I Almost Did Not Go. I Have Thought About That Almost Every Day Since.

“I rescheduled the appointment three times. The fourth time I did not let myself think about it. I just went.”

I had been meaning to get screened for two years. I kept finding reasons. Work. The children. The cost of getting across the city on a day I was not scheduled to be there. The feeling, persistent and hard to explain, that going would make something real that was currently only theoretical.

The third time I rescheduled, my sister called me about something unrelated. We talked for an hour. She mentioned, in passing, a woman we had both known years ago. She said: you know she is gone now. And I knew what she meant and I sat with that after the call ended and I made the fourth appointment and I did not let myself reschedule it.

They found something. Early. Stage one. Small.

I sat in the room while the doctor explained what this meant and what the treatment would involve. I was very calm. I have wondered about that calmness since. I think I had used up my emotional capacity making myself go. There was nothing left for the result.

The treatment was hard. I will not minimize it. But it was possible. And I am here, two years after that appointment, with a clear scan and a life that continues.

I think about the almost every day. Almost did not go. Almost rescheduled again. Almost let another year pass. The margin between the version of this story I am telling and the version where I waited too long is one appointment.

I am not telling you this to frighten you. I am telling you because I know exactly how easy it is to keep rescheduling. I did it three times. And because the woman who finally went was not braver than the woman who had been putting it off. She was just the same woman who happened to stop rescheduling on a particular day.

Stop rescheduling. That is the whole thing I have to say.