For Kamille

 My interruption

The Birmingham sky was postcard pretty on the Friday that I found out I have Stage 3 breast cancer. Brilliant brushstrokes of cerulean stretched from East Lake to West End and the sun pierced through the sky. It was like the setting of a dream, but the snap of cold in the air reminded me that it wasn’t.

It was lunchtime, and my team and I were interviewing for an opening in our department. The candidate, a woman, was in her early thirties. She had a messy ponytail, cheap mail-order tortoiseshell glasses and wore an ink blue pants suit that revealed her skinny legs. Five minutes into her talk, I wrote the words: “She’s a no.” She rambled and complained about her former employer and my mind drifted toward lunch.

I discreetly pulled out my phone underneath the table and scrolled through emails while she answered the questions from our prepared list. I saw that I had missed a call from an “801” number and my heart began to beat in my chest.

I clumsily excused myself from the room, walked over to a corner of the hallway and dialed my voicemail. The woman's message began with a sigh, and then, in a heavy African accent, said, “Mrs. Sutton, I have your results. Please call me.”

My knees began to buckle and I looked around for a place to go. I walked out onto the student center patio and tried to steady my fingers while calling back the number.

“Are you somewhere where you can talk?” the doctor said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you want me to call you back when you can talk?”

“No,” I said. My stomach was in knots and I felt I as if was going to throw up.

“Well...I am the doctor who did your biopsies. Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” I said, becoming annoyed. It had been less than 48 hours since she was pulling tissue from my right breast and lymph nodes. How could I forget?

“Well, we tested all three of the areas and all three came back cancer.”

Her words felt like a sledgehammer to the side of my head. Vibrations were coming from my skull and her words seeped in, in slow motion.  

With each word she spoke – “metastasized” and “mastectomy” – a part of me slowly deflated. I thought of my 10-year-old daughter who loves art and hangs on my every word and of my 9-year-old baby boy who wants to save all the animals and enjoys kissing my cheeks. I thought of the possibility of dying. I was just two weeks shy of my 44th birthday. 

After I hung up, her words were still sitting in my ear. I tried to get them out with my finger, but they were stuck.

I sat and stared for a moment. I spotted a man in the distance on the fifth floor of a parking deck. He was near the edge of the guardrail. “What is he doing,” I thought to myself. Was he going to jump?

Maybe I should jump.

I called my husband and without taking a breath, blurted out, “They said I have cancer.”

“I’m on my way,” he said and immediately came to my job. I walked toward the parking lot in a daze. I left my purse, my car, my keys, my coat. 

When I got into his gray Infiniti, he grabbed my hand and said, "I'm sorry." 

I didn’t speak, couldn’t speak. 

He held my hand the entire drive. I stared out the window and tried to find words to say.

When we got home, he and I prayed, ate sandwiches, and watched episodes of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” We didn't know what else to do, so we laughed and cried and braced ourselves for cancer.