Waiting by Caroline Sutton
I have a pebble in my right nipple. Or a pebble-size something. I found it one night lying in bed, and as I rolled it around under one finger to determine the size, I went into auto defense: a little cyst, sure feels like a cyst. Tumors are as squishy as jellyfish. And then I forgot about it for a few weeks.
Until my daughter, who has BRCA1 from her father’s side, told her breast surgeon what I’d found. Get it checked, came the immediate counsel. And so I did, blithely, with heavy sighs about the inconvenience and wasted time. I’d had full screening seven months prior, but I went for another round of mammogram and sonogram at Weil Cornell Hospital in New York. There I was, still splayed on the table with a goo-smeared breast, when a fierce doctor with straying black curls past her shoulders was at my side affirming it was very lucky I did self-exams, which I don’t. You need a biopsy, she decreed. Check at the desk if we can do it now or schedule for tomorrow. We don’t really know, it’s a gray matter.
As a writer inclined to live in a world of cloudy connotation, I inferred she meant it’s ambiguous, not black and white, not decipherable either way. Family members quickly corrected me. No, Mom, they see gray matter, literally. Something there.
Just after the biopsy I called my husband. Bring Tylenol. The hospital can’t dispense two tabs of regular Tylenol. And a sports bra to support my barely there, throbbing boob and the tiny ice pack they did provide. We went to a restaurant and I ordered scotch, neat. The waiter brought an ample pour, and as it slipped down my breast sort of melted into oblivion.
The next morning’s persistent horns and ambulance sirens on 1st Avenue ushered in Stage 1 of the waiting game. First, for the biopsy results. A weekend intervened, which didn’t count in the promise of two days. As dusk fell four days later, my bubbly GP called. Hi! Is this a good time?
Then you know, you already know.
She sped through the pathology so fast I didn’t catch the name of the thing inhabiting my nipple, and I had her repeat. Something or other carcinoma. So far not invading. So that’s good! Those are good words! she piped. We’re still waiting for a few more results, the ER and the PR, and before I could ask what that meant, she said I’ll be praying for you. And as if I hadn’t heard that, again, I’ll pray for you. Which is about the worst thing a GP can say to you, whether or not you believe in God, which I don’t.
Next morning I was on the phone as soon as the surgeon’s secretary walked in the door, as if catching her would open a slot that day. But no. Four weeks to wait. Stage 2. It was like racing into the subway only to sit between stations within black walls with the doors tight shut and no voice telling you why you’re stuck—a fire on the tracks? A broken down train? Police activity on board? Sorry for the delay thank you for your patience, blurs the loudspeaker as if under the East River. You’ll be on a wait list in case of cancellation, the secretary intoned. That seemed as unlikely as anyone giving up their spot on line outside of JG Melon. Such is the desire for a famous burger. Such is the enormous need for cancer care.
And why? Why did this thing decide to grow? Under what auspices? Like an army at the border of a thriving country, when would it signal to invade? How fast would be its advance? What were the defenses in the trenches? Would it break down one perimeter after another? My body had betrayed me.
Time is the villain, a friend said simply. But I didn’t buy it, not yet. Kids get cancer too, I retorted.
I took long walks feeling as lively as ever while words threaded through my head I have breast cancer and I’d keep walking, oblivious to jack hammering and bikes running red and the relentless solidity of the sidewalk underfoot, afloat and detached by the dissonance of body and mind, of one reality and another. Nothing had changed except the backdrop to everything I did.
The house wears out, said a dear friend in the middle of weekly chemo for breast cancer. The soul finds another abode.
I wished I could feel that, really feel that, but even if I entertained the premise, I knew the next abode wouldn’t recognize my soul, which is so interlocked with movement. My movement, my energy, emanating. To my children. To a sudden hawk winging through Central Park or a runner who passes me on the reservoir path and flashes a smile.
