This seems an odd comparison and it has been many years since I thought of it. But it sprang to mind this morning when I woke up, checked The New York Times front page to be sure I hadn’t dreamed president-elect Barack Obama’s victory, and got as weepy about it as I was last night:
Forty-one years ago, almost to the day, the soap slipped out of my hand in the shower. I grabbed for it, missed, and caught my breast instead. And, I caught a shock. The kind that makes your brain rattle around in your head. The kind that makes you dizzy.
In my hand was a hard lump that felt like a pebble about the size of a pea. There was no mistaking it: no mistaking that it was what cancer warnings are about, no mistaking that a doctor was required. Now!
It was my third day in Minneapolis, having just moved north with my then-husband from Houston. I didn’t know a soul yet, let alone a physician. Through a series of telephone calls, I found one and made an appointment.
Yes, he told me, it was the kind of lump that needed immediate surgery. Although it was seldom malignant in women my age (I was 26), he said as he showed me a drawing in a medical book about breast cancer, it was not unknown and it was often malignant in older women. It should be removed without delay.
Back in those days, 1967, there wasn’t much choice about treating breast cancer and I signed the permission, if the lump proved malignant, to remove my breast then and there. So I went into surgery a few days later not knowing if I would have one breast or two when I woke up.
In the recovery room of a hospital, a nurse told me the lump was benign, that under what seemed to me to be an excessive amount of bandaging for three stitches, I still had my breast.
I wept. And I kept weeping. So great was my relief that I didn’t stop weeping, on and off, for two or three days. More than I had wept over anything before or since.
Now, forty-odd years after marches and riots and bombings and murders over the right of black people to vote, over the right of black children to attend the same schools as white children, over the right of black people to sit and eat and travel and use the same drinking fountains as white people do, the United States has elected a black man to be president. And not just any man – black or white.
Yesterday, we elected a man who has engaged the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans, a man who believes hope is consequential. A man who convinced us to believe in hope too and that with it, there can be change.
It is a new day in so many respects, and I weep this morning in even greater relief than in 1967, which was, after all, only a personal release. Today’s is universal.
There is so much to do. So many wrongs to right. So much hard work ahead. But today, let us rejoice, tears and all. We have a done a good thing.
Forty-one years ago, almost to the day, the soap slipped out of my hand in the shower. I grabbed for it, missed, and caught my breast instead. And, I caught a shock. The kind that makes your brain rattle around in your head. The kind that makes you dizzy.
In my hand was a hard lump that felt like a pebble about the size of a pea. There was no mistaking it: no mistaking that it was what cancer warnings are about, no mistaking that a doctor was required. Now!
It was my third day in Minneapolis, having just moved north with my then-husband from Houston. I didn’t know a soul yet, let alone a physician. Through a series of telephone calls, I found one and made an appointment.
Yes, he told me, it was the kind of lump that needed immediate surgery. Although it was seldom malignant in women my age (I was 26), he said as he showed me a drawing in a medical book about breast cancer, it was not unknown and it was often malignant in older women. It should be removed without delay.
Back in those days, 1967, there wasn’t much choice about treating breast cancer and I signed the permission, if the lump proved malignant, to remove my breast then and there. So I went into surgery a few days later not knowing if I would have one breast or two when I woke up.
In the recovery room of a hospital, a nurse told me the lump was benign, that under what seemed to me to be an excessive amount of bandaging for three stitches, I still had my breast.
I wept. And I kept weeping. So great was my relief that I didn’t stop weeping, on and off, for two or three days. More than I had wept over anything before or since.
Now, forty-odd years after marches and riots and bombings and murders over the right of black people to vote, over the right of black children to attend the same schools as white children, over the right of black people to sit and eat and travel and use the same drinking fountains as white people do, the United States has elected a black man to be president. And not just any man – black or white.
Yesterday, we elected a man who has engaged the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans, a man who believes hope is consequential. A man who convinced us to believe in hope too and that with it, there can be change.
It is a new day in so many respects, and I weep this morning in even greater relief than in 1967, which was, after all, only a personal release. Today’s is universal.
There is so much to do. So many wrongs to right. So much hard work ahead. But today, let us rejoice, tears and all. We have a done a good thing.