Cancer or not, I will certainly be at my boy's weddings

At my third and youngest son’s bar mitzvah, I joked that I wanted some form of a mezinke, the Ashkenazi broom dance that parents do when their final child is finally married off.

Three brises, one pidyon haben, more bar mitzvahs than kids (there was an added zoomitzvah in there, thanks to Covid-19), I felt my job as a Jewish mother was officially done.

Five days after the bar mitzvah, I emerged from the shower and lay down for a rest. It had been a whirlwind week. My husband, still in bed, rolled to face me. He was looking at my chest, where the towel had slipped a little.

He opened his mouth, and I smiled, expecting an amorous comment. Instead, he said: “What’s that lump on your chest?”

We both looked down. I was quick to reassure him. “It’s nothing,” I replied.

“Remember I mentioned it? I think I pulled a muscle in my circuits training class.”

Karen-Skinazi

Karen Skinazi (Photo: Karen Skinazi)

But as soon I said the words, I knew something was wrong. When had I first noticed the lump and thought it the result of bad form at the gym? A month before? Two? Six? More?

An hour later I was in my doctor’s office getting booked in for a mammogram. As I counted down the 18 days it took for my “urgent” hospital appointment, I confided in a couple of friends. “Oh, that happened to my sister,” one said.

“It was a cyst.” “Oh, my mum had a scare like that,” said another. “Don’t worry — it was just a cyst.” At the hospital, the doctor who saw me before my mammogram drew a circle in marker around the lump on my chest. “I think it will might just be a cyst,” he said.

It wasn’t a cyst.

“I’m going to take a biopsy,” said the second doctor after determining that the mass was not a cyst. “You’ll get the results in a couple of weeks.”

As I waited (calling the hospital frantically every day as two weeks became three), I began to worry about my kids. Why would I think my job as a Jewish mother was finished?
My oldest son is in the middle of his A-levels. He has got into university, and most days, I think he’ll be fine. But last weekend he was supposed to take his theory test so he could start learning to drive, and only the night before the test, he realised he’d lost his provisional driving licence.

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Karen Skinazi (Photo: Karen Skinazi)