So I kept walking, for miles every day. I watched teenage girls in bedroom slippers flap across Madison Avenue, a woman carry three mammoth plastic bags of empty cans on her back, a guy outside his deli have a smoke, a shaggy man bent like a bass clef, two women avidly recount a night with someone, like so many clusters of animals in open fields or underbrush eating and living, sleeping and eating and looking for comfort of one sort or another, endearingly inconsequential, vulnerable, semi-conscious in any given moment, like me. They would go on doing those things, and go on—till what end—when others would be foraging and reproducing and building in their tracks. This isn’t to say having a malignant tumor made me morbid. It just shifted my line of vision, the way a dog cocks his head when he’s trying to understand a human word.
At 10 a.m. on the designated day, I approached Sloan Kettering on 66th and 2nd. I thought it was the cancer center, but I found that the entire building was devoted solely to breasts: the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center, all sixteen floors. From the moment I pushed the silent revolving door, entered a massive lobby of glass and stone, plucked a mask from a plastic stand where an attendant merely watched, entered an elevator and pressed a quiet button, I heard near silence, even mid-morning. And while I navigated, I thought about all the women with glands that nurture and devolve so readily and arbitrarily into instruments of sickness and death, changes on such a scale to demand a building like this with not just one or two screening rooms, but Kafkaesque hallways of closed doors, scores of aides and nurses, well-honed systems to usher patients from space to space, and waiting rooms with too many women half dressed in seersucker robes staring at their phones or into space, crossing their arms and glancing up now and then without meeting anyone’s eye. Except one: while I waited for a doctor to read a mammogram of the so-called good breast, a woman with streaky gray hair was knitting with thick wool and telling her life story to a woman far across the room. All the stuff she had to clear out from the attic of the house she lived in for forty years, oh my, those stairs. And her grown children across the country. Of no help. She didn’t even need to look at her needles that clicked and ducked, clicked and ducked, at a dogged tempo like those of Madame Defarge.
I opened my novel about a passionate twenty-two year old having sex with a middle-aged guy in an open marriage. Each sentence was palpable, a physical entity in my head, but connecting one to the next eluded me so that two or three times I backtracked and re-read. At irregular intervals an aide would stand in the shadow of the hall to the waiting room, paperwork in hand, call a first name, and deliver the verdict. Finally, I ventured across the wine-dark carpeting to one of these messengers, who met me with such stolidity that I gingerly murmured, may I ask you a question? Receiving a curt nod, I asked how long I might expect to wait. A shrug. The doctor is reading the images. I don’t know. All depends.
Every six months for ten years my daughter, 36, had sat in that waiting room. Or another off the maze of hallways where one awaits a consultation, mammo, or MRI. I pictured her sitting cross-legged with her gaping black tote crammed with a wallet, granola bar wrapper, shades, baby wipes, a novel with coffee-curled edges, and a lost spinning top while she texted me: still here, been 45 minutes. Now she’s scheduling a double mastectomy to beat her odds against the hounding disease mere weeks after my own simple surgery. The confluence is strangely ethereal, as if this pebble arose in sympathy, which means not only feeling with, being with, but also (says Merriam Webster) “mutual or parallel susceptibility.” A lesser known definition is the “correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational energy to one another through some medium.” What, I wondered, was that medium between my daughter and me?
When she went off to college and I’d be walking the dog and suddenly think of her and at that instant my phone would ring, I’d feel it was more than coincidence. But what, if not coincidence? Is our shared DNA encoded to effuse “vibrational energy” and to receive it? I didn’t think much about it at the time. Now I wonder if Paracelsus and the occults were on to something 500 years ago when they claimed that mental, spiritual, and physical elements all have vibrational energy and the only difference between them is the frequency. That was radical, even heretical. To practice medicine you just had to figure out sympathies and antipathies between elements, all of which constitute processes or vibrations. By this logic, a doctor could treat a patient miles away.
