Everything Else Can Wait: An Excerpt from FLOOD
My obstetrician insists the pinpricking lump in my breast is a clogged milk duct.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Robb says, removing his latex gloves. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t feel like nothing,” I say from the obstetric table, belly in the air.
“It’s nothing,” he says, winking, throwing his gloves in the trash. He leans against the countertop, crosses his arms, and smiles. “We’ll keep an eye on it. But, really, it’s just a clogged milk duct.”
It’s true that although I still have two months to go, I am already lactating.
“OK,” I say, hauling myself up.
So there’s a lump, big deal, I say to myself in the car. He’s the one wearing a white coat with diplomas on the wall. I was raised to not only accept authority, but revere it.
A month later, the lump noticeably larger, Dr. Robb waves my worries away with another purple latex glove. Just after Christmas, Trevor is snuggling with me on a lazy Sunday morning. I tickle him and one of his four-year-old elbows connects with the lump in my right breast. My mouth falls open and my eyes clamp shut. Behind my squeezed eyelids are shooting stars.
A week later, January second, I’m back with Dr. Robb for another heartbeat checkup. My belly is like Mount Everest. Dr. Robb traverses it with a white paper measuring tape, stretching it with the help of a nurse I haven’t met before. Together, they laid the tape over my hills and valleys, sternum to pubic bone.
“That lump,” I say, bringing my chin to my chest, searching for eye contact with Dr. Robb. “It really hurts.”
“Lump?” Dr. Robb says, turning away, clicking a pen, he writes something on a paper attached to a clipboard.
Weren’t we supposed to be watching it?
“Here,” I say, touching the lump. I’m ten again, standing in front of Grandma Rose’s open casket, nine-year old cousin Alison beside me. I dare you to touch her finger she says in my ear.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says, waving his arm, placing the measuring tape into the nurse’s open hand like he’s a magician and she’s his assistant. Struggling to sit up, the nurse takes me by the shoulders and together we bring my body upright. I lock eyes with her.
“Now. I want it checked out now.”
At the reception desk, she’s waiting behind the glass partition. Sliding it open, she hands me a sticky note. “It’s just across the street. They’ve squeezed you in.”
I shuffle out of the office and down the hall of this converted 1800s elementary school. I bypass the broad staircase for the elevator. Jaywalk waddling across the New Haven street, I enter a glass and steel building. Inside, all the lights are on motion detectors. The expansive lobby rains darkness. A single light over my head switches on when the elevator opens.
Minutes later I am prone again, my body a mirror for the Ansel Adams poster of Yosemite on the ceiling. The polar opposite of my obstetrician, this doctor is wiry and wears the neon running sneakers I’ve seen on the feet of college students. He swabs my exposed peasant-sized lactating breast with a numbing agent. At the pinnacle of the lump he inserts a long thin needle.
I’ve taken the day off from work where I shuffle papers at an insurance office, and proceed through the afternoon shuffling through my house, my belly shapeshifting from mountain to pendulum.
After dinner, Greg and I sit across from one another at the dining room table—our only table—since the kitchen is galley-shaped. There is an ocean of newly washed baby clothes between us. We fold. Trevor runs in from the sunroom asking for a drink. The phone rings and I answer it as I open the fridge, pouring apple juice into a drip-free cup.
Dr. Robb doesn’t wait for me to say hello.
“You have to come in tomorrow. The babies have to come out. Pre-operative blood work tomorrow and delivery the next day. The tumor is aggressive. We don’t know where else the cancer is.”
I can’t seem to screw the top on the cup. I abandon it on the counter and hang up the phone. Greg is mid-fold of a tiny onesie. His huge hands place it on the pile. The twins aren’t due for another three weeks. They aren’t ready. I’m not ready. I don’t have time for blood work, twin delivery, or cancer. Greg looks at me. I don’t have time for conversation. I have an errand. I whisper, “It’s positive,” while putting on my coat. As if whispering “cancer” will make cancer small. I’d only told him about the lump that morning. I have my reasons. Greg doesn’t stop me from going out. It’s eight-thirty. The store closes at nine.
Mid-afternoon, when I picked Trevor up from daycare, Miss Nancy, the Mother Goose of Sunny Side Up, pulled me aside.
“Trevor can’t play outside in the snow with the other children because you haven’t brought in boots.”
Boots. Everything else can wait.
I drive through lightly falling snow to Kohl’s. No emotion. Just boots. Inside the store’s wet aisle, I spot my treasure. Right hand grabs the last pair of size five navy blue Totes with easy-on handles. My left hand supports my back. The boots are fifty percent off.
At home, Trevor is asleep, a tuft of his brown hair visible above the blankets. Downstairs, I walk past Greg sitting on the love seat staring into space, retrieve the phone from the kitchen, and curl myself into a corner of the larger sofa. Last summer, I nearly drove my car straight into a road race. There had been no security at the intersection, just hundreds of runners.
I’m in a race I didn’t sign up for. The only way I can finish is if it’s a relay.
I punch buttons on the cordless phone. I speak to my mother. I speak to my cousin Alison. I try to call up the face of the doctor with the needle but the only thing that connects are neon sneakers.
The next morning, Greg and I drop Trevor off to Miss Nancy happily wearing his new boots and head to the hospital. While he parks the car, I follow small blue signs down broad corridors to the lab. At the center of an intersection is a raised security guard station. A female guard sits at the center like a queen in a swivel chair. She looks me up and down and throws her head back, releasing a full-throated laugh. I stop walking. Hoisting herself to stand, the guard steps down from her octagonal throne. She purses her lips and produces a slow whistle while resting her hands on ample hips, nodding her head. Her crown of braids dance.
“Whoa, honey. That’s what I know for sure. That’s a twin belly coming at me.”
I don’t want to go to the lab. I want to crawl into the lap of this oracle in blue and ask her if I’m going to live. I squeak out, “Lab?”
“Right there, baby,” she says, pointing at the door next to me that has lab in giant red letters.
Inside, the phlebotomist shakes her head as she assesses my pale, freckled arm.
“What this is, is the Milky Way.” Her eyes are violet. “Darlin,’ you have baby veins. Pump your fist while I get a butterfly.” While she chooses a needle with plastic wings from her collection, I pump my fist as directed, wishing I could use it on my obstetrician.
That night, after my parents pick up Trevor, Greg and I go to bed. It’s seven PM, but I’m exhausted. Together, we have whisked the house clean of dust, the cobwebs that seem to plague our old house, and errant Legos. The small bedroom next to our holds a pair of white cribs, their mattresses encased in sheets sprinkled with a pattern of blue and yellow dots. Blue and white striped crib skirts conceal a drawer at the bottom of each crib where I stacked shallow rows of premature sized diapers. My small suitcase is packed with several days of clothes and leans against our open bedroom door. Waiting.
Greg reaches over, finds my hand on top of my belly and gathers it up in his. I recall the security guard, her laugh, her knowing. I don’t seem to know anything. I hold my belly all night. I don’t touch either breast.
Four-thirty in the morning, Greg and I depart for the hospital. Rolling down our street, I wonder about the next time I’ll see our house. I once had control. I was once the driver of my life. Now I’m a passenger, an unwilling particle in a sweeping current.
Excerpt from “Chapter Two” by Christine Kalafus from Flood, published by Woodhall Press, 2025. Used with permission.
Feature photo (submerged traffic signal) by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
About the Author
Christine Kalafus’s essays and poems have been published by The Culture We Deserve, Longreads, The New Guard, and The Connecticut Literary Anthology, among others. Previously a
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