One day my wife told me she could feel something in her breast. A hard lump that had never been there before. The moment I heard those words, my mind went blank, just for a flash. Maybe a single second. I kept telling myself it couldn't be, and yet my heart dropped. I told her to go to the hospital the very next day.
A few days after the biopsy, she went alone to hear the results. I was at work when a message lit up my phone. "It's breast cancer." I called her back, but she didn't pick up. I stopped what I was doing and rushed straight home. When I opened the front door, she was crumpled on the floor, crying. I don't think I'll ever forget the sight of her like that.
The diagnosis was invasive ductal carcinoma, a small tumor less than a centimeter across. Everyone around us said more or less the same thing: breast cancer is fine as long as you have the surgery, they treat it so well these days. At first I leaned on those words and tried to hold myself together. But while we were waiting for the appointment at the university hospital, I started digging through online forum posts and videos, anything I could find, and the more I learned the more frightened I became. That was when the real ordeal began.
At night I couldn't sleep. I would toss and turn on less than four hours of sleep, my heart pounding for no reason, a heaviness sitting on my chest. And through all of it I took over everything at home, the chores, the cooking, the cleaning. I wanted my wife to feel even a little less shaken. Even at work, my mind was consumed by nothing but this. Pretending to be fine was the hardest part of all.
Once all the tests were done, we met with the professor again. The cancer had spread to several spots in one breast, he said, so she would need a total mastectomy. It looked hormone positive, and whether it had reached the lymph nodes wouldn't be known until after the surgery. In the end, a date was set for a robotic procedure combining total mastectomy with immediate reconstruction. And strangely enough, once the date was fixed, the anxiety began, little by little, to settle. The fear that had been drifting around so vaguely became one concrete thing, "this surgery, on this day," and only then did it feel like I finally had solid ground beneath my feet.
The anxiety still hasn't gone away completely. So I'm scribbling out this long, rambling note. Every single day I pray the surgery goes safely. I know there are others walking this same road, and I want us to tell one another that everything will be all right, that we can do this. This is only one caregiver's story, so please be sure to discuss any decisions about diagnosis or treatment with your own medical team.