Being Normal

A couple of weird healthcare encounters

On November 5, Trump was elected and I was told that I might have cancer (I don’t). I have to get regular breast screenings, which have always turned up as non-suspicious, and this was a date with lots of availability. I thought I was so smart. Turns out most people don’t want to hear they might have cancer on the same day that a dire election result might trickle in.

The process of getting an ultrasound and mammogram in New York, if insurance approves it, takes a long time. In the past, I went to NYU Langone facilities but I decided to try Lennox Hill instead, in case they were quicker. You change into a paisley or pink sheet-dress and sit. It gets drafty. After maybe 20 minutes you are called into a room for the mammogram, then you go back to sitting for another hour. After that, you are called into another room for an ultrasound, which can provide more detailed imaging. Then, you wait another hour or so to talk to the doctor at the office about their interpretation.

I checked in at 1.30pm and at around 4.15pm I was back in the waiting room with several other women, refreshing news websites to see the election-day coverage. Instead of the doctor, a tech came out in a rush and told me to schedule a biopsy, in front of everyone, because “the radiologist thinks it might be cancer”. This was an incredibly daunting thing to hear but I was stunned and making awkward eye contact with a fellow Waiter, so just said, “uh, okay”. Then I paid my co-pay, went down the elevator, through the sterile grey reception, and burst into tears outside a sex store.

Putting aside the scientific reality — only about 20 percent of breast lumps turn out to be cancerous — this was not a communication rooted in compassion or empathy. A way to do that would be away from other people, and more: “hey, we’d like you to schedule a biopsy, the likelihood of it being cancer is low but we want to be thorough”. Logically, I knew the risk was low, and had always suspected I’d need to get a biopsy eventually, but the way the message was delivered melted away all logic.

I took two subway trains home, Trump was elected, and instead of watching each state announce its votes, I scoured the internet to read about breast cancer. I’m lucky that I was able to schedule a biopsy two weeks later (some of my New Zealand friends have told me they faced months-long waits). I’m also lucky to have pretty good insurance, which meant I was able to get a biopsy at all: a woman in front of me at the reception was told her insurance wouldn’t cover further imaging.

Biopsies are low-key super unpleasant but it ended up being benign, though a small surgery may be on the cards. In the waiting room afterwards I put a little ice packet on my head because healthcare settings make me nervous. An older woman next to me asked what I was doing and I told her with deep shame that I was scared. “It’s okay to be scared,” she told me.

During the two-week wait for the biopsy I cycled through a lot of thoughts: was this my fault because I had recently done a somewhat obnoxious instagram post celebrating finally being able to move on from a traumatic surgery I had in 2020? Was this my fault because I skipped my imaging last year since I’d had another surgery and simply wanted to give my body and insurance-admin-brain a break? Most pressingly, I was genuinely worried that the people who have stood by me through these weird and dramatic health struggles of the last few years might have finally had enough. People have enough shit going on without me having a health crisis every other year!

I went to a science writers conference in North Carolina, which turned out to be a good distraction. I even met a woman who worked with engineers trying to create a better cancer screening method for women with dense breasts (where it’s more difficult to identity whether lumps are of concern or not).

But another thought that repeatedly popped into my mind was an encounter I had back in 2020 at Woodhull hospital. This was also a case where a 30-second interaction dramatically factored into how I interpreted a healthcare event.

I had just been admitted to the emergency room after fainting twice and carried in via an ambulance stretcher and the first nurse I saw after an hour wait on a stretcher in a hallway was also not great. When she came over to set me up with an IV drip I told her I’d fainted twice earlier that night, so as to give her a head’s up that I might faint again upon injection. Instead she walked away.

After what felt like an hour but was probably really 15 minutes, she returned to my curtained section and said: “Are you ready to get better now?” That was a point where I realized that hospitals aren’t necessarily the safe-haven you would think and I started getting very concerned I was going to die in that ER. As it turned out I was internally bleeding, yada yada, if you know me, you know the story of the burst ovarian cyst and surgery that gave me acute respiratory failure and the ICU etc. Anyway, when I finally had a CT Scan some six hours later, the nurses on morning shift were shocked to find I’d just been chilling in the ER. I was still just shocked she had talked like that.

In therapy, we discuss the importance of advocating for myself with healthcare professionals, but that stay in 2020 really ingrained a response in me to try and be as compliant as possible with such workers: because they can walk away, and deny you care. They can be callous as you are squirming in pain while blood rocks and rolls away in your abdomen.

This is kind of a meandering piece and also my first Substack blog, but I think that these are two instances where it REALLY wouldn’t have been that hard to be a little more, well, normal about communicating. I understand healthcare workers are underpaid, overworked, and witness immense suffering, but in both cases these two interactions had a big impact. It’s not even compassion, it’s just being normal. Or maybe, in the absence of truly knowing what “normal” even is, it’s being human.