Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards

on our calendars. My husband was running for vice president of the United States, and certainly the next monumental moment in our lives would be on November 3, 2004, election day. But sometimes the critical moments are hidden in an ordinary day. My life changed on October 21 as I showered. Standing in a hotel bathroom in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I felt a lump, fat and smooth, like a slice of plum midway between my armpit and nipple. I convinced myself that it was just a cyst. Allowing myself to think that it could be a cyst allowed me to dress that day, to lead the town hall, and then to campaign for another week before a mammogram and ultrasound took away such foolish illusions. Maybe not so foolish: No women in my family had had breast cancer save my father's sister. On my mother's side, the side important for breast cancer, I thought, there was nothing. And this was, I believed, nothing but a cyst. Since it was the size of a generous slice of plum, though, I would have it checked when I could. But it was eleven days before election day, and I had a full schedule. I couldn't get it checked for a few days without canceling events and alerting the press. And I couldn't tell the press because they would say the threat of cancer was a play for sympathy, and I didn't tell John because these days leading up to the election might be the most life-changing days of his life, and my plum shouldn't be on his mind unless it needed to be. So far, it was just a cyst-plum, and it didn't need to be.
    A week later, after a secret mammogram and biopsy while I was home in Raleigh to vote early, it was clear it was not just a cyst. Watching the radiologist read the ultrasound monitor, I knew it could not be something benign like a cyst. The plum was likely to be cancer, and I had to tell John. He jumped into action. He arranged for a biopsy in Boston the day after the election, and we barreled through the final days of the campaign as if that sword were not dangling over our heads. In truth, the campaign gave us each a respite from letting ourselves go where we knew we would likely have to go after the biopsy the next week: The test was likely to confirm I had cancer, we were certain. And a week later, the day after the 2004 presidential election that did not alter John's life (or mine) in any significant way, we drove from somber words of the concession speeches at Faneuil Hall in Boston to Massachusetts General Hospital and the somber words we knew were coming.
    I cannot tell you whether knowing the words “you have cancer” are coming makes it easier, since I did not get to do it two ways. I did it one way, and although that was bad enough, I suspect that it was easier getting used to the idea of cancer over a period of a couple of weeks, getting a chance to tell my family in little pieces rather than having to hear it one day and having everyone sitting at my knees in tears all at once after that. So my husband, my oldest daughter and I stood erect and took with resignation the words: You have cancer. It had been a life-changing day after all. We would have to adjust our lives to the disease.
    At first it was not cancer itself to which I adjusted but the idea of cancer. The disease was inside me, but except for that plum, there would be no reason to suspect it was there based on how I felt or how I looked. Even when I started to look like a cancer patient in external ways and to feel in internal ways like I was sick, it was, honestly, the medicine I was taking to stop the cancer, not the plum-sized tumor itself, that was responsible. If the pharmacist who was preparing my chemotherapy infusion happened to drop a bag of my medicine on the floor, he would wear protective gear to clean it up; it was sufficiently toxic to require that degree of precaution. And yet we pumped it directly into my veins for several hours every two weeks. It was no wonder I was feeling lousy.
    In those months, that first year when the chief nurse Ann was greeting me at