I don’t have many memories of my high school science classes. Science was, to put it gently, never my strongest subject, and I've blocked most of them out.
I remember that my AP Environmental Science teacher’s name was (allegedly) Robin Jay Crain and that he was an avid bird watcher.
I remember that I signed up for Physics because at the end of the year, the whole class took a field trip to an amusement park, and I love roller coasters (though no one had warned me that on said field trip, we would be tasked with calculating the velocity of the roller coasters…).
But the memory that stands out the most occurred during my sophomore year when my class watched a documentary on genetic testing. It was 2008, three years after my mother died, something that I had desperately tried to keep hidden from my classmates. My mother had been the principal of my previous school, and when she died, I felt like everyone around me was walking on eggshells. I was the girl with the dead mother. My classmates’ dead principal. My teacher’s dead boss. Once I got to high school, I was desperate to be anything else.
In the documentary, two sisters lost their mother to breast cancer. I remember holding my breath, not wanting the rest of the class to know how closely tied my story was to that on the screen. The word cancer was enough to spike my anxiety. I thought about it constantly. I worried about it constantly. And now it was in my science class.
The sisters’ mother had a mutation in one of her BRCA genes, leading to an increased risk of breast cancer. The film followed the women as they went through genetic testing to find out if they were carriers of the genetic mutation or not. On the screen, the daughters cried. In the classroom, I tried to hide my tears and quell my anxiety. At fifteen, I had diagnosed myself with more life-ending illnesses than I could count. And now, I had something new to worry about.
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, only five years after scientists pinpointed the location of the genetic mutation BRCA 1 and years before it was common for people to be tested for the mutation.
I got my first mammogram at 28. I was living in France, and having the test done in another language helped put some distance between myself and the experience. Everything came back normal.
“You’re worried for nothing,” the French doctor told me, my shirt and bra still folded on the changing room chair. (Just as a rule of thumb, if you ever have to go to the doctor in France, you will take off your clothes, there will be no hospital gown, and you will be expected to sit there half-naked and listen to your medical fate. It doesn’t matter if you’re there for a flu shot or major surgery—you will be naked.)
I asked this doctor if I could have genetic testing. She said no since my mother had not tested positive for the mutation.
“But she died before they were widely testing people!” I protested (it is also commonplace to protest in France; those rumors are very true. Shockingly, bickering with your doctor isn’t as acceptable in the States.).
It didn’t matter. They would only test me if my mother had been a known carrier of the mutation.
When I moved back to America in 2022, one of the first things I did was take the steps to get tested. I had carried around the anxiety for too long. I needed to know.
I was six years old when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I was twelve when she died. For six years of my life, I watched my mother’s roller coaster health journey. She would start chemo. She would lose her hair. Her left arm swelled two times its normal size. The cancer would go away. The cancer would come back. Round and round for six years.
I do not tell you this to paint my mother as an invalid. My mother was the principal of my school, organized support groups, and was involved in our church. She was a cornerstone of our community.
I tell you what it was like to witness my mother’s cancer journey to try to explain why now, almost twenty years after she died, I struggle with hypogonadal tendencies. Why I get anxious the people I love the most will disappear. Why the scariest thing in the world was to make the appointment to get genetic testing. Why the most freeing thing in the world was to get genetic testing.
I lived in fear of the unknown for most of my life. Sitting in that science class had confirmed every scary thing I believed—there could be something inside of me trying to kill me.
It was a Friday afternoon when the doctor called with the test results. A Friday afternoon that was years and so many sleepless nights in the making. I had an answer. And sometimes, that alone can bring an anxious mind peace.
I am not going to tell you the result of my test. It’s not that the result doesn’t matter—it does—but what mattered more was taking the test. What mattered more was finally having an answer. When you grieve, so much is unanswerable. So much will never be known. So much left unsaid. That, for me, is one of the stickiest things about grief. I love to know the answers. I was (and still am) the kid who asked too many questions. So, to have just this one answered is something to be celebrated.
Today, my mother would be 65. A big birthday, a birthday worth celebrating. And I am celebrating. I'm celebrating her life. I'm celebrating the impact she had on who I am. And I'm celebrating the medical advances that have provided answers to me and so many others.
I wish I could go back in time to that fifteen-year-old girl sitting in her science class riddled with anxiety. I would tell her that it will be okay, not easy by any means, but okay. That someday she will have some of the answers. Twenty years later, she will still miss her mother, but telling people she died will be less scary. Twenty years later, science will still feel like a foreign language, but she will work for a health-based non-profit that helps young people access life-saving health services. Twenty years later, she will still have anxiety, but there will be peace and ways to cope.
Twenty years later, she will be just a little less scared.
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