The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.
– C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

Update: pathology results have returned from the first surgery to indicate that I have not only a large area of “the worst kind of the best cancer” (high-grade ductal carcinoma in situ), but multiple areas of “the best kind of the worst cancer” (microinvasive ductal carcinoma), in addition to (surprise!) several areas of “the best kind of an entirely different category of breast cancer” (lobular carcinoma in situ).

If your head is spinning, so is mine. The report was pages long, and included the word “interestingly,” which made me both smile and wince. Cool word from a medical perspective; not so much from a patient perspective.

What the pathology essentially did was rule everything in while eliminating nothing for sure: radiation, chemotherapy, antibody infusions, hormone treatments—it’s all on the table. And I’ll certainly need to go back for a second, more aggressive surgery. Before I do, the plan is for me to meet with a bevy of specialists (medical and radiation oncologists, plastic surgeon), who will then convene for a “tumor board” to discuss my case and map out a path forward.

The gist of the thing is that this cancer is early stages still, and I’m a young, otherwise healthy person for whom both the temporary and long-term side effects of extensive systemic and radiation therapy are not negligible. However, the cancer is also high-grade, positive for concerning biological markers, has already migrated past its point of origin in over a dozen spots, and is located dangerously close to skin on one side and muscle on the other. They’ll check lymph nodes and go back to remove breast tissue, but no one wants this thing to find its way elsewhere in my body, now or during my lifetime.

I remember thinking after the first surgery: it’s like everything is happening by degrees. First it was waiting for the initial biopsy result; now it’s more and more stages of waiting. First it was a punch biopsy, then it was wires, then it was parts of my breast gone, and now it is going back to remove all of it. Contemplating another surgery before I’ve finished recovering from the first. Deeper in, higher up: that’s what each step feels like. Like terribly recursive forays into a landscape both dreadfully familiar and wholly new, a disorienting blend of past, present and an uncertain but increasingly real future.

Last night, our older boy, upset after a fight with his brother, came barreling into the room and plunked himself down on my lap. Given how much he swims these days, holding him feels like wrangling my arms around a smooth, slippery seal that smells faintly but constantly of chlorine. He is far enough into adolescence that I don’t take these spontaneous moments of closeness for granted, even if he is too big to hold comfortably.

Suddenly, sitting there, I felt like I was seeing him layered in time: the cant of his lips and furrow in his brow so similar to how he used to look as an upset toddler; the curve of his hand and wrist a perfect miniature of mine, hinting of adulthood. And I thought of that line from Celeste Ng in Little Fires Everywhere: “To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image.”

It's a stereopsis that only time and experience can give. I know some who are plunged without preamble into the worst of it, like my husband’s colleague, who after a few weeks of coughing found he had lung cancer that had already colonized his brain in fifty places. I see now the grace that is my gradual immersion and my certain survival, the grace that allows me to grasp with increasing fullness the shape of the world I am entering, that gives me time to adjust to its terms and tenets, its ups and downs, its constant pull towards deeper and deeper surrender. Further in, further up. That’s the final call Aslan gives, to all his beloved creatures. And as they saw the real Narnia more clearly, they saw him too more truly, and I pray it may somehow be the same for me, that there would be a sacred seeing, a sacred sorrow, in this place as holy as it is terrible.