A River of Waterfalls

The metaphoric river of my life flows and twists around sand, boulders, and sometimes waterfalls. Each day brings something new; from deciding what color I want to paint my fingernails to where to go to college. Sometimes situations don’t have a straight answer.

I walked into an office that looked as if it had just had one big explosion of the color pink. Pink pillows on the couches, pink and red quilts on the wall, pink M&Ms in the bowl on the reception desk. Even the receptionist’s fingernails had been polished with pink. You would think they were trying to sway everyone’s opinion of their favorite color. I hadn’t seen that much of one color since, well, ever. Every woman in the waiting room quietly listened to the pink clock on the wall tick-tock the minutes away. I was scheduled to meet with a doctor in five minutes, and that pink clock could not tick fast enough.

“Welcome to McDonald’s. What can I get for you?” The cashier’s monotone screamed boredom.

My dad walked up to the counter, “I’ll have a Big Mac and a Sprite,” and then stepped to the side.

“Uh, I want the uh, the uh, um…hamburger…with a French fry. No wait, I want…the uh, um…chicken nuggets…?”

“Say ‘please’,” Dad reminded me.

“Please…and the toy…?” hesitant, my 4-year-old self looked up at my dad to make sure that’s what I wanted.

“Thomas, Annie?” I cautiously raised my hand, too nervous to speak a solid word, in response to the nurse’s call. Why am I anxious? I shouldn’t be uneasy. There is nothing here I haven’t seen before. My whole life I’ve been around doctor’s offices, not because I was always sick or had a broken bone, but because my dad is a surgeon and often took me with him to work. Perhaps the fact that I was the patient this time is what caused my mouth to fill with cotton.

The short, confident woman in the starch white lab coat with a crown of curly hair introduced herself as Dr. Barbara once we were enclosed in a small room, filled with the smell of hand sanitizer and sharply sterile equipment. “This office is covered in pink because of the awareness we have for breast cancer,” she started with a rehearsed, metronomic tone, “which is the most common cancer among women in the U.S.” She proceeded to repeat for me the dramatic statistics of deaths and recoveries, but I wasn’t quite sure why I needed to know all of this information. I could have Googled all this random information. By the end of her lecture I was still confused.

Someday I want to look deep into the sparkling eyes of my lovable future husband and be able to share time and all eternity with him. I, like many other girls, can’t help but wonder: where is he, when will I meet him, and how will I know? There are so many uncertainties over which I have no control. My newly wedded, older, and oh-so-lovable sister has taught me to follow my heart and all the worries and conflicts will work out in the way it was meant to be. The end of the river is out there somewhere, perhaps just not in the straightforward path expected.

I finally found my voice, “What exactly does this information have to do with me?”

In one breath Dr. Barbara sighed this: “We ran some blood tests on the sample you gave us last time you were here, and have found that you have a mutated gene, passed down from your mother, that won’t fight breast cancer. And because your mom had breast cancer at the early age of 28, the general population statistics no longer apply to you, which means that your chance of getting cancer before you are 30 years of age is 89%.”

Did I just hear that right?

My heart slammed on the breaks. I was just like everyone else, an 18-year-old high school senior with a lot on my mind: college applications, graduation, and summer plans. Everything I had been hoping to do, everything I wanted to become just got hit with a demolition crane. “So you are telling me that as an 18-year-old, I have the same level of risk for cancer as the 40-year-old women sitting in the waiting room?”

“Well, actually, its higher.”

Great, I thought as I rolled my eyes in disappointment. I am a 40-year-old high school senior who will get breast cancer within the next ten years of my life. That’s not exactly what I wanted to hear one month before I am going to walk across the long awaited stage to receive my diploma.

As I was driving home to thank my mom for the wondrous pool of genes she passed on to me, none of the beautiful mountainous landscape entered my vision. The purple wildflowers attempted to perform their well-rehearsed production of laughing in the wind, the rivers were trying to dance with the countryside for me, but I wouldn’t give them the stage. I was too engaged in the dramatic events in my own life.

“Hurry up Annie!” My mom whined at me, the indecisive seven-year-old. “You’re gonna be late for the bus!” I was standing in front my closet in tights and a tank top, trying to decide what to wear. The pink shirt with jeans, or the fuzzy green shirt and skirt? Why does this have to be so hard?

Dr. Barbara gave me two options for handling my situation. The first option was to not do anything until the cancer actually shows up, and then proceed through the chemotherapy process. I had seen my mom go through those treatments, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs. The second possibility was to have a plastic surgeon perform a prophylactic surgery, which would reduce my chances of getting breast cancer to less than 1%. For weeks on end I cried myself to sleep until I eventually I asked my parents for advice.

 “If it were me, I would have that surgery this summer before you start college, so all you have to worry about is studying once you get in the flow of things,” was the opinion from my mother. She had always been one to take action right away as soon as she found out there was a problem. I didn’t completely agree with her because I didn’t think I could handle the stress of leaving home, starting college, and a adjusting to a new body all with in a couple of months.

 “You are old enough to make your own decisions. Whichever choice you make will change your life dramatically.” Thanks, Dad, for those knowledgeable words. Like I hadn’t figured that one out for myself. I felt as if I needed to make a decision right away, as if my life was ticking away on that sickly-sweet pink clock right before my eyes, and every day was another one closer to that ultimate fatality.

Within the next 5 years I will be a new college graduate, looking for a stable job to help pay the mountains of bills on the counter, hopefully with a husband who loves me for who I am, and is looking forward to a long life together. If I prepare myself now by making the best possible choices, I can have that future. There are always construction sites along the road. Whether it is a new roommate or a life-altering surgery, usually the change is for the better.

Colossal rocks and boulders project from behind the falling water—a tumultuous crash as that water finally hits the riverbed below after greatly meandering and tossing about in the riverbed. Both results intimidating and terrifying. All it takes to make it past this immense obstacle is to look up and see how the river flows on.