The first time it happened, I was 13. I was obsessed with Panic! At The Disco, Abercrombie & Fitch and riding my bike. I’d always been an anxious child, but by middle school, I was having panic attacks almost nightly. I would pace around our apartment for hours with “Finding Nemo” playing in my headphones until I was too tired to stand.
During one of those episodes, I convinced myself I had breast cancer. I made the first mistake in my long and arduous hypochondriac career: I looked up the symptoms. I was new to having boobs, and having nothing to compare the symptoms to, I was absolutely sure I was exhibiting every symptom of stage 4 breast cancer. I was devastated. For the next two days I scanned the symptoms once an hour and cross-referenced studies to calculate the probability of getting breast cancer as a 13-year-old (I came up with about a 100% chance). I reached a breaking point. I texted my grandma (a nurse) and presented my findings: I was practically terminal.
To my surprise, she didn’t seem worried about it at all. At 13, that was enough to stop me from worrying about it. But over the next seven years, I became convinced I had breast cancer about three times a year. I needed increasingly more evidence to the contrary—articles, medical advice, statistics and instructions for breast self-exams. Even as someone who was barely religious (and even less so over the years), I found myself praying for enough money to do a full-body cancer scan.
As I later found out, I have health OCD (among other types of OCD). I obsess about my symptoms and get uncomfortable with the uncertainty of my looming diagnosis. To cope, I have to check for reassurance – online, with my grandma, with my friends.. It’s been years, but it still takes time for me to A) realize it’s the OCD talking and B) refrain from engaging with the obsessions and compulsions.
You can imagine my horror when I really found a lump.Â
It was February 17th. I had my suspicions (I do a breast self-exam about twice daily, despite already being a year into OCD-specific therapy), but spent the preceding month in denial. Finally, I came to terms with it: I had a lump and I had to get it checked out. I couldn’t write it off as an obsession because it was really there. I texted three of my closest girlfriends and even had one of them feel my boob to make sure I wasn’t making it up. It was real. It was there.
I made an appointment with Planned Parenthood. I had already looked up every possible scenario—Was it hard or soft? Was it mobile? Was the skin around it itchy? I had all of the hallmarks of a benign mass but nothing was consoling me. No amount of reassurance can truly eradicate the fear of doom. I walked 2.2 miles from Fremont Hall to Planned Parenthood, listening to Billy Joel and trying to keep myself distracted.Â
I filled out forms (doable, practical) and tried to get an A+ in being a potential cancer patient. I was emulating my inner Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I stayed calm, asked specific questions, cracked jokes, made funny playlists, answered my medical history in detail, offered my arm for the blood pressure cuff and took selfies while I waited. The doctor came in, did the exam and left the room. It was the most anxious I had been in years.
As an out-of-state student with friends I had only known for about six months, I had no one to hold my hand. As someone whose mother isn’t a part of my life, I had no guidance. I was at the mercy of the women at the Planned Parenthood of San Luis Obispo.Â
She came back in and told me it was probably just a cyst, but that I should come back in about three months. I felt—maybe out of desperation—that she knew I was anxious and alone in this problem, and she spoke to me like you would a child who just got a flu shot. I was cured!
I came back three months later and was told I needed an ultrasound. It being the middle of May, and my flight back to Chicago a month away, I would have to do it at home. Two months and copious cross-country paperwork later, I was once again sitting in a waiting room trying to calm myself down. An ultrasound was serious. An ultrasound meant there was enough mass to be examined. I was once again dependent on a woman—a stranger—to help me through an intimate problem.
The ultrasound jelly was on, and I tried to look at the screen, comparing it to the hundreds of pictures I’d seen online. Once she finished, I wiped the jelly– and about three layers of anxious sweat– off my breast and armpit.
In one of the kindest acts in my entire breast cancer scare journey, she said on her way out, “I’m going to find the doctor, but if it takes a while, it doesn’t mean we’re talking for longer or that the results are bad.” I loved her for that. I was motherless and rootless, on a table with a lump in my breast, and she helped me. She didn’t have to tell me it might be a second. I’ve certainly had worse bedside manner at plenty of appointments in the past. In the end, I had a fibroadenoma, a benign tumor that’s common in young women.
Just because it’s taking a second it doesn’t mean you have cancer. Just because there’s uncertainty, it doesn’t mean the worst is coming. Never have I felt more understood and comforted by a stranger. Never have I felt more connected to the women who got me through one of the most female problems to have—a problem of the breast, which paradoxically gives life and takes away with the same unwitting speed. Never have I felt more like a woman.