the skeleton club

I had my annual pelvic exam before work. I wanted to get it over with so I could arrive at the office by ten to prepare for an eleven o’clock meeting.

In the doctor’s office, waiting with a tissue on my lap and a gown open in the front, I heard Rick Astley playing on the loudspeaker:

Never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and hurt you.

I am getting rick-rolled, I thought. I am naked in a doctor’s office and I am getting rick-rolled.

My weight was the same as last year. My blood pressure was fine. I told the nurse practitioner about my hormonal fluctuations, and she said she’d make a referral to gynecology.

Then she inserted the speculum. She paused. And she said, “huh.”

She didn’t say anything more, so I told myself: maybe it’s nothing, this huh. But after removing the speculum and having me sit up on the edge of the table, she explained that I had a mass, like a polyp, but she didn’t often see polyps that large. And she was still going to make the referral to gynecology but she was going to mark it urgent, and I shouldn’t worry about the perimenopause symptoms until I got this figured out.

So now I wait to see if I have cancer.

All the Substack newsletters I’ve gotten recently began with a mention of “these apocalyptic times.” First the pandemic brought “these unprecedented times” and now it’s “these apocalyptic times,” and I don’t know how many more times I can take.

Are these apocalyptic times? The grass is still growing. The sun still travels across the sky. The flowerbeds are crisp and sunbaked, leaves blackening at the tips, but the roses have survived another year of Japanese beetles, and the sedum is just starting to bloom.

The preteens swarmed that night in their usual way—piling out of cars and vans, congregating first around the swing set and then the s’mores ingredients, then the porch for a little privacy. They played hide and seek and tag. They stole each other’s shoes and hid them in trees. They put on dark clothes and Halloween masks and planned elaborate jump scares. They ate all the chocolate and too many marshmallows and left plastic water bottles scattered around the lawn.

B and I spent the evening sitting by the fire, watching the flames. We listened to their shrieks and laughter echo across the yard. Each of us smoldered with our own private what-ifs.

Later that night I dreamed I was at an outdoor party when a plane flew low overhead. Then bombs began to fall. I ran toward them, trying to reach them just before they hit the ground.

I thought my death might be less painful that way. That it might be better to go in one quick, grand explosion.

Later I tried to see it for myself—this maybe-a-polyp—with a hand mirror in the bathroom, but I couldn’t make any meaning out of all that flesh. What does a polyp look like through a speculum? I Googled and got countless pictures of fleshy pink knobs.

Maybe I should follow dream logic. Throw myself on top of this bomb. Then, when the oncologist revealed it to be nothing, I would emerge changed.

I told a friend, who encouraged me to set a timer on my phone for five minutes and spill my heart to God. When the timer rang, she said, I should pause and listen for a response.

I tried it. I heard nothing.

I felt cheated, like the time, as a child, when I invited Jesus into my heart, but Jesus never came.

I waited until the day of surgery to tell the boys. I thought they might worry. Instead, they were thrilled by the possibilities—thrilled by memories of all the funny YouTube videos they’d seen of people coming off of anesthesia and saying ridiculous things.

“Bring your phone!” they said. “Have Dad take a video!”

Coming out of surgery, B laid his forehead on the side of the gurney and said, “It’s not good.” And I drifted in a dark fog of anesthesia and waited for him to say just kidding but he didn’t.

The surgeon explained that she’d taken five biopsies in total. She had a working diagnosis of cervical or uterine cancer. I would need a hysterectomy, or radiation, or both. There was no way to know until we heard back from pathology.

The dread was the worst part—a black tar that washed over everything. I called a friend and despaired. I called my mom and despaired. I Slacked one coworker, then another, and despaired.

I called my boss and repeated what the surgeon had said. How long does it take to recover from a hysterectomy? How could I possibly help him prepare? He was warm and supportive. I hung up feeling proud of myself for not crying.

When the phone rang five minutes later, I assumed it was a post-visit survey or an automated appointment reminder.

It wasn’t. It was the surgeon.

“You don’t have cancer,” she said.

A fibroid. It was a fibroid, five centimeters long—big enough to cause a callus where it rested against my cervix. A callus that looked like cancer that had spread.

I shared the news with B. We hugged and cheered. The boys stared, confused by our sudden shift in mood.

“We’re happy because we thought I might have cancer,” I explained. “It turns out that I don’t.”

R rolled his eyes. “Well, good job not having cancer, Mom. But you could still have cancer. It could be somewhere that you just don’t know about yet.”