Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [148]
“YOU HAVE BREAST cancer.” Those are the words one in eight women will hear, but, trust me, knowing those odds doesn’t make it any easier to hear it. And those words were what Barbara Smith said to me, to us—Cate and John and me—on the afternoon of November 3rd, the day after the election of 2004.
Earlier that day, the three of us had arrived at Faneuil Hall in a motorcade past lines of well-wishers waving and cheering, reaching their hands toward the car, four and five deep on the sidewalks as we passed, just as if it were a victory celebration. As we’d done a hundred times before, we stepped out of the SUV and into a building, into a quiet space—this time a bookstore in a basement, I think—where we were to wait until the event—this time John Kerry’s concession speech—was ready to begin. His daughters, Vanessa and Alex Kerry, came in; it would be our last time with them, probably, certainly like this. On the campaign train ride through the Southwest in August, Emma Claire gave half of her dolphin-shaped best-friend bracelet to Alex, who, sweetly, had worn it, at least for a while. Alex got a lot of points with me for that. And I had grown especially fond of Vanessa—she had a spirit that would serve her well, one she had needed in the past and would need in the months to come. The room broke up into sexes and age groups, like rooms had been doing since junior high school dances. Cate talked to the Kerry girls. The two Johns talked. Then Teresa came in, hobbling toward me, her ankle thickly wrapped. Her shoe had broken and she had fallen, and as sorry as I was that she was hurt, I was just pleased to be able to listen to a conversation about something as trivial as a twisted ankle. It was probably really painful, but it was, after all, a twisted ankle. The election and the two tough years that preceded it. This awful unwanted speech now. The appointment with the breast surgeon to follow. A twisted ankle was actually just what I needed. I let myself concentrate on her every word.
Cate and I sat in the front row with the Kerry women as the men stepped up to the stage. My husband spoke first. We listened as he gave his speech, listened as he never used the words concede or lose or defeat. His defiance was a small gesture, but we had learned about how precious hope could be—and we had more lessons ahead—and somehow saying those words seemed to us the same as relinquishing hope, so even with the concession speech to follow, he would not say them. John finished to warm applause and left the stage, left John Kerry alone to receive the palpably extraordinary love of the people gathered there, left him to say the words that John would not.
He said them. And then it was over. We rode in the same car in which we had arrived, in the same seats, Cate and John and I again, now away from Faneuil Hall, still cheered on by the waiting crowds. No one else knew, but we were driving on to face our next fight.
If there was ever a day and a place where we would be identifiable, it was this day in Boston, so I was glad we had a little special treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Someone met us at a back door, met us and a pared-down Secret Service group, their faces solemn for the present chore. Through back corridors and empty stairwells, we made our way to a bright examining room. There we first met Barbara Smith, who would later be my surgeon. It was impossible not to have immediate confidence in this serene, intelligent woman. She explained the needle biopsy and the process for getting results, and she asked if John and Cate wanted to stay for the procedure. I could have told her the answer. They hadn’t stayed in our bedroom as I gave myself hormone shots before Emma Claire and Jack were born, they weren’t likely to stay now.
When they left, she put the needle next to the lump and with a dull click pulled out the tiniest amount of tissue. She did the same thing under my arm, from a lymph node. She left to have the tissue examined, and my family came back in. Cate’s face was stained with tears. It was, for me, a worse