September 22, 2015

By Amelia Sauter

We have cancer. That’s what it feels like when someone you are that close to gets a diagnosis. WE have cancer. At least that’s what it felt like three weeks ago at the Wende Breast Clinic. The sad clown face on the nurse that day as she walked Leah out from the biopsy shouted a diagnosis that they couldn’t say out loud before the pathology report came back. I called my parents that night and said Leah is going to be told tomorrow that she has cancer and I don’t know what we are going to do. The shock, the grief, the WTFs. Leah and I are going through all of it together.

Everything in your head comes to a crashing halt when the cancer diagnosis comes. And the ripple effects of the crash shake up every corner of your life. For us, that ripple has an aftershock that most people don’t have to deal with: We were planning to open a new restaurant this fall. So now we are both indefinitely unemployed. Until we get pathology reports back after surgery and meet with an oncologist, we are both in limbo. No plans can be made. Talk about bad timing. For now, I paint and I cry. I paint every fucking wall in that building, every ceiling, every piece of trim. I paint and I cry and I hope. It’s all I can do.

We have cancer is changing to Leah has cancer now that the surgery is approaching. Our paths are separating. I can’t do that part with her. I can’t lay on the operating room table with her and join her in in the LaLa land of anesthesia and in the exhaustion of pain and painkillers. I am not losing a breast and I will not know the same grief as her.

My path is a river of utter helplessness. I have never before had the feeling of wanting so badly to protect the person I love most and been able to do nothing. Every second, I fight the urge to grab her and run from the hospital and take her away from all this. But I can’t save her. It is the worst feeling I have ever had in my life.