(no subject)
My mom's annual mammogram turned up something serious, and now, after a biopsy and a few days of everyone freaking out, she has a diagnosis: it is a Low-grade Infiltrating Ductile Carcinoma.
This collection of terms is somewhat overwhelming to the layman, i.e. me. I find myself reacting to the words themselves, rather than their meaning; I roll them around on my tongue, whisper them under my breath, gauging their precise emotional impact, instead of looking them up. "Low-grade" is good, Mom tells me, and I'm comforted by the very sound of it. Nobody dies of some low-grade shit. "Infiltrating" is frightening, though, and makes me look about the room suspiciously whenever I read it, as if cancer might be sneaking up on me. "Ductile" is kind of neutral. There are worse adjectives, like "explosive", or "malignant". "Ductile" I can live with.
"Carcinoma" is a terrible word. There's no spin you can put on it, it's just awful. It sounds like "carcinogen" and "melanoma" and it brings to mind all the horrible things in the world at once, cancer, radiation, plague, pollution, holes in the ozone layer, secret toxins in our food, we're all gonna die, OH GOD. That's pretty much the feeling that word inspires in me -- a gestalt impression of every problem on Earth that's too big to ever fix and is slowly getting worse. It's not fear, it's panic.
But now I have to stop reacting emotionally and go find out what these words mean. Well, they mean breast cancer. But you know.
This collection of terms is somewhat overwhelming to the layman, i.e. me. I find myself reacting to the words themselves, rather than their meaning; I roll them around on my tongue, whisper them under my breath, gauging their precise emotional impact, instead of looking them up. "Low-grade" is good, Mom tells me, and I'm comforted by the very sound of it. Nobody dies of some low-grade shit. "Infiltrating" is frightening, though, and makes me look about the room suspiciously whenever I read it, as if cancer might be sneaking up on me. "Ductile" is kind of neutral. There are worse adjectives, like "explosive", or "malignant". "Ductile" I can live with.
"Carcinoma" is a terrible word. There's no spin you can put on it, it's just awful. It sounds like "carcinogen" and "melanoma" and it brings to mind all the horrible things in the world at once, cancer, radiation, plague, pollution, holes in the ozone layer, secret toxins in our food, we're all gonna die, OH GOD. That's pretty much the feeling that word inspires in me -- a gestalt impression of every problem on Earth that's too big to ever fix and is slowly getting worse. It's not fear, it's panic.
But now I have to stop reacting emotionally and go find out what these words mean. Well, they mean breast cancer. But you know.