“…an outside email address,” Dr. Okafor said. “Not to your physician, and not to you. Is this someone you know?”
I leaned closer to the screen. The address began with g.whitcomb. Gary Whitcomb. My brother-in-law. The man who had raised his champagne glass in that video. He worked as a billing supervisor at the imaging center in Wilmington where I had my biopsy done in September.
Dr. Okafor printed both reports and laid them side by side. The one I had been carrying around in my purse for three weeks said invasive carcinoma, stage two, on official letterhead. The original from the laboratory said benign fibroadenoma. A harmless lump. Nothing to treat.
I did not feel relief at first. I felt dizzy. I had already told my pastor, my book club and the women at my water aerobics class. I had bought two soft head scarves at Belk. I had cried myself to sleep for twenty-one nights over something that was not even there.
He would not let me leave on paper alone. He ordered fresh imaging that same afternoon, read by a radiologist who had never heard my name. Two days later he called me himself. Benign. Healthy. Go home, Mrs. Parker, and stop worrying.
Then I sat at my kitchen table and made myself think about why. The answer was lying in my desk drawer. Two weeks earlier, my sister Debra had brought me a stack of papers from her lawyer. A quitclaim deed for the beach house at Topsail Island, signing it over to her right away, so I would not have to deal with probate while I was so sick.
The signing was scheduled for that coming Friday. After that, she said, we could focus on my treatment at a clinic Gary had found in Myrtle Beach. A clinic that, she kept insisting, did not believe in second opinions.
I called my nephew Tyler that evening. He picked up on the first ring and started apologizing before I could say anything. He had not sent that video by accident. He had watched his parents toast my diagnosis at dinner and could not sleep for two nights afterward.
“I am so sorry, Aunt Lynn,” he said, his voice cracking like the seventeen year old he was. “I did not know who else to tell, and I did not know if anyone would believe me.”
I told him he was the bravest person in our whole family, and that I would make sure nothing bad happened to him for doing the right thing.
The next morning I walked into the New Hanover County sheriff office with both reports, the video, and the deed. A detective named Ruth Simmons took four pages of notes. The imaging center pulled its own records within a day and found that Gary had opened my file after hours and replaced the report before it was released to me.
I canceled the power of attorney Debra had pushed me to sign. I rewrote my will at a different law firm, one she had never heard of. Then I invited her over for coffee.
She arrived with a chicken casserole and her sad sister face. I let her set the dish down. Then I handed her the real lab report, and I watched her read it all the way to the bottom.
She tried to say it was all Gary. She said she had no idea. I picked up my phone and played the video, her own voice talking about having the beach house by summer.
She did not cry. She just looked at me like I was a stranger who had walked into her kitchen, and I realized that to her, I always had been.
Gary was charged with altering medical records and attempted fraud. He lost his job, his license to work in medical billing, and most of their savings to the lawyers. Debra was never charged, but she lost something she wanted far more than the beach house. Every person at our church heard the truth.
Tyler moved in with me for his senior year. His parents did not fight it. I set up a college fund in his name and paid his first semester at UNC Wilmington myself.
The beach house is in my will now, for Tyler, and it says so in black ink at a law firm my sister will never walk into.
I think often about the women who do get that diagnosis for real, who sit in waiting rooms with genuine fear and fight with everything they have. I owe it to them to say this plainly. Always ask for a second opinion. Anyone who tells you not to is not looking out for you.
Last summer Tyler and I spent all of July at Topsail. He learned to surf badly. I learned to sit still and watch the ocean without crying.
I am sixty-two. I am healthy. And I finally know which members of my family were celebrating my life, and which were celebrating its end.