’d only seen this once before and voiced her concern gently. She wasn’t saying much, and I didn’t want to meet the fear beneath her thoughts. I asked again, still clinging to denial, “But what’s the treatment if it’s just a cyst?” 

She set up the imaging appointment for the next morning, where I was told of malignant suspicions and given a box of tissues along with four biopsies. A day later we got a phone call to confirm what they had warned us to expect, and an oncologist appointment for that same day. At first, the oncologist was easing worries and telling me that we would be able to treat this and move on. We had options, we had time, we had hope. I was frozen and frantic and rich.