The In-Between

What a mammogram scare revealed about fear, love, and ordinary life

A few hours after a routine mammogram, I got an email that changed my day. They had seen something and needed me to come back.

I’ve had a mammogram every year since I turned forty. My mother had breast cancer at seventy, but I’ve done the genetic testing and don’t carry the mutations they look for. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly at risk, and I haven’t spent much time worrying about cancer. That’s part of why the email caught me off guard. It disrupted a sense of safety I hadn’t realized I was relying on.

I scheduled the follow-up for a few days later, and then I went on with my life.

If you asked how I usually handle fear, the answer wouldn’t be flattering. I think in loops. I imagine outcomes. I try to think my way into certainty, even when certainty isn’t available.

Interestingly, that isn’t what happened this time. The fear didn’t disappear, but I kept it contained. It was close enough to feel, but not running the show. I worked, I wrote, I showed up where I needed to.

The night before the follow-up was entirely ordinary. My husband was at choir rehearsal, which meant I was on bedtime duty with my youngest. I was exhausted in that full-body way that makes everything feel heavy. When I climbed into his bed to hug him goodnight, I couldn’t make myself leave. I just stayed there, wrapped around him, letting the day end slowly.

A few minutes in, my eighteen-year-old knocked on the door and asked if he could join. He’s six feet tall now, but we made it work. The three of us squeezed into a twin bed, limbs everywhere, laughing a little at how ridiculous it was and not moving anyway. Those are the moments I want to hold onto. The ones that aren’t guaranteed. I could feel that, even then, in a way I don’t always let myself.

The anxiety stayed contained until about 3:30 in the morning, just a few hours before the appointment. That’s when something loosened enough to pull me out of sleep. Enough for my mind to start doing what it does so naturally: filling in the blanks with possibilities that began to feel more real than they were.

Underneath all that was a quieter, sharper thought: I want more nights like that. More ordinary moments that aren’t actually ordinary at all. I didn’t panic, but I could feel the edge of it, the familiar pull toward imagining what I couldn’t know.

The appointment itself was straightforward. They started with a focused mammogram on the area they had flagged, and then I was told to wait while a radiologist reviewed the images. If anything still looked unclear, I would be sent for an ultrasound. I prepared myself for a long wait, the kind that stretches time and invites your thoughts to wander too far ahead.

It only lasted about five minutes, but that turned out to be more than enough.

In that small window, I could feel my mind begin to move ahead of me again, turning uncertainty into something more definitive than it was. When the nurse came in and told me they wanted an ultrasound, I made a joke about how this one would be far less fun than the ones I’d had during pregnancy. She laughed in that way people do when they understand exactly what the humor is doing.

The ultrasound itself took only a few minutes, but time stretched again while it was happening. I could feel my thoughts pulling forward, constructing a version of the future I didn’t want, one that included treatments, disruptions, and loss. My mind was already starting to treat possibility like fact.

And then I realized something I didn’t expect: the fear wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about my body, or even my life in the way I would have expected. What rose up instead was something else entirely. I thought about my husband, who has already lived through more loss than most people should have to carry. I thought about my children, about the life that exists around me and because of me, about the small ordinary moments that would ripple if something changed.

My fear didn’t turn inward. It turned outward, toward the people I love.

Within ten minutes, the radiologist came back with the results. It was a fluid-filled cyst. Benign. Nothing to treat. I was free to go, released back into the life I had been living just an hour before.

Of course there was relief. That part is easy to name. What stays with me is harder to articulate. It’s the in-between. The suspended stretch where nothing is certain and everything feels possible, where your mind reaches for answers it can’t have and fear waits for an opening, where you’re asked to live alongside uncertainty without resolving it.

I used to believe that space would undo me, that I would spin or obsess or lose myself inside it. This time, though, I didn’t. I carried it. I lived alongside it. And when it finally came close, it revealed something I hadn’t fully understood before: the deepest fear I carry isn’t really about losing my life. It’s about losing my loved ones, or being taken from them.

We move through our days assuming a kind of stability, even when we know better. We make plans. We think in years. We imagine a future as something we’re owed. The truth is, we are always, whether we acknowledge it or not, living in that narrow space between what is and what could be.

There’s no way to eliminate that uncertainty. No amount of knowledge or preparation can protect us from it. The best we can do is notice when we’re still here. Still inside the life we want. Still surrounded by the people we love.

When I walked out of that appointment, the life I returned to hadn’t changed, but I could feel that my grip on it had.