Ultrasound brings up question, memories | Laura Pierce

The size and shape of a pea.

Only it’s not a pea.

It is in my breast and there is a person with an ultrasound device watching it on a screen.

“It could just be a gland,” she says, as the wand passes over the suspicious place again. The image on the screen, the spot that shows up as a brighter-colored bubble than the flesh around it, bobs as if on a sea, in unison with the device passing over me and sending back the strange, cloudy image.

Until today, I didn’t devote much thought to glands, cysts, or even peas, for that matter.

But for the last half hour, I have been sucked into these images on the screen. The images that could say that there is something – or nothing – wrong with me.

The diagnostic consultant comes in and we all watch the screen together. Again, the question remains open, the complicated notes in my chart the educated equivalent of a shrug.

No answer – not yet. I have to wait six months and go back in again, when we’ll take another look.

It’s probably nothing.

But today I know why women are supposed to get mammograms every year, starting at age 40.

I haven’t had one for three years, so there is really nothing they can compare it to.

I knew the time every year when I was supposed to get one, and the one scare I did have, a few years back, when “it” turned out to be nothing.

But today those reasons why I didn’t get one seem superfluous.

Busy schedule? I could have made the time. Too expensive? My insurance would have covered it. Feeling perfectly healthy? Well, I feel perfectly healthy today, too. Only a routine mammogram has raised the question about whether I actually am.

While I’m laying there watching an image of me that is utterly foreign, I think about two friends who started out like me, and yet had their lives turned completely inside out.

One died at 32; the other continues to fight for her life with stage 4 breast cancer. It was through my still-living friend, Amanda, that I learned there is no stage 5. But she’s fighting it, all the same. We had a party for her when she grew her hair back the first time, after the chemotherapy did its job (or so we thought.)

When she learned she was in remission, Amanda started living her life as fiercely as she could, making up for the time she’d lost. In fact, she was going through adoption proceedings for a Native American boy that she had been foster-parenting, when the news came. It turns out her cancer, the uninvited guest, had stepped out for a bit, but never really left. This time it had taken up residence in her lungs.

My other friend, Robin, married and with a toddler, fought the disease with everything she had for several years. We all nodded in sympathy and held her hand when we saw her at various social functions. And we helped with the fundraiser her family had, when the insurance company wouldn’t fund her bone-marrow transplant. We clucked our tongues but didn’t really get it. Cancer? Hmmm. That’s bad.

Robin survived long enough to achieve the goal she set: to make it through her son’s first year of kindergarten, fighting until the end. She was eulogized for her bravery at her funeral service.

Until today, though, I didn’t realize just how alone Amanda and Robin must have felt, even when we patted their hands and did our best to sympathize. Today, as the person with the potential problem, I feel as foreign to these technicians gathered around me as perhaps that bump is to the rest of my breast.

I’m kind of pissed at them, actually, although I feel badly about that feeling.

They get to go home and think about making dinner, or watching television.

I get to go home with a sore extremity and a big question that will have to wait.

Well, I can tell you what we’re NOT having for dinner this evening:

Anything with peas.

Get your mammogram

If you are 40 and older, talk to your doctor.

To learn more about low-cost or free mammograms, go to: www.healthcentral.com/breast-cancer/c/78/15110/faqs-women

To learn more about breast cancer and steps you can take to help prevent it, including monthly self-checks, go to the American Cancer Society Web site at www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp.