Finding the Right Doctor to Deliver Bad News to a Cancer Patient

My wife, Meredith, and I were having dinner at a place we’d been wanting to try since it opened. The Brooklyn restaurant, self-described as a “Jew–ish” bistro, was as cozy and familiar as I’d hoped. The delicacies — latkes topped with slices of smoked sable, a gin martini washed in pickle brine — appealed to me as an epicure and a descendant of shtetl stock. But on that Thursday night something was off; not with the food, but with me.

Six days earlier, I’d undergone a biopsy of my right breast, after two irregular mammograms — one routine, one follow-up — revealed what appeared to be calcium deposits.

My wife assured me that biopsies, like follow-up mammograms, become more frequent as we get older. And, she said, they might turn up false positives — especially when your breasts are as dense as memory foam, as mine are. Other friends have shared such experiences. I often joked that getting our breasts prodded, needled and squashed in the vise grip of the mammography plates was a rite of passage at our age. But the observation feels different when delivered as a punchline.

I was doing my best to appear fully engaged in our date, but Meredith — with whom I’ve been married for 13 years and partnered for 22 — could see I was agonizing over my impending test results. So I confessed: I could feel bad news coming in my gut, which, personal history has dictated, is rarely wrong.

Sharing my anxiety was enough to alleviate it for the time being, especially since there was nothing to be done but to savor each delectable dish set before us. By the time we strolled home, I was so sated by our meal that I’d managed to put the biopsy out of my mind.

At 3 a.m., however, I was jolted awake by extreme nausea. I crawled to the bathroom, seeking the cold comfort of the tiled floor. The next thing I knew, I was bidding adieu to every bite I’d relished just hours earlier. As my head hung over the toilet bowl, I worked through a mental checklist of potential causes: I hadn’t finished my martini, so it wasn’t alcohol. Meredith and I had split every dish, and she was sound asleep, so it wasn’t food poisoning.

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