'The Diagnosis I Told My Family Saved Their Lives'

In late 1974, I sat in our wood-paneled family room, watching the news as Betty Ford revealed to the world that she'd had breast cancer and a mastectomy.

I called out to my mother in the kitchen, "Mom! What's a mastectomy?"

Dead silence.

My mother had a long history of being unable to speak of female body parts. This is a woman who could not warn me when I almost bounded off to my sixth-grade gym class with a can of Feminine Deodorant Spray thinking it was regular deodorant. She saved me not by telling me what it was, but by pointing her nose downwards, towards the lower region of her body.

This time, again, the same type of pantomime. A hand slashing down her chest meant I understood: Betty Ford, breasts, gone.

At 14, my breasts had just barely shown up; it was impossible to imagine them gone. It was impossible for me at that moment to imagine what was in store for them.

Childhood taboos

My family could talk about anything on the planet—nothing was off limits—and my siblings and I were bigmouthed, opinionated, 1970s teenagers living in Arizona. But this thing, this cancer thing, this Betty Ford thing, this thing that happened to be eating our neighbor up—that we couldn't talk about.

Once, when we were outside our house at the same moment as our neighbor, I saw her creaking slowly out of the house, her dresses that once fit now hanging on her, a turban on her head, large sunglasses.

I said to my mother, "What's the matter with her?"

She said, "She's sick."

In 1974, people were just called "sick" all the way until they were dead, with nothing in-between.

My mother might have been silent about anything involving female body parts, but she was an exuberant patient. Something about living in the forest during World War II, suffering malnutrition, made my mother a very meticulous patient when she came to the U.S.

There was one time that something was found on her own breast. I couldn't make it all out completely because she hid the information from the youngest daughters but I overheard her telling my oldest sister while I eavesdropped nearby. There was some surgery, some scarring to the nipple, more silence, more pantomime.

Receiving my diagnosis

I remembered this years later when I went for my 21st annual mammogram. I was diligent. Each year the same clinic, the same room, the same gathering of women in the same gowns. Sometimes I would be set free right after the mammogram. Sometimes there would be a call back for a 3D mammogram or an ultrasound. The words "fibrous" and "dense" and "Ashkenazic" were tossed around a lot. But each year my visit to the imaging center had a happy conclusion: a nurse coming out to tell me everything was fine and I was free to go.

Everything is always okay, until the day it's not okay. The 2021 mammogram didn't end with me skipping off into the parking lot, happily done for the year. Instead, I was called in to talk to the radiologist. She pointed to my images enlarged on a giant screen in front of her, my breast the size of a giant flat-screen TV.

I couldn't make anything out, only what looked like a constellation of stars on a cloudy night. The radiologist explained that these were calcifications and that clustered calcifications—like here and here and here, she pointed—were likely cancer.

My brain turned off. My body continued moving but the rest of me was hovering somewhere up by the ceiling. I met my Nurse Navigator, a kind woman, my own personal advocate and contact. She handed me a pink bag filled with information, even a free book. And then I left, a different person than the one who arrived.

Removing the stigma

Two months later, on the day of my double mastectomy, I got the answer to all those questions that had burned in my 14-year-old mind. Could breasts be cut off? Well, yes. Where did the breasts go? To the pathologist. Could this happen to anyone, even a President's wife? Yes, even me.

Unlike my mother, I'm open about my breast cancer. Not loud, not announcing it on social media, but happy and even eager to talk about it and answer the questions people have. I knew I had two choices, to speak or not speak, to hide or be open. I realized that if I could dispel some of the mystery and horror of the words "breast cancer," I would do that.

It's not 1974 anymore. The mutilation is not quite as extreme, death not quite as much of a certainty. Yes, I lost one piece of me, and then another. Parts of my chest are so numb that I'm convinced I could have surgery there with no anesthesia.

Ironically, I realize there are good changes like no more underwire bras, no more breasts falling into my armpits when I lay on my back. They look good in clothes. And most importantly – they almost certainly can't get cancer like the old pair.

Since I'm open about the diagnosis, I ended up serving as a cautionary warning to my sisters, all of whom marched off for mammograms that had been delayed during the pandemic. Two others were diagnosed in the same six-month time period with the same form of breast cancer. It was a wake-up call to the family, and to all the young women in our family. Speak up, be open, live.

Linda Pressman is a writer and the author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie and Jewish Girls Go Wild. She lives in Arizona. For more information, visit: lindajpressman.com.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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