Joan Garrett McClane: Before the cancer, there was Christmastime.
There was convincing her curly-headed 7-year-old son for one more year that Santa Claus existed. There was Amazon shopping for her husband, Terry Cannon, and hopes of sledding on the pillowy white hills if it snowed.
And there was her work, her hospice, the hospice she dreamed to open and almost didn’t. There was the nice new sign outside her office building on Rossville Avenue and the excited staff. There was the sense that at age 43 she had finally — after years of toil and worry — arrived.
Deanna Duncan hadn’t planned to have her breasts flattened and analyzed that day. But the doctor she was meeting with about hospice research had the mammogram machine in his office and she was overdue for a checkup. She joked with him about it. It was funny, how good she was at multitasking, how busy she could keep herself and waste not a minute.
Her life was a list: Mammogram — check.
The airiness of the moment seems absurd now.
There was a spot inside her, a troubling spot. And in the next days, a flurry of tests would show that cancer had been creeping through her body and gnawing her bones. What she thought had been routine back pain was actually compound fractures, little pieces of her spine disintegrating, giving in to the disease.
The first scan of her body lit like a Christmas tree.
She had seen the patterns before, in her patients, not long before they were gone. She was a hospice doctor, after all. So she didn’t ask about the stage of her cancer. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know how long she had left. Denial is essential to survive. Denial is essential to survive, she told herself.
But Terry wanted to know, and the doctor told him.
Stage 4.
There were just months left.
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