I don’t remember if I was going somewhere or returning to a temporary home.Īt the time of the first biopsy, I was writing an essay on Kathy Acker and her Don Quixote, which opens beautifully, paradoxically with an abortion and a conception: an aborted fetus, a conceived idea. That’s what I wrote in a text to a professor on my dissertation committee. I don’t remember where I was heading on the day the doctor called and said I could keep my breast. This time, they cleared the margins, which meant I would not have mastectomy and I could go to theory camp that summer which is what I was calling the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where I had a fellowship to study madness. And yes, the cancer was real and still there, so I underwent a second surgery a week later. But no, the diagnosis wasn’t initially clear, it was pre-cancer, stage zero, a point so small, the doctor wanted to do an excisional biopsy (also called a lumpectomy) to confirm the disease and maybe get it out. I have a history of breast calcifications, and had undergone, three years before, a needle biopsy on the same spot that later held malignant cells. In May 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
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