My name is Natalie. I’m twenty-seven years old. And I have breast cancer.

Oh yeah. And I’m single. There goes my dating life down the toilet.

I never dreamed I’d get breast cancer. That was for older women. Right? I mean, you can’t even get a routine mammogram until you’re forty. There’s gotta be a reason for that.

Right?

I discovered the lump by accident.

Wish I could say it was during my regular self-exams but my monthly self-exams were more irregular than regular. And I never could tell one lump from another anyway. They all felt the same to me. Squishy.

Like more than half the women on the planet—including my sixty-seven-year-old mother, I had fibrocystic breasts. Lumpy, in other words. But to my knowledge, there’s no history of breast cancer in our family, so I really wasn’t worried when I felt the lump while trying on a gel bra at Victoria’s Secret.

My best friend, Merritt, and I were goofing around one Saturday at the mall, wondering how we’d look if we were both a little bigger in the boob department.
Although I needed more help than she did.

We each tried on one of those padded gel and water bras like they use in Hollywood. And Merritt, who’d grabbed a black double-D, was vamping for the dressing-room mirror, making her lips all pouty, and trying to look appropriately sexy as she admired her now-bountiful cleavage beneath her straining white poet’s blouse.

I shook my head. “Too Anna Nicole Smith.”

She swung her mane and examined her double-basketball profile. “But they helped her marry a millionaire. Who knows? Maybe they’ll do the same for me.”

“Right. And then you’d have to sleep with a guy who’s as old as your grandfather. Correction, great-grandfather.”

We scrunched up horrified faces. “Eew!”

Faster than a Hollywood marriage, Merritt whipped that bad boy off and dropped it on the reject pile. Then she glanced at me and did a double take. “Hey, whaddya know? You’ve got boobs!”

“I know! Can you believe it?” I turned sideways and scrutinized my B-cup self. “The double-fried-egg girl finally has curves.”

“You’ve always had curves. They’re just small.” She stared at my black T-shirt as I pirouetted in front of the mirror. “But those double fried eggs are now a couple of blueberry muffins. You have to buy that miracle-worker bra.”

“Nope.” I took a last look at my curvy front. “With me, what you see is what you get.”

“I know. Little Ms. Candid and Up-front. But what would it hurt to be a little mysterious every now and then? Men like that in a woman.”

“Well, they’re not going to get it from me. I wouldn’t know how to begin to be mysterious.” I turned my back and unhooked the lacy pink bra. As I lowered the straps off my shoulders, my hand grazed my left breast and I felt something.
A lump. Not squishy.

Time to cut down on my caffeine intake. I’d read somewhere that too much caffeine can increase fibrocystic lumps.

 “Hey, heads up!” I tossed the bra over my shoulder to join the others on the reject pile.

*      *      *

Pushing open the door of her midtown Victorian apartment half an hour later, Merritt sang out, “Honey, I’m home!”

“Me, too, honey,” I echoed, even though I didn’t live there.

Jillian raised her shaped-and-waxed eyebrows over her cappuccino. “So what’d you buy?”

“A T-shirt.” I raised my lone shopping bag high. “It’s this great coral color. And only $9.99 at Target.”

She rolled her eyes. “Nat, you’ve got to branch out from your discount stores.” She glanced at my jeans. “And your jeans and T-shirt uniform.”

“You’re such a snob, Jilly.” I gave her an affectionate grin.  “Besides, I do so branch out. At work I wear khakis or dress pants and the occasional skirt. And I have a tailored jacket for meetings.”

“Whoa. Really pushing the fashion envelope there.”

Merritt was trying to skulk behind me in an evasive maneuver. But Jillian spotted her.
“Not so fast, roomie. Show me what you got for your date tonight.”

My best friend exchanged a resigned look with me, shrugged her shoulders, and lifted her hands, empty palms up. “Nada.”

“You two! What am I going to do with you?” Jillian slid her slim, designer-clad self off the retro kitchen bar stool and advanced toward us. “How do you expect to get a guy if you don’t even make a little bit of an effort?”

“Uh, have you forgotten? I’ve already got a guy.” I popped an Altoid into my mouth.

“And Jack doesn’t seem to have any complaints about my casual style.”

“That’s right,” Merritt said. “And you guys have been together—what? Two months now?”I thought back to our first date and did some mental calculations. “One month and seventeen days. But who’s counting?”

“Whoa, I’m impressed, math girl. You’re usually not good with numbers.” Merritt turned a dazzling smile on Jillian. “And speaking of numbers, I’m not even thirty yet. You know what they say—forty is the new thirty, which goes to follow that thirty must be the new twenty, which means I’m really only eighteen. Besides . . .” She waved her hand airily. “If a guy’s hung up by how I dress, he’s not for me.”

