Terri's news

Before Christmas, I will have lost my breasts.

It’s the first time I’ve written those words. .

Deb and Mary, my younger sisters, will also lose theirs.

None of us is sick. Not yet. But Deb has atypical hyperplasia, two little spots of precancerous cells.

It was not even two months ago that our 44-year-old sister Terri was diagnosed with breast cancer. When she had her biopsy in early July, I told her not to worry. We’d all had biopsies, and it wouldn’t be anything. Even the radiologist in Lincoln told her not to worry.

“Go home and enjoy your 4th of July weekend,” she reassured Terri.  But the next Tuesday, Terri called me from the WalMart parking lot.

“I’ve got it!” she sobbed.

I waited for her to tell me it was a joke. Terri’s good at fake sobbing. But none of us would joke about this. Somehow I was standing in the corner of our dining room by the big potted plant not recalling exactly how I got there.

“Terri,” I finally said, “tell me exactly what they told you.”

She struggled to pull herself together. “I have to see the doctor this afternoon. The nurse wasn’t going to tell me!” she fell apart again. “But I told her, ‘If something’s wrong, you tell me now!’ She finally said it was breast cancer.”

It’s a hard thing to be 90 miles away from your little sister when she’s just received news like this. Terri’s tall and beautiful and the mother of six kids. But in that moment, she was my baby sister with her fluff of yellow hair and her gap-toothed smile. And I was an hour and 15 minutes away.

“Have you called Paul?” I asked.

“Yes,” she breathed raggedly. “He’s meeting me at home. But I can’t go home and tell the kids!” The sobs started afresh.

We prayed on the phone. At least, I prayed. I’m not much of a phone pray-er. But Terri and her husband Paul are the most devout Catholics I know. I’m a good Catholic myself, but I like to do my praying at Mass or on my Rosary beads. Terri, however, will clasp her hands in a restaurant and say grace right then and there. So I prayed for her, and she stopped crying.

She called again after her doctor’s visit, and I heard the overwhelming disbelief in her voice. “Invasive ductal carcinoma,” she read to me from the biopsy report, “and another spot of D.C.I.S.” I scribbled it all furiously on an envelope. Later, I would google it all.

“The doctor said it’s early,” she said.

It was a glimmer of hope.

And it was the beginning of losing our breasts.