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2 JANUARY 16. CELLS GONE WILD It begins with a whiff of criminality: a suspicious place on a routine mammogram. Something fishy. On the film, a dark circle that doesn’t belong there. There being my body. The body that has, perhaps , gone wild. On the cellular level. Cancer is overproduction, the assembly belt gone haywire, the sorcerer’s broom wheeling out of control when the apprentice thinks he knows enough. Too much too much too many. The experts examine and pick and remain closelipped . It could be something. Or nothing. But they say or nothing as an afterthought. Because they know it’s cancer but they can’t say it yet because Pathology hasn’t said so. And then Pathology says so. And then the radiology Fellow says: It’s positive. The surgeon says, It’s in three places, not one, and we’ll have to take off the whole breast, we can’t conserve it. It sounds like it happens fast but it doesn’t. There is much waiting, in the hospital in a pale blue gown that’s both too loose and too tight with those little blue ties that never match up. There are phone calls. The whole thing—is a relief in a way. Because with every mammogram I’ve ever had, I’ve gone through cancer scenarios in my head: all the way to whether I’ll have an obituary in the Tribune written by a staff writer (a news obituary) or whether my husband Linc will have to pay for a death notice. I wonder whether he’ll sit shiva (Of course not) or if my mother will (Yes, of course). And I worry about my papers. My words—my six tall file cabinets filled with finished and unfinished manuscripts, letters from the days when people wrote letters , accounts of dreams from the early 1980s. Where will they go? No archivist has ever come calling, asking for Everything. Or anything. I know these questions are substitutes for questions about me, my Self. My body will go to Science. And then I will be gone from this earth. MORE JANUARY 16. HEMATOLOGY ThedayIwentforthefollow-upmammogramIalsohadanappointment with a hematologist because I have a high platelet count—high enough to be monitored but not to require intervention. The official name is ...

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