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Health & Fitness

Our Day of Diagnosis

In tribute to Novato's Relay For Life, Novato Patch features excerpts from Juliane Cortino's forthcoming book, "Nothing Can Scare Me Now," to be released in late June.

     When I started to pitch my Nothing Can Scare Me Now manuscript to a publisher some time ago, I was surprised to see her eyes well with tears. “Ah, our day of diagnosis,” she said. She then told me about her own incurable disease, diagnosed nearly a decade earlier. “I marched myself into my HMO’s psychiatry department,” she said, “and told them, ‘I need an appointment now.’”

     She got her appointment and with it the realization we all come to: Our day of diagnosis is imprinted forever upon our hearts.

     I will remember my day, October 9, until I die. I was sitting in the office chair I’m in now, typing on the same computer, waiting for the results of my biopsy. I remember looking at the clock at 9:50 a.m. “Please let them call me in the afternoon,” I thought. “If they call later in the day, it’s benign. The morning calls will be to people needing surgery.”

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     At 10:05 the hospital was on the telephone. “We have your results. The slide came back from pathology marked ‘IDC.’ You have invasive ductal carcinoma.” I wrote down the details of my date with the surgeon. I hung up the telephone and let out what would be the first of many anguished screams.

     The irony of being diagnosed during Breast Cancer Awareness month was not lost on me. There was another irony. I’d skipped my mammogram screening the previous year and thought I might put it off until the following spring. I felt fine. Life was good. Why put my upper body through torture? My husband and my primary care physician both harped on me to get a checkup. I went to please them.

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     When the radiologist called after my initial screening, she had to browbeat me to come back. (I thought she was seeing a benign area on the x-ray that had been discovered years before.) I could almost feel her hopping up and down on the other end of the phone. This did not bode well. So I went back for another mammogram, an ultrasound, and a biopsy.

     The people who browbeat me into getting a mammogram saved my life. I will never skip it again.

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