Since I learned the insidious nature of the pebble inside me, I sometimes felt a twinge in my breast, a nip, like a crab nibbling my ankle in water too murky to see it. But then I’d rub the spot and realize it didn’t hurt at all; edgy fears were inventing tactile sensation. Notions of mind/body connection are tossed around a lot these days and underlie the platforms of wellness influencers and the marketing of holistic medicines; it’s something we’re supposed to believe but may discreetly hold suspect due to decades of conditioning otherwise. Now I know that my mind messages nerves and tissues in my body, that the spiritual and physiological are interwoven with the tensile strength and delicacy of a spider web.
Cancer is a head game and a waiting game. It breaks down both preconceived ideas and thriving, unwitting cells. It yawns, throwing back its head so long your sense of time eddies against norms and dates and the stuff of yesterday. Moments bubble up: the surgeon drawing a picture of the duct, a pipe lined with healthy cells but in the inner space a huddle of damaged ones that corrupt and refuse to go away; midnight images of invasion; the nervous flutter of my GP; the upward-gazing eyes of my dog sprawled on the kitchen floor after chemo—why this—the revolution in my stomach when my daughter’s tests for BRCA came in; each as disconnected as the words in the novel I tried to read in the waiting room at Sloan, each impossible to weave into the ongoingness of days.
But the waiting stretches like open highway across a desert, narrowing until it becomes a barely visible pinprick on the horizon and is lost. Stage-3 wait fell between the consultation with the surgeon and the surgery: three weeks. At last, lying on a gurney in a vast chilly room with gleaming equipment and quick women in French blue scrubs, I stared at the IV firmly taped on the back of my hand, felt liquid cold then heat in the vein, and rapidly nothing, realizing (only as I woke up and saw sunlight scattered on the East River out my window) the lost peace of utter oblivion when all limbs were unconscious and all thoughts were blackened by the hefty embrace of Morpheus and the world eked on elsewhere with its sirens and stoplights and hustling and sorrows.
With sunshine came Stage 4: rationality and the wait for analysis of what the surgeon had removed— “beautifully”— she said. So I wondered about the aesthetics of disease. And I waited.
Days. Weeks. And while I waited, I had plenty of time to google images of papillary cancers, which now I could look at since mine was purportedly out of my body and on a slide somewhere. Lovely lavender pathology outlines appeared where fat round cells floated like lily pads, where violet streams white flecked rushed among purple continents, where a slim finger pointed like the Red Sea seen from an ascending plane. Another image seemed to me purely abstract, a dense pointillist painting of black on purple until I zoomed in, and the dots grew into beads or bugs or clusters of mud snails with their tiny hidden cargo in the shallows of a bay. Morality vanished here. I didn’t know good cells from bad, healthy from sick, orderly from chaotic, productive from stagnant, and dichotomies flipped, too, since productive might not be positive. I pictured rapidly reproducing, irregular nodules gobbling up estrogen like a protein shake and bursting the walls of a duct, a city. Penetrating like a bunker buster bomb.
At 8:45 p.m. my surgeon called at last. Had I seen the pathology report? It’s excellent news—the margins of the surgery are clean! I thanked her profusely, marveling that after performing five or six surgeries that day, she had the energy to call me. By the next morning the pathology report appeared on the Sloan portal. Histological type: solid papillary carcinoma with invasion. The last word struck. My breath caught in my throat. Where? How far? Was this an error? At my post-op visit that day, the surgeon conceded that malignant cells had penetrated the duct. They had crept into virgin territory, nourished by estrogen comprising 95% of the tumor. As I shuddered, images of guerilla warfare unleashed, she hastily reassured me about the borders. If any stray cell made its way out, we will starve it. And so began Stage 5 of the waiting game, three weeks to see a general oncologist who would advise about hormone blockers and/or radiation based on a certain gamble of odds of recurrence. Again, it all depends.
During that time, my friend completed her four months of weekly chemo with grace and awaited a complicated four-hour mastectomy on 12/12, her deceased mother’s birthday, which she felt was auspicious. I didn’t mention that my father died of lung cancer on that day thirty years ago. She smiled, sipped wine, hugged me and remarked (as if commenting on the weather), Of course there’s a cure for cancer. The medical and pharmaceutical world is keeping it from us. Cancer makes too much money! My procedures will cost about $2 million. Tomorrow they put ink in my veins and the next day, Chop, Chop!
