January 2, 2025

I am haunting you. Not because I am still inside of you. No, your surgeon took care of that. It’s the possibility of me that haunts you.

True, I was in your body and I am disquieting in my malignancy, but a lot of the fear I induce comes from bad PR as much as anything else. Because let’s be honest, at least in the early stages, it’s the chemo, the radiation, the hormone pills that cause most of the problems for people. It’s the lymphedema after surgery or the infections from implants. It’s the surgical drains–the weight of them–that made you cry like clockwork every day at 6pm for two weeks. I had you there, lying in an unmade bed, snotty and salty and comforted by your wife.

What is cause and effect, really, when talking about me?

I mean, you didn’t even know I was there. Modern technology, health insurance, and regular visits to the doctor were required to discover me. I wasn’t a lump you could feel pinched between two fingers while bathing; I wasn’t tangible.

Each year: a nurse would mold your small dense breasts between the support plates of the mammogram like Play-Doh. Each year: that pinch of compression. Each year: the way you learned to breathe through the pain. Each year: the call back for more scans. How quickly those years of nonchalance dissipated. There I was, like a game of hide and seek, waiting to be found.

The truth of it is this: I didn’t make you sick, not yet. I was there, contained, not yet free to roam about the cabin, when you found me. Your body provided my housing, and two months after you discovered me I was gone. Gone before you even had a chance to process my existence.

Certainly, you can’t help but wonder how long I was there. How many years was I tucked into that dense breast tissue, hiding away from the most advanced technologies? Your body carries you into the world every day, but there are slips, there are blunders. Your estrogen fueled a veritable fruit basket–your doctor back then called them “grapefruits”–of fibroids in your thirties. A decade later, micro-calcifications became a biopsy report, sent to you via phone app, that read, “Ductal carcinoma in situ, high nuclear grade, cribriform and micropapillary type with necrosis and multifocal microcalcifications.” 

I can quickly push you from the doctor’s office to the dictionary, WebMD, and soon, the rabbit hole.

So you wonder, don’t you? Did you really have cancer? Sure, the oncologist said, while your bare legs, winter-white and freckled, stuck to the crinkly blue paper of the examination table, “we found micro-invasive cancer cells in the breast tissue.” But he followed that up with a smile and said, “they are too small to warrant chemotherapy; I rarely get to give such good news.” And the pathology report, sent to you via phone app, said, “no cancer detected in the lymph nodes.” And your surgeon–an older woman, reddish hair like your own, almost motherly, with a quiet surgical focus–said, “clean margins.” Then again, you had a surgical oncologist and a medical oncologist assigned to your care. You still do. The swiftness of it all leaves you grappling with what’s next.

Was that really it? Can you really trust that I’m gone?

Of course, I also took something central: your breasts. And the certainty of that can leave you breathless.

The length of the scars across your flat chest are the numbers that replace your bra size. Their absence also brings another number:  2%. A place for faith–trust–when your surgeon tells you the likelihood of my return. But I come in multiple forms; I can recur from those old cells or emerge as new ones.

I am pesky in this way; I can disappear for years until one day your back hurts, or your stomach. I have many on ramps and human habits of consumption mean more are made every day. The mundane features of a life lived are also a list of the routes through which I could trigger a return: alcohol, hair spray, food chemicals, saturated fat, curtains, cleaning supplies, plastic.  Remember all those cigarettes you had in your twenties, back when they were so cheap you could scrounge up dimes from underneath car seats and couch cushions, walk across the train tracks to the gas station for more? I could thank you for those. The accumulation of all those days when you were too busy–early career and up for promotion–to exercise?

No matter how much you try, I give you no answers.

On a sunny spring day you sat with your friends, glass of white wine dripping condensation onto your hands, and my voice showed up louder than theirs. Rather than a calming balm at the end of a difficult day, I made your body buzz with anxiety. Each sip, a question: will the alcohol bring me back?

In other words, I am not to be trusted, and because I was inside you, it leaves you wondering if you are equally unreliable. Because even though I am two years in the surgical dustbin, you are still here, feeling as healthy as you were when I was inside you, which is a complex reckoning indeed. You can live your life, yes, but you will always wonder if a piece of me will continue on.

Your body, forever remapped to account for my brief stay. A life well lived is a death pondered; this, I can provide for you.

Monica Edwards has a Ph.D. in Sociology and teaches at a Chicago area Community College.  She has published in academic journals and most recently, published the book Pedagogies of Quiet: Silence and Social Justice in the Classroom, Rowman & Littlefield (April 2024).  Her academic writing is published in academic journals, such as Socialist Studies, and online with Medium and The Good Men Project.  Her creative nonfiction has been published in HerStry and Moria Literary Magazine.