When We Had Cancer

We are identical twins, born in Boise, Idaho in June 1975. We can count on our hands the number of hours we spent apart growing up. We headed to New York City in the fall of 1993 to attend college--Kate at Barnard, Emily at Columbia. We thought, because they were on opposite sides of Broadway, that we wouldn’t run into each other much. We did. We became best friends over those four years and have stayed that way even as Kate moved around the country for graduate school and work before settling in Baltimore and Emily moved around Brooklyn.

When we were in our mid-30s, our mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She made it through treatment, it recurred, and she made it through again. Being inveterate rule followers, we both signed up for our obligatory screening mammograms early on the advice of our doctors.

The first few were clear, and then Emily got called in for a biopsy. It came back negative, so when Kate was called in for a biopsy six weeks later we assumed it would be the same.

It wasn’t. Kate had breast cancer, and Emily didn’t. In the last week of Kate’s active treatment Emily went in for her six month follow up mammogram. She told the radiologist her twin sister had breast cancer, and they looked around for over an hour. They found a couple spots that turned into a lot more, and it was Emily’s turn to have cancer.
Both of us are writers, and we both wrote about our experiences as they happened. What follows tells the story of When We Had Cancer.