Diagnosis "Favorable"

She woke up early, it was going to be a long day. By 8am her mom was there, cooking in the kitchen, keeping her hands busy. Together, they waited through a cold December morning and into the early afternoon. Finally, sometime in the very middle of the day she just decided it would be better to call than to be called and when she did, after being put on hold by a well meaning and totally unhelpful administrative assistant, the Pathologist picked up the phone at a desk somewhere she would never see and he called the diagnosis “favorable” and this was immediately incomprehensible to her. It would never have occurred to her to characterize any sort of cancerous- ness as favorable and so, she hung up the phone where she sat up in bed still achy from the biopsy stitches and the world fell away and she wasn’t stoned anymore so if fell away hard and fast.  And after 33 years of working on it, she had completely lost who she thought she had become and she did not understand life even a little and, despite the sickening diagnosis of a life threatening illness which saddened her in a places heretofore hidden away- she wished for a moment she were dead. It was simply a very, very sad afternoon. A total disappointment.Earlier in the week, as they anticipated the results with hopeful abandon, she had called it “the friendliest case of cancer” that ever was- if it was at all. It hadn’t let on a bit. No weight loss. No unusual infections, illnesses. Successful yearly check ups, hours at the gym, no significant family history of illness. Not a whisper of what was to come.