October 8th, 2014 - Kristen Henderson

It wasn’t the kind of call-back most people in Los Angeles relish. There weren’t Hollywood directors or handsome actors or lines to remember—or hopes of stardom.

I brought my husband with me—his first time visiting the breast imaging center. If the news was bad, I’d need him. There would be meetings with oncologists to schedule and treatment plans to make. We’d been married 21 years at that point, and he’d helped me through other medical things, like a very challenging pregnancy and a ruptured appendix. But the idea of cancer had paralyzed him. He barely spoke on the drive to the center and didn’t sing along to the Grateful Dead.

We both glanced, without making eye contact, at the women with scarves wrapped around their heads or with eyebrows drawn on to make them look feminine. What would I do? Shave my head and get a wig? Replace my identity-defining DDDs with petite little things?              

A few other men were there, and like my husband, they stayed mostly absorbed in phones. Some, more connected than my spouse, rubbed the shoulders of their partner. Everyone whispered, like if there was a sound too loud, the frail women might crack, crumble.

All of the women were filling out questionnaires on a chilly iPads.

When was your last mammogram—Jesus, don’t you know, why do you think I’m here?

Family history: two maternal great-aunts, post-menopausal breast cancer. (Too distant to really matter.)

Last period? I had no idea … when was that hysterectomy?

“Miss Henderson, you ready?” It was Kat, who’d been “my” tech for a few years. Her weathered, lined face always made me wonder how old she was, but her soft gray eyes made it not matter. “Miss” was the formality she always used with me.

My husband looked up for a second from his phone; he stayed in the waiting room. He’d come back later if needed.

I changed into the bizarre salmon pink kimono-type thing I never bothered to tie. Kat was right there.

“Come this way, Miss Henderson, let’s make this thing go away.”

Instead of the usual two, they were looking at only the right breast that day.

“Little something there, but not much. Seems smaller than before,” Kat, hidden behind her protective screen, said.  The machine and the room were so cold, I shivered and wondered if it mattered that my nipple was all puckered up. 

“They’re ready to do the ultrasound. Just need to make sure,” she said, leading me down the hallway into a room I’d never inhabited before.

Is my husband worried? I wondered. Is he pacing or still just doing stuff on his phone?

The window-less room was dark like it was couched in clouds. Two men, whom I assumed were radiologists of some sort, hovered near a computer-looking machine. One, clearly more in charge than the other, said: “Sorry, it’s better for us with the lights off. The right one, right?”

“Right, the right,” I said, moving my arm out of the pink thing again.

The man not so in charge squeezed some jelly out of a tube, producing a noise that sounded like someone expelling gas. After rubbing some on my breast (I shivered again) the man in charge placed the ultrasound wand on the spot in question. Buttons were pushed, the wand was moved around. My heart fluttered.

“Appears to be just a cyst,” the in-charge man said. “We’re not gonna worry about that. Nothing for you to worry about. Follow-up with your usual mammogram in a year.”

“Really? Wow. Great.”

I shoved the pink cloth top into the bin marked “used gowns,” and put my DDD underwire bra and loose flowered blouse back on, before collapsing onto a little stool in the dressing room—but only for a second. I needed to see my husband.

“Come on, we can go,” I said, as he stuffed his phone into his back pocket.

“Really? You’re OK? Well, that’s good,” he said. “You have the ticket for the parking?”

I took it out of its appointed slot in my purse, put it into my husband’s warm hand and laced our fingers together.

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A former journalist, Kristen Henderson now writes flash fiction and memoir. Her work has appeared in Bending Genres (x2), Free Flash Fiction, the Dabble, the Daily Drunk, amongst others. When Kristen was bored during the pandemic, she founded Bright Flash Literary Review, an online journal for flash, short fiction, and memoir. Kristen splits her time between her homes in Los Angeles, and Lamy, NM, where the sky never ends. 

Kristen encourages you to learn more about Heal the Bay, her local non-profit that helps to mitigate pollution getting to our beaches.