“At least tell me you’ll change out of those paint-spattered leggings.” Jillian raised a French-manicured hand to her brow, her sparkling new solitaire winking in the light, and shook her head in dismay. “I can’t believe you went out in public like that.”
Jillian’s the fashionista in our trio of friends. A personal shopper at Nordstrom, she lives, breathes, and eats what’s in and what’s out in the world of fashion.
Merritt and I, not so much.

I’m more a Target and Old Navy girl myself. In fact, the first time Jillian said “Jimmy Choo,” I said “Gesundheit.” But I’m willing to spend a little more money on a fabulous accessory to pull a whole outfit together. I might be casual, and thrifty, but I do have flair if I say so myself.

*      *      *

“Tell you what,” Dr. Calhoun said.  “Just to be on the safe side, I’d like you to get a mammogram.”

“A mammogram? Don’t they hurt?”

“Nah. They’re just a little uncomfortable.”

*      *      *

A little was stretching it.  Did you ever notice that doctors have their own unique vocabulary?  “Just a little stick now.”  Yeah, right.

Anyway, now I knew how it felt to be a hamburger patty on a George Forman grill – and on my lunch hour yet.

After the technologist raised the grill cover and my breast popped back to its normal, unsquished shape, I waited in the dressing-room cubicle at the breast-imaging center, clad in yet another waxy blue gown and thumbing through the latest issue of People.

A knock on the cubicle door interrupted my drooling over a picture of Orlando Bloom.
“Natalie?”  The kind middle-aged tech in kitten-print scrubs who’d just finished squashing my breasts opened the door.  “Your mammogram was difficult to read.  It often is in younger women because your breasts are so much denser, so the radiologist wants us to do an ultrasound too.  We’re just waiting for the okay from your referring physician.”

“Aren’t ultrasounds what they do when a woman’s pregnant?”  I flashed back to the Friends episode when Rachel couldn’t see her baby but pretended to Ross that she could.  “I’m so not pregnant.”

“Ultrasounds are used for many reasons―including giving us a better picture when a mammogram can’t.”

“Oh, okay.”  Another first to share with Merritt and Gillian.

The ultrasound was a little strange.  A female tech squirted some warm gel-goop on my breast and rolled a thingy that looked like a Star Trek phaser over the lump―which showed up as black wavy lines on the TV-looking screen.
I was tempted to change the channel but decided against it.

*      *      *

Dr. Calhoun called two days later to tell me that the lump looked a little “unusual.”  So just to be safe (again with that ‘just to be safe’ bit?) she was referring me to a breast surgeon so I could get an expert opinion.  And a needle biopsy.

Now I was getting seriously freaked out.

“It’s just a precautionary measure,” she reassured me.  “Don’t worry.  Most lumps are benign.”

“It’s not the lump I’m worried about.  It’s the needle.”

Ever since a nasty tetanus shot as a kid, coupled with a painful blood draw from a novice lab tech when I was fifteen―she kept digging and digging trying to capture a “rolling” vein―needles have not been my friends.

But I figured I could do what I always did in her office―shut my eyes and think of the ocean.

*      *      *

After I hung up I went online and Googled breast needle biopsy.  I learned that, as my ob-gyn had said, most breast lumps are benign.  But when I saw a picture of the needle, I began to shake.

The shaking started all over again the following week, when the thirty-something breast surgeon, Dr. Karen Herris―another woman, yes! I wasn’t comfortable with strange men feeling my breasts ― started explaining the procedure.  I squeezed my eyes shut and just nodded and said uh-huh as she talked.  I was so freaked out by the needle prospect that the words “lump feels a little suspicious” didn’t even register at the time.

Before I knew it, it was all over.

“Okay, you can open your eyes now.  We’re finished.”

Cautiously, I opened one eye.  “Are the needles put away?”

“Yep.  All gone.”

“Now what?”

Dr. Herris stuck a nickel-sized bandage over the tender spot.  “We’ll send this to the lab, and I should have the results by late tomorrow afternoon.”  She picked up my chart and a pen.  “Where will you be around five o’clock so I can call you?”

*      *      *

I know it sounds clueless.  Maybe I was in denial. Or just stupid.  But to tell the truth, I was just relieved the biopsy was over.  Okay, I’d done the right thing―taken care of the problem.  Even better, I’d managed to do it without freaking out my mother, although it took some little white lies about running errands away from the office.

I honestly didn’t think much about the results.  I was too busy thinking about Jack and our weekend plans.

At 5:07 the next day, I’d just turned off the freeway and was approaching a stop sign when Pachelbel’s Canon rang―unknown number.  I flipped open my phone as I coasted to a stop.  “Hello?”

“Natalie?”  Dr. Herris said gently.  “I’m afraid I have news you aren’t going to want to hear . . . it’s cancer."