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| Marie Sutton |
The Birmingham sky was postcard pretty on the Friday that
I found out I have Stage 3 breast cancer.
Brilliant brushstrokes of cerulean stretched from East Lake to West End and the
sun pierced through the sky. It was like the setting of a dream, but the snap
of cold in the air reminded me that it wasn’t.
It was lunchtime, and my team and I were interviewing for
an opening in our department. The candidate, a woman, was in her early
thirties. She had a messy ponytail, cheap mail-order tortoiseshell glasses and
wore an ink blue pants suit that revealed her skinny legs. Five minutes into
her talk, I wrote the words: “She’s a no.” She rambled and complained about her
former employer and my mind drifted toward lunch.
I discreetly pulled out my phone underneath the table and
scrolled through emails while she answered the questions from our prepared
list. I saw that I had missed a call from an “801” number and my heart began to
beat in my chest.
I clumsily excused myself from the room, walked over to a
corner of the hallway and dialed my voicemail. The woman's message began with a
sigh, and then, in a heavy African accent, said, “Mrs. Sutton, I have your
results. Please call me.”
My knees began to buckle and I looked around for a place
to go. I walked out onto the student center patio and tried to steady my
fingers while calling back the number.
“Are you somewhere where you can talk?” the doctor said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want me to call you back when you can talk?”
“No,” I said. My stomach was in knots and I felt I as if
was going to throw up.
“Well...I am the doctor who did your biopsies. Do you
remember me?”
“Yes,” I said, becoming annoyed. It had been less than 48
hours since she was pulling tissue from my right breast and lymph nodes. How
could I forget?
“Well, we tested all three of the areas and all three
came back cancer.”
Her words felt like a sledgehammer to the side of my
head. Vibrations were coming from my skull and her words seeped in, in slow
motion.
With each word she spoke – “metastasized” and
“mastectomy” – a part of me slowly deflated. I thought of my 10-year-old
daughter who loves art and hangs on my every word and of my 9-year-old baby boy
who wants to save all the animals and enjoys kissing my cheeks. I thought of
the possibility of dying. I was just two weeks shy of my 44th birthday.
After I hung up, her words were still sitting in my ear.
I tried to get them out with my finger, but they were stuck.
I sat and stared for a moment. I spotted a man in the
distance on the fifth floor of a parking deck. He was near the edge of the
guardrail. “What is he doing,” I thought to myself. Was he going to jump?
Maybe I should jump.
I called my husband and without taking a breath, blurted
out, “They said I have cancer.”
“I’m on my way,” he said and immediately came to my job.
I walked toward the parking lot in a daze. I left my purse, my car, my keys, my
coat.
When I got into his gray Infiniti, he grabbed my hand and
said, "I'm sorry."
I didn’t speak, couldn’t speak.
He held my hand the entire drive. I stared out the window and tried to find words to say.
When we got home, he and I prayed, ate sandwiches, and watched episodes of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” We didn't know what else to do, so we laughed and cried and braced ourselves for cancer.
