Probably benign alien

One day, you wake up and find that your body has other plans.

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Worrying in Greenwood, October 2022.

Last week, I had a run-in with a robot. It started benignly enough, with a welcome-to-midlife mammogram. I stood in a pepto-pink hospital gown and eyed the robot, a giant R2-D2 with plastic pincers.

“Are you nervous?” the tech asked, as she draped me over the robot like an awkward marionette. “Sometimes people get so nervous on their first scan, they faint.”

“No,” I replied. “Mostly I’m thinking that if men had to squish their bits in this thing, the robot would be a lot friendlier.”

“Honey, you know that’s right!” she said, chuckling, as she positioned me in the robot’s maw.

I wasn’t nervous because it never occurred to me that the scan would be anything other than normal. For 40 years, my body and I had maintained a tacit understanding: I’d get my steps in and occasionally eat some spinach, and it mostly did what I wanted without complaining. I had scheduled a week of tick-the-box doctor’s visits that you do at 40 and gave them little thought, beyond the mild inconvenience of being squished and poked and prodded.

Then the results started coming back: My eggs could no longer make babies. My breasts may be making mutants. Every time my phone dinged with a new result from the doctor, I felt increasingly unhinged. It was the lump in my breast that set me over the edge. Intellectually I knew an abnormal mammogram was very common, but emotionally it was the lump that broke the camel’s back.

I immediately called to schedule follow-up appointments, but every imaging center in New York was wildly backed up. Clinic 1, which did the first scan, could see me again in three months. Clinic 2 could see me in a month. Clinic 3, in Long Island, could see me next week. I booked a Long Island appointment and then spent the next week worrying nonstop.

On the day of the appointment, I took two trains to a soulless strip mall in Long Island. I was so nervous, I arrived two hours early, and passed the time eating empanadas in a Pep Boys parking lot. Soon enough, I was again in a faded gown, staring down a similar robot—except this time, the tech refused to squish anything. She needed a CD of images from my last scans. A CD??

“Can I get them emailed over?” I asked.
“No, it has to be a CD,” she said with the air of someone explaining the obvious.
“Can you re-run the original scan?” I said.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for without the CD,” she said, exasperated, as if I were asking her to drive a car blindfolded.
“You’re looking for the lump,” I said. “I brought it to Long Island. Could we work something out?”
“No CD, no scan,” she said.

My lump and I fled back to the train in rage, tinged with hysteria. More appointments to book. More weeks to wait. I fired off texts to my friends. I feel so stupid about worrying, I told them, but I can’t help it. And what the hell is up with the CD??

“I think it’s totally normal to be anxious until you get answers,” one friend replied. “I am nervous about many stupider things. Like the lumps on my daughter’s skull that I KNOW are just the shape of her head. Or the sun spot on my hand, that’s a big one. Or the little fatty deposit I’ve had on my back since 2008. Still waiting for that to kill me.” I found this oddly reassuring.

“I’m quite good at worrying,” she continued, “So if it helps, you book the next appointment and I’ll do the worrying. Oh, and if you could please send me a CD of images so I know what I’m worrying about, that would be great, thanks.”

“I’ve never understood the CD,” replied another friend, who is a cancer veteran. “Am I bringing Whitney Houston’s greatest hits? Are we having a dance party? Is that what we’re doing???”

I was never cool enough to own Whitney Houston. My first CD was Alanis Morissette. I decided that if I couldn’t make friends with the situation, I could at least make friends with the lump. I decided to name it Alanis, or Al for short. That seemed friendly enough.

After I made it home and regrouped, I called Clinic 1 to order the CD for Clinic 2. By chance, the original clinic had a cancellation the next day, no CD required. I texted my Designated Worrier the good news. “Oh good,” she said, “I was worried about that!”

The next day, I was dressed in my faded gown and ready for my date with the robots: First a sonogram to find the lumps, and then a mammogram to squish them.

“Beep beep beep,” said the sonogram, as the technician squirted warm gel on my chest and ran her wand over me like a metal detector. I hovered somewhere over my body and willed myself to breathe as she marked blob after blob with ominous red Xs. It occurred to me, distantly, that the same machine that would probably never find babies in my body was sure finding a lot of mutants in my breasts. (Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?)

Next, it was time for the robot, a fancier version that could squish things sideways.
“Relax!” said the technician, draping me over the robot. “Stop breathing!”
“I feel like these two things are mutually exclusive,” I told the technician.
“RESUME BREATHING!” said the robot, after it released me from its awkward embrace.
“I feel like you could work on your bedside manner,” I told the robot.

The robot spit out results a few minutes later: It was your standard middle-age lump, “probably benign,” with some cysts thrown in as party favors.

“See you in a few months,” I told the robot, and texted my friends the good news.
“Yay, a cyst galaxy in your right breast and a pet alien in your left, well done!” they texted back, changing our group chat name to Aliens Among Us, and texting me gifs of dancing breasts. “Welcome to the club!”

Despite the good news, I left the clinic in a daze, emotionally flattened. I was massively relieved, of course, that Al the Alien was likely benign. But on a deeper level, it didn’t matter if the cells were dividing or not, if Al was growing or just hanging out. Her very existence was an undeniable marker that I had entered a new phase of life—no longer young, and not yet old, but somewhere in-between.

Here’s the thing my friends already knew, that nobody tells you in advance: That one day you will wake up and realize that the perfectly good body that you have taken mostly for granted for the last 40 years is not indestructible. That right around the time you get yourself together emotionally is when your body starts fraying in small ways. I realized it wasn’t just the lump I was struggling with, or the stupid CD, but middle age itself. It was the sudden full-body knowledge that my body is fragile and my time is finite.

I’m still figuring out what to do with that knowledge, both startling and clarifying, which is ringing in my body like a bell. But in the meantime, Al and I have resumed breathing. We might even have a dance party.

Self-portrait in Greenwood, October 2022.

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Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. She’s spent her career finding the right words for others and now she’s finding her own