SARCOMA!?!?

I still remember my doctor’s face when he told me. 

He was a kind, older, burly man with a semi-scholarly, semi-fatherly air.  He’d always been so sure of himself, but now he looked worn and puzzled – and, as an award-winning professor of surgery at George Washington University Hospital, he was not used to being puzzled.  He told me the pathologist was reporting that my tumor was a sarcoma – but that just couldn’t be, he said.  Sarcomas are extremely rare to begin with, and they don’t occur in breasts.  (He was wrong about that; they do occur in breasts but are only 1% of all breast cancers).  Sarcomas are so rare, he went on, that the pathologist at GW only saw one or two a year; maybe he was mistaken.  The surgeon advised that we wait & see – even if it was a sarcoma, he’d been able to remove the whole thing.  He thought.  Even if it did recur, it was a low-grade variety, and if it did happen to recur, we could treat it more aggressively then.

I rode the bus down Pennsylvania Avenue back to work, stunned.  The familiar buildings slid past my eyes, other people got on and off the bus.  All I could think was:  I have cancer.

I have cancer.

At the office I told my coworker Elaine what my doctor had said.  Elaine, bless her heart -- saving my life in that moment of speaking up – said:  no.  No, you are not going to settle for “waiting to see” or a pathology report from someone who may not be sure what a sarcoma looks like.  She called a friend at the National Institutes of Health, who gave her a name for me to call.  I dialed the phone; the voice on the other end of the line became lively.  Yes, they happened to be doing a study at NIH on sarcoma, and YES, they’d be VERY interested in seeing someone who might have it in her breast.