The Complication

Trey Smith

One of the great challenges to life is that it has a way of mucking up well laid out plans. You formulate a strategy and, just as you are ready to implement it, some weird happenstance comes out of the blue. Blindsided, you flail around trying to make sense of everything.

While Della still plans to shove off tomorrow morning, we learned of a complicating factor yesterday afternoon. Since December was her last month of her quality union health insurance -- she will be covered under a lesser policy while serving in AmeriCorps -- Della decided to get a bunch of routine diagnostic tests out of the way. One of these was her biannual mammogram.

We learned yesterday that something showed up on the pictures. It may not be anything significant, but Della's doctor wants her to return to our local hospital for some follow-up tests. These more detailed tests will go a long way toward informing the medical team if the spot they saw in the original mammogram is nothing to worry about OR if it indicates the possibility of a cancerous tumor.

Needless to say, this is not the kind of alarming news we wanted to hear two days before Della leaves for White Salmon! Just the thought that Della may have breast cancer is a recipe for massive anxiety. Della is a cancer survivor as it is (she had melanoma in her 30s) and the very notion of another round of cancer treatment -- while beginning a new life temporarily apart from me -- is about the last thing in the world either of us needs right now.

Adding insult to injury, we learned of this possibility during the 2 week period between the end of one health insurance policy and the beginning of the new one. Fortunately, her tests are scheduled for the week after next here in South Bend and so her new policy should cover a good deal of the cost...unless there is some bureaucratic snag that we don't know about yet.

I have ended two previous posts with the sentence, Such is life, and that certainly applies here as well! While this seems like a particularly inopportune time to receive this kind of potentially scary information, ANY time would seem just as inopportune.

Let's face it.  No one wants to hear that they might be facing a life threatening disease.  If the spot does turn out to indicate a malignant tumor, we can at least be thankful that it was caught early.  The earlier the detection, the better the chance of survival.

Then again, it may turn out to be nothing more than a smudge on the picture.