A Word From the Weiss
        And so, another year skids to a close. Time to toss out the old, ring in the new… and get all of those medical procedures that you need now before January 1, when the percentage you’ve met toward your health insurance deductible rolls back to zero again.
        I’m not just talking about the mammogram I had on Monday (scheduled in part in the wake of poor Elizabeth Edwards’ passing). I’m referring to what I did a year ago, when I broke down and submitted to something I thought I’d never dare consider – genetic testing.
        From the time I was in my teens, when my mother’s only sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, I harbored a sense of certain doom. It was like I was walking around with an internal time bomb, inactive now but destined to go off someday. My mother tried to dodge this unwelcome twist of fate, combating her own raised risk of developing the disease with the least effective approach imaginable: denial. When a mammogram she had soon after my aunt’s death revealed a suspicious growth, she told her doctor that it had to be a mistake – just scar tissue from a fibroid she’d had removed years earlier. Then she adamantly refused to get another mammogram for the next 16 years.
        Fate and modern medicine finally caught up with her when her longtime gynecologist eventually retired and her young, less compliant new one refused to take no for an answer. Soon after, the other shoe dropped. My mother was diagnosed with the disease… and my own probability of contracting it myself went through the roof.
        By then, of course, what had once been a pea-sized growth had reached the dimensions of a grapefruit. As my mother went through treatment after treatment following surgery (much of which was more brutal than the disease itself), friends urged me to consider genetic testing. I refused. I’d been getting yearly mammograms since I was in my thirties, I countered. All had been clear so far. Besides, even if I got tested and received a bad report, I wasn’t ready to consider a double mastectomy for prophylactic purposes.
        I preferred to live with uncertainty and hope for a slim chance that I’d been spared.
        A year ago, though, I started to think differently. I now had watched my mother suffer through her agonizing final months and begun to revise my stance. I would never let that happen to me, I decided. Nor would I ever make my own kids have to witness it.
        Genetic testing is extremely costly – over $3,000 – and only one lab in the country performs it, Myriad Genetic Laboratories in Utah (although the blood can be drawn anywhere and sent there). Having two close relatives die of breast cancer, I learned, made me eligible to have the testing fully covered by our insurance. And yes, my family had already met its hefty annual deductible and was about to start from scratch again.
        I must admit that I was half-hoping when I phoned the cancer center at the University of Connecticut Health Center that there would be no available appointments. No such lack of luck. They fit me in almost immediately, three days before Christmas.
        The appointment included an hour of conversation before I’d be sent for blood work. The young genetic counselor I saw had to make sure that I was mentally prepared to handle the potential outcome.
        That conversation included some positive surprises. Even with two close relatives afflicted by the disease, my own risk of having either of the two most common genetic mutations that lead to it was less than 20 percent (far from the 100 percent I’d long imagined). That was the good news. I won’t bore you with every grim detail of the not-so-good. Suffice it to say that there was plenty of it.
        The two most common forms of the mutation are known as BRCA1 and BRCA2 (short for Breast Cancer 1 and 2), and both are disproportionately prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews like me. If I had either one, my chances of developing breast cancer would soar to between 56 and 85 percent (versus 12 percent for the general population).
        Even worse, if I had either mutation, there was a 50/50 chance that I’d passed it on to my own daughter, or that my son was a carrier who could pass it on to his children. I’d lived for over 50 years with uncertainty about my own genetic makeup. Was it fair for me to get tested and potentially give my children a terrible prognosis in their early 20s?
        Yet after coming this far, there seemed to be no legitimate way to turn back now. So I went off to the lab and let them draw the requisite three vials of blood.
        Unfortunately, it takes approximately three weeks for the results to be issued. Believe me, for me, those weeks were far from fun.
        The results were to be delivered in person by the same woman who’d done my initial consultation at UConn. I scheduled the appointment for January 12, two days before my birthday. Over dinner the night before, I confessed to my close friend “Nan” that I was terrified, more anxious than I’d ever been about anything in my entire life.
        “In that case, I’m going with you,” she asserted. I protested that I’d be fine alone. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She even insisted on driving me.
        She picked me up early the next morning, which was icy cold and ominously overcast. Soon we were sitting in the cancer ward’s waiting room, alongside countless other women, many of whom were very frail and concealing bald scalps with kerchiefs.
        Nan had agreed to remain sitting there while I went in to face my fate. But when the counselor finally came to retrieve me, I had a moment of panic. I pictured myself having to return soon after, shake my head sadly and recount all the dreadful details. This would be unbearable.
        “Come with me!” I blurted out. Nan looked surprised, but did.
        We followed the counselor down a long hallway and into a small conference room. She picked up a folder and pulled out a report featuring lots of fine print. I watched her leaf through it briefly, then fold her arms. I tried to brace myself, but couldn’t breathe.
        “Before going into all of the details, which are very complex and you need to know, let me get this out of the way,” she said. She paused, glancing down at the sheet before her. “Your blood tested negative. Negative for both. You don’t have either mutation.”
        I looked at her. I looked at Nan. Then a scream of utter disbelief escaped my lips, and I began to sob uncontrollably. Never mind three awful weeks of crippling fear. A lifetime of unspeakable dread burst through a shattered dam and flooded down my face.
        I tried my best to come down to earth as the details were divulged. Given my family history, my risk of my developing breast cancer was still elevated, to an estimated 22 percent. It remained possible that my mother had had a different, rarer mutation not yet detectable by today’s technology. Or that she’d had a mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2, but not passed it on. Either way, I didn’t have one.
        And here was the best news of all: Since I didn’t have either genetic mutation, my children could not have inherited one. They don’t skip generations.
        Furthermore, since cancer doesn’t run in my husband’s family (neither his mother nor any of her 10 siblings was ever diagnosed with any form of the disease), the likelihood that either of my children had either genetic mutation was estimated to be nil!
        Over the celebratory lunch to which Nan treated me at Bricco, our favorite local restaurant, the full implications of this revelation began to dawn on me. Genetic testing hadn’t merely lifted what had felt like a lifelong death sentence. Maybe it was time to rethink a lifetime of inherent negativity and always preparing myself for the worst.
        I guess I grew up like many Jews do, internalizing centuries of pent-up anxiety, always wondering when the next pogrom, wave of anti-Semitism or other catastrophe will hit. Who knows what other worst-case scenarios that I’d long conjured up were based on erroneous assumptions? Maybe it was high time that I stopped waiting to die and started thinking instead about how to live, and maybe even really enjoy it.
        In the year since, I’ve tried to live every day bearing in mind that I dodged not a bullet, but a bomb. I’ve tried to hold onto that new sense of both optimism and infinite possibility, believing that, against my instincts, things actually can work out for the best.
        That didn’t prevent me from having a moment of panic following my mammogram on Monday, when the technician returned after taking my films, told me the radiologist had seen something that looked suspicious, and that she had to do one side over again.
        I tried to stay calm. Then she returned after round 2 and said it had been nothing.
        Nothing?
        “You’re all clear. There was nothing there.” She studied my look of clear disbelief. “I don’t know how else to say it: You’re absolutely fine.”
        I’m fine. I’m more than fine. For another year! And I intend to have a fine one indeed.