Her screening was early in the month. The letter asking her back came yesterday.
All month the posters at work have called women like her fighters. Pink ribbons on the lift doors, pink on the coffee cups.
At lunch she finds a surgeon’s name under a hospital’s October caption and taps it. His profile says he has given his career to the fight against breast cancer.
She has not called it a fight. She has not called it anything. Yesterday it was a letter.
Fight, battle, brave, survivor: the campaign’s words, on every caption this month. Some women pick those words up and keep them for years. That is for her to decide. His page decided before she got there.
His profile says he walks beside every woman on her journey.
A profile I wrote for a breast surgeon opens on the woman sitting across from her, who has never done this before, who doesn’t know what the next hour will change.
She turns her cup so the ribbon faces the wall. She has not decided what to call it yet.