On the latest mammogram images, it looks like you’re staring down from an airplane at night. The two tumors are lit-up cities—say Greensboro and Winston-Salem. And the four-centimeter stretch between them is Interstate 40, illuminated by headlights. We won’t know exactly how trafficky I-40 is until the surgeon gets in there.
According to Dr. Cavanaugh, this is a stupid way for cancer to behave. Smart cancer explodes itself like an atom bomb—mushrooming out wherever possible and jumping on the lymph node train to ride to the far reaches of the body and set up diabolic satellite campuses there. Stupid cancer makes a tumor, gets bored, sidles around, builds a nearby tumor. We hope.
Cavanaugh is not afraid of saying things like hopefully cured and probably no more chemo. But she also sends me for more imaging—the packed room of anxious women ranging from twenty to ninety all in our identical gray dressing gowns, half of us texting, half knitting—just to confirm the geography, as she says. As though having a map makes the trail less snowy.