Leases

A little on where I've been and where I'm going

Photo by Eugene Golovesov

Here’s something I started writing last month but didn’t send, let alone finish:

Before I lay face down onto the gurney for an MRI, I choose an aromatherapy scent. Music too, which they’ll pipe into headphones placed over plugs stuffed in my ears, like pillows in too-small cases.

I pick lavender for the scent. Piano for the sound. Anything to relax.

I wrote this six weeks ago, during the first week of March, as an opening to talk about my experience with breast cancer screenings in the days before I underwent a partial mastectomy. I was fearful and anxious, and frankly, spiraling.

No one likes a health cliffhanger, so I’ll cut to the chase: I’m fine. Surgery went fine, everything is benign, I’ve healed well, and my screening protocols were actually downgraded, which was a huge relief.

But this overdue check-in isn’t about the surgery itself (though I have included a “how we got here” summary at the end of this post). Instead, I want to talk about leases.

When I received the results of the excision, I called my husband with the good news. He was thrilled, and said, “Are you so happy?”

My candid response was, “Yes. I mean—I think so?” 

In the hours and days after, as I unpacked my response, the words a new lease on life kept floating through my head. It was accompanied by weightlessness, the sense that a massive boulder I’d been shouldering had instantly vaporized. I’d been carrying that rock around for over a year, since January of 2023, when I started getting MRIs every six months to monitor a suspicious spot. I don’t think I realized how much the monitoring weighed on me until there was reprieve. A release as much as a re-lease. If I’m honest, I’d expected something terrible to happen to me.