July, 2026

After months of poking, prodding, squishing, and waiting, waiting, waiting, I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of June. It was exactly five weeks from the day I when I was out for a walk and saw my doctor’s number on my cell phone, to the moment I untied my hospital gown to let two surgeons scrutinize my lumpectomy and lymph-node biopsy scars.

During that time, cancer was identified, announced, excised. The wounds had healed enough for me to be able to get a T-shirt over my head, wash my own hair, open a tin of beans. I had learned the stage: 1a. Much to my relief, it had not spread. The type was aggressive, though, being HER2-positive, so I'm going to need more treatment and I still don't know what that will look like.

Especially at the start—but even sometimes now—my mood changes from minute to minute, pinballing from grief to fear, to relief that we caught this early, to a strange emotion which is the opposite of relief. It’s a kind of hypothetical panic, my mind playing and replaying scenes of what might have happened had the cancer not been detected when it was. My imagination races down multiple pathways: rushing in like water to fill the gaps in knowledge, constructing possible futures.

So much activity. So much has changed. And yet, as I’ve realized, some things haven’t. In between the times I’ve spent crying and shaking, I’ve also been observing, thinking, and writing. It’s what I have done for sixty years. It's the first thing I think of doing when anything "big" happens. Like now.

From the moment I got my diagnosis – even before – I knew that I was going to share this beyond just my immediate circle. But when to start?

I’ve been waiting for a moment when the news is not rushing at me from all directions, a moment when I know where I stand and what to expect. When I know what to say.

I know more than I did a month ago, and I expect to know even more a month from now, but I also realize that the certainty I’ve been waiting for will never come. I will learn my treatment plan soon, but then I’ll be waiting to know how I react to it, and then to know how well it has worked. From here on in, I’ll always be waiting for the results of some test or other. I’ll always be living in relation to the diagnosis that I heard on my cell phone, taking refuge under a neighbour’s tree to escape the mid-day heat.

I suspected for a long time – long before the official diagnosis – that I had cancer, even though I didn’t want to believe it. Even as doctors told me to go ahead and make my plans for the summer because it would likely be alright. Even as I told myself not to catastrophize.

Of course, I also fantasized. The day of the gown and the scars and the pathology results, I constructed a scene where the surgeon would say: “It was all a big mistake. The lump was benign after all.” In that thought experiment/fantasy, I always arrived at the same place. Even if it were a big mistake, I’d still be forever changed.

There was the shock of it, and what I saw and understood so clearly in that moment of revelation. The stigmas and fears which I carry from the past have been part of it, too. As an almost-septuagenarian I remember a time when “cancer” was a word spoken in a whisper, if at all. I had to take into myself the diagnosis that once carried such shame.

And I’m changed from just having gone through the long process of waiting that preceded the diagnosis. The way it hovered, but was not yet attached to me. This cancer would not have been detected so early without sophisticated technology, and thank goodness for it, but the system of triage left me in limbo for a long time. I had cancer, but not officially. What did I experience and feel and think? That time could easily be eclipsed in my story by the diagnosis, and treatment that’s to come. And whatever comes after that, and whatever comes after that.

But that liminal time is important, just as now is important.

My point is, there’s no point in waiting to write to write a story about waiting.

It’s August, now, a month when I hope to have more answers, but July 2026 was still July 2026, and always will be.