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Friday a minor procedure to facilitate the pathology report, which the doctor rushed after eyeing the bumpy terrain in there. "Probably we'll hear back Monday," she tells me when I wake up afterwards, and all I can think is that if there's anything but the greatest news I don't want to hear it at work. But I didn't tell her that. She showed me pictures she took of my insides. I sensed without being told that the white parts were not good. "This uterus is coming out," is all she says. The hospital nurses were so nice. It unhinged me.

Friday I turned a corner in my mind, from one who couldn't imagine having cancer, to one who could. "We don't die from things like that," my grandmother told me when I was younger, before she died from it, or with it, at a ripe old age. I keep wanting to ask my mother for reassurance--to crawl up against her side in her chair and smell her warmth and feel her strength. But I don't want to burden her; what can she say beyond what she already has: "You're fine. I know you're fine." And in that moment I saw my own reassurances to the children about things they fear: verbal talismans that only have power while the children believe.

Oh, I hope I hope I hope.