There are times when you are acutely aware that you are the youngest person in a room. A chemotherapy treatment center is one of them. These are the times when I think, “I’m not supposed to be here.” But here I am, in a room with people decades older than me who also have cancer, and they’re looking at me thinking the same thing, She’s not supposed to be here. It’s what I think, too, when I see someone decades younger than me with cancer. It’s a stupid vicious circle of cancer.

This is the appointment I was dreading: the oncologist. I just keep waiting for someone to say, “You’re all set. Bye!” I don’t want to hear anymore bad news. In fact, I don’t want to hear any news at all. But the oncologist laid out the plan: chemotherapy for 18 weeks (Taxotere & Carboplatin), and Herceptin for a year.

Chemo will be administered through a mediport that will be inserted in my chest in surgery. The port is a small disc, about the size of a quarter, and will sit just under my skin. A soft thin catheter tube connects the port to a large vein. Chemotherapy is administered directly into the port. Blood can be drawn through the port as well, which gets done before every appointment. It’ll be in for a year. Things like this fascinate me so I start googling all sorts of things; Who invented it? When did they start using it for chemo? What is it made of? Do they put it anywhere else in the body? Can your body reject it? What are the risks? What does it look like? Any reason to learn something new.

Each doctor I’ve seen always checks in with the same grave question, “Do you know why you’re here?” It’s like when you’re speeding and you get pulled over by a cop, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Of course you want to act innocent and mystified as if you couldn’t have possibly been speeding, but what comes out is “Yeah, I was speeding.” The doctors want to know that we’re ready, ready for words like cancer, mastectomy, chemotherapy, hair loss. I think I a lot of patients probably go into appointments with false hopes, not grasping the gravity of their diagnosis. A lot of patients simply haven’t asked questions about the details and their doctors have to carefully navigate through some big emotions. I am a reader and a researcher, so when she asked me, “Do you know why you’re here?” I said “Yes, I have cancer, I’m going to get chemo, and all my hair is going to fall out.” She liked my answer; it’s one less thing for her to explain and more time to talk about treatment details. With the basics out of the way, we walked with her into the deep, dark depths of the cancer basement.