Her eyes were glacier blue and watery though not with tears. In the sunlight her foundation looked sadly intentional. She looked forward to the starless sleep mimicking death when her spirit would leave her “house” while the destruction occurred and a new edifice be erected in its place.
Early morning, eyes still closed, I heard rain brushing the windows and padding on the roof. I pulled the comforter over me and listened and drifted and remembered as I hadn’t for so long some nights I spent alone in the woods on the Kenai peninsula without a tent, and the rain came down, hissing through Sitka spruce and tilting the leaves of red alders and birch while I huddled in a hollow of twisted roots curled like a dog and had no regrets—such was my spirit— and now I wondered if my spirit was the same as then when my body was eighteen and I didn’t even ask if there were grizzlies in those woods because mortality was an abstraction and to hell with it I’d be fine.
This evening I wonder if my friend has opened her eyes, if she can ever tell me where she traveled.
Waiting. I picture her partner in the waiting room flicking through his phone or closing his eyes and tilting back his head or thinking about getting a coffee and not.
Waiting, I see that the slim crescent below my right nipple, drawn like an amber moon in partial eclipse, has nearly healed. Beneath the surface lie small unfamiliar hillocks, still tender, and I wonder if they will stay.
I have seven days to wait to see the oncologist. The body is a delicate balance wherein one solution can tilt the balance of something else—eliminating estrogen might starve a cancer cell but weaken bones and fling me back on the gurney to replace a hip. Like the dog querulous about the meaning of a human word (that it hopes will include the eventuality of treat, which it knows) I realize I have little understanding of the literal meaning of radiation (far less than the connotative) but try to believe in its benefits. Naturally, I’ve used the term in scores of contexts and nodded while friends profess, oh yeah, they target the area, no big deal, you won’t feel a thing. But on Sloan’s website I find a list of five different forms of external beam radiation alone: image-guided, intensity-modulated, stereotactic body, hypofractionated, and proton. There’s also internal therapy in which radioactive material is inserted in the body near the tumor and blasts away. This is called brachytherapy, the prefix brachy from the Greek bakhus, meaning short. So, what is short? The therapy or your life springs to mind, but of course it’s the close range from which the radiation fires.
The options shoot out like streets from a traffic circle. You don’t know where they lead and will never know, except the ride on the one you take. Aching joints and broken bones or persistent burning in your breast? Motel 6 or a Marriott? How barbed will my regrets be if I choose wrong, or I don’t choose and the oncologist does it for me, which he should, and the life I’ve known is skewed?
Waiting, I function. I make meals and take care of stuff. I descend the stairs of the subway in a downpour, slide shut my umbrella and shake it. In a corner where the stairs turn to the next set of stairs, suddenly, the corner of my left eye lights on a bared shin, a red streak the color of raw steak running from knee to ankle, pant leg pulled up, eyes I don’t meet, a black coat open, too light for the December night. Just a wet corner, just two blackened brick walls and a half ceiling made useless by the rain. As the train rattles in, I eye the volume of passengers, choose a car and enter. Immediately to my right a man raises his arms over his head, pulls down violently, raises them, pulls, each time hooting as loud as his lungs can bear and spitting. I scoot by and weave to the end of the car. One man waiting, stationary, another being moved one place or another.
Later, I take a run in the park to hear myself breathe, which is equivalent to feeling interior energy, which is equivalent to life force, which is life. For me, movement affirms spirit, is interlocked with it, snug as puzzle pieces—something I can write about without confirming it exists. After my father died I went to an aerobics class and wondered where the energy I exerted went, where his went. When my femur, which is thin where it curves to the hip, gives way due to drugs I will have taken daily for five years to starve any breast cell that has the slightest inclination to go rogue since a few in the same venue had done so already, will my spirit run amok, unhoused, roam for eternity like the shades of the unburied dead on the plains of Troy?
