2001-10-10 - 2:54 p.m.

I went back today for stage 2 of my breast screening - a sonogram, given in addition to the mammogram for women who have dense tissue, also those with a possible problem. Test was fine, all was fine. What I wanted to talk about was the waiting room.

There were maybe 8 women in there, all dressed in identical pink smocks - ranging in age from mid-thirties to eighty eight - and I never saw such immediate inter-generational bonding in my life. As if the pink smock erased everything else about us, our ages and our body types and our income levels and our color. All women, with the possibility of sharing the same horror. It was immensely reassuring to me, to hear the oldest talking about years of mammograms, about her doctors, and her life. I can't really explain it - but she was truly the wise one, the one everyone else deferred to. Like it should be in life, and rarely is. Everyone talked about their experiences, what they were there for, what they were afraid of.

One woman, early thirties, sitting in the same spot I was in last week, worried and scared about her first mammogram. I reassured her, telling her how worried I was, and how it didn't hurt at all. She smiled, relief in her eyes. An older woman worried aloud over how long they were taking with her results - and the one sitting next to her put her hand over hers, and told her not to worry, that sometimes the films weren't clear. It was pretty amazing, really. And we all talked about everything going on, although most of the talk centered on the city, and not what's going on now in Afghanistan. We talked about how people look you in the eye now, and the younger woman and I talked about the new, disturbing feeling - that anything is possible, that anything can happen.

I'm reading over this, and I don't think I'm articulating it very well, but I wanted to get it down.

And now, I'm back in my office putting candy-corn fangs on my front teeth and answering email. Because things should never be too serious for candy corn fangs.

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