You've Got to Be Joking

The article in the waiting room magazine was titled “Cancer Should Be a Laughing Matter” so I paged straight for it. The author, a comedian and veteran of testicular cancer and a melanoma at the back of his eye, quipped about specializing in “tumor humor” and how he loved to make his doctors laugh.

I chuckled along with him and wrote a few marital jokes in my orange notebook. No tumor humor. That wasn’t what I needed to laugh myself through at the moment. My cancer crisis was long-gone, last year’s anecdote. The soap operas of a thirty-seven year marriage were my one-liner material now.

I was there at the breast center for a chest wall exam, the first since my bilateral mastectomy a year and three months before. I was just six months past my reconstruction surgery. Today would be routine, a celebration of what the oncology nurse called a success story.

My breast surgeon and I were all smiles when we saw each other in the same small room where we had been together so many times on less happy days. We hugged and chatted. She admired my plastic surgeon’s handiwork – two small breasts sculpted from my own belly flesh, almost perfect except for the scars.

We continued chatting as I lay down on the exam table and she began to palpate my new breasts. There was a time when these examinations embarrassed me. A year and a half of procedures much more invasive than a little palpating had sent such modesty packing long ago.

Then she said, “We’ve got a little nodularity here.”

I’d been around this block enough times to recognize that as doc-speak for a lump. I searched my shell-shocked brain for a laugh line, but I was fresh out.

Two very anxious days later, thank heaven, I heard the word that may not be the most amusing in the language but most definitely is the most divine – BENIGN.