A somber young man in a black coat walks by and I’m insanely jealous of the years he has. And angry.
I skip down the steps to the fountain at 72nd Street and sit on a bench, an empty one, facing the water where a steady breeze darkens one side of the pool, and across the water white branches of sycamores seem to move because of the tangle of limbs, but don’t. Face in my hands, I sob (for the first time about all this), just sob. When I look up, a woman in a brown coat and brown hood over her hair, a woman with walnut eyes and full lips, smiles slightly and offers to help. I shake my head and raise a hand to signal no. And she turns. She had just been there. A fairy godmother who could turn a pumpkin into a coach in that moment and only that moment. I’m dumbfounded by her courage in approaching me. I stare at my feet, again the pool.
In any exchange between two people, Emerson wrote, there is “tacit reference as to a third party, to a common nature.” That impersonal nature, and not the exchange itself, “is God.” And that is what I felt momentarily in the intimations of her appeal that rippled down my arms just as a breeze chilled the sweat under my fleece and I headed back up the steps to the sidewalk on 72nd.
Waiting embodies all kinds of divisions. On the phone, on hold, you try to read or wipe a counter while listening to the same measures from Pachelbel and a recurring refrain, “a representative will be with you shortly” which has exactly no meaning.
Waiting, you see through a glass darkly, figures moving in familiar ways but out of touch. You watch as I imagine princesses did through the lattice of the pink palace in Jaipur to which they were confined year after year, watching as the sun cast a fish net of shadows over the floor, which slowly drew in and darkened while alternate scenes played out in their moods and dreams.
Waiting is like crossing a river on stepping stones with odd spacing, uncertain angles, and slick moss. My friend had her surgery and lived on oxycodone for a week. At her post-op she learned that the surgeon took out major lymph nodes that were affected and twenty-six more that were not.
Why?
I told you before, the surgeon retorted. (Who can possibly remember the morass of medical info, statistical data, reasons for this treatment or that in the course of a consultation when a balloon is inflating in your brain eliminating everything except a foreign voice that says you have a potentially fatal disease and how will it be after that?) You’ll need six weeks of daily radiation, she continued.
But it’s a new breast! Why? Are you literally covering your ass?
Mid-stream, my friend waits for the appointment with her oncologist, which is after Christmas, after New Year’s, and some days later when she may or may not get answers, may or may not hear a variation on the theme of treatment. With all those lymph nodes gone she waits for her arm to swell and throb should she cut her finger chopping a tomato or wear a bra with a too-tight shoulder strap or carry a load of groceries or have a nurse measure her blood pressure in the wrong arm.
On January 8 it will be my daughter staring at the needle in the vein of her left hand. She will feel a momentary chill before heat and rapid passage somewhere other. While she waits for that day, she has nightmares about her daughter’s new school and wakes up worrying if she made a wrong choice. Waiting, she makes lists of menus her daughters like even though I, who’ll be making the meals, already know. She makes lists of things to order like comfy pj’s and great readable books and never has time to order them. She second-guesses her decision, should I wait till next year, or the next? Should I just wait till they find something and have a lumpectomy like you? She, too, has nursed two children. She, too, has an athlete’s body and small breasts.
My surgeon dislodged a traitor just south of my nipple. The same surgeon will carve healthy cells, young, highly performing, obedient cells, from my daughter. That is where the confluence ends.
For ten years she has known she’ll get cancer (a safe bet), felt dread with each six-month test, heard the odds tick up with each passing year, and gambled, how long to wait, just when?
Caroline Sutton’s new collection essays, Eyes in the Soles of My Feet: From Horseshoe Crabs to Sycamores, Exploring Hidden Connections to the Natural World, was published by Schaffner Press October 1, 2025. Previous books include Don’t Mind Me, I Just Died (essays) and Mainlining (a memoir).
2 October 2025
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