On Wednesday our first grandchild was born. On Thursday I was diagnosed

On Wednesday evening, January 24, 2018, my oldest daughter gave birth to our first grandchild, a beautiful baby boy with dark hair and even darker eyes.

On Thursday morning, January 25, 2018, I found out I had breast cancer. I was very sick and needed immediate medical care, I was told. In the moments following my diagnosis, I made the very personal decision not to tell my husband and children until after the bris.

Everyone had joked that my daughter, who worked in the same school as me, wouldn’t have her baby until the mid-winter vacation, since I worked full time and rarely took off. And that’s exactly what happened.

Vacation was Thursday through Tuesday. Right after I closed my office and locked the school doors on Wednesday evening, with a long list of things to accomplish, including looking after my ten-year-old son who was sick, the baby was born.

I met my husband at the hospital. We hugged and kissed the new baby, hugged and kissed the exhausted new parents, gave my teenage daughters the go-ahead to buy “the cutest things you ever saw, don’t forget the pom-pom hat,” and started planning for the shalom zachar and bris.

I’m the type who rarely visits the doctor, and had seen him only a few times in the past 20 years. Because I only came when I truly didn’t feel well, my doctor had accommodated my request, a few weeks previously, to run a mono test, which came back negative. I still wasn’t feeling well, and my OB, covering all possibilities, scheduled me for a diagnostic mammogram, although she thought I was just rundown, my hectic schedule finally catching up with me, and she advised me to slow down and give myself “me time.”

Vacation for my boys began on Friday, and I’d planned to get a lot done on Thursday. I arrived for my appointment as scheduled, at 7:45 a.m. While everyone else had their test and was told to “come back next year,” I was called back four times for “additional images.” After the fourth mammogram, the nurse told me the radiologist wanted a sonogram.

By this point I understood this was no longer routine. I’d already called my pediatrician’s office three times, pushing off the appointment for my sick son by 40 minutes, an hour, more. I told them I was held up at another appointment and promised to get there as soon as I could.