It had all started off so innocently. A mild fluttering in my right breast, something hard to pin down except that it reminded me of the sensation created on the tongue by the sherbet dips of my British childhood. Not that that was something easy to explain even to an English doctor, which is why, perhaps, when I mentioned it to her last November mine merely handed me a number to make an appointment for a mammogram. Having heard that the British government was prioritizing early treatment for cancer, I lifted the phone anticipating a speedy consultation. Instead a boy who sounded a dead ringer for the “the computer says no” character in the TV sitcom Little Britain told me he could offer me an appointment in April, a full five months away.Since my forays to the UK are of limited duration, I managed to persuade myself that I had been imagining things and did nothing more until this week when a persistent nagging ache had me convinced that I was one step away from my deathbed (this in spite of the fact that my friend the vet assured me that where there is no mass [by which I assume he meant lump], there is rarely any cancer).
So now I had submitted to having my breasts squeezed into something rather like the toasted sandwich machine in my kitchen, an action that had proved about as easy as squashing in some of my super-sized lunches. Then came my protracted vigil in the corridor until at last it occurred to me that perhaps I should ask how the system worked. At once it was action stations. The results were found and stared at, a doctor fetched to read them to me, another to explain them in English yet a third to give me a manual check and further reassurance. At no point did anyone utter the word “cancer,” although when I looked at the report, the unexpected term “calcification” popped up.
“Calcification? Whatever does that mean?” I texted to the vet who texted back at once that it meant there was nothing to worry about. The third of the doctors thought that an ultrasound might be a good idea; I concluded that a diet certainly would be. But the most striking thing I kept remembering as I made my way back to Göreme in the bus was that the whole business had been sorted out in the course of a single afternoon and at a cost of TL 120 (about 50 pounds). I suppose if I'd gone private in England, the speed might have been equally impressive, although the cost would certainly have been prohibitive. There are arguments, too, about the rights and wrongs of paying for treatment that is not equally available to everyone. But for the time being, I'm just relieved to be able to stop thinking about sherbet dips.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
