As Dr. McFinney animatedly chats with Annie, I ache with the recognition of her humanness, her vulnerability. Someone who blindly smiles with cream cheese in her teeth—and who attends pop concerts—wilts my shred of confidence. Forget human. I want a superhero for a doctor.

So many of my women friends and family members have located breast lumps that have turned out to be “nothing.” This thought provides me with sporadic comfort in the days until my doctor’s appointment. Breasts, apparently, are lumpy, and the quality of that lumpiness changes throughout the month. Sometimes they are like cottage cheese, other times like gravel. Lumpiness is normal, even though “lump” is so often conflated with “cancer.” I can’t fully convince myself, however, that the equation of lump=cancer is faulty since for several women in my life the equation was accurate, including my best friend, Marie, her daughter Melinda, and her sister Jan.

Two years ago, Marie, who is 56, hit her five-year-with-no-recurrence mark, which means she is ostensibly cured. The next year, her 48-year-old sister died after battling the disease for three years. Soon after, her 37-year-old daughter called her from overseas, where she was studying, to tell her she’d found some blood in her bra.

“I’ve never heard of bleeding through the nipple as a sign of breast cancer, have you?” Marie had asked me on the phone one spring morning. Her voice ached for me to share her perception.

“No,” I said, trying to veer my friend’s life away from tragedy. I had a vague sense that I had once heard that such bleeding was a sign of cancer, but what I said at that moment would not alter her daughter’s diagnosis. If there was any truth to the saying that thoughts are things, I wanted my thoughts to be cures.

After their agonizing equivalent of my current ten-day wait, Marie called to ask if I would take her to the airport. Her daughter’s doctor was pressing for a mastectomy, and Marie wanted to be there. Every day I checked my email for ongoing letters from Marie, who detailed the events with the clarity of a journalist. It seemed as though those moments of almost-objectivity gave her a certain strength. The email subject headings piled up like headlines: Melinda and I Search for More Information, Doctor Recommends Implant Over Reconstruction, A Needed Night of Belgian Beer, Melinda Set for Surgery. There was something terrifying and reassuring in these missives, like wires from the front line. But the combatants were not faceless soldiers; they were my best friend and her daughter. The final email I received from Marie before she returned home buoyed me with its irreverent pugnaciousness: Melinda Fortified with Bionic Tit.

At the Pride Parade in San Francisco a few years back, a topless woman wove among thousands of people colorfully displaying their banners and bodies. One breast hung long and thin; the other was non-existent. In its place, ribs protruded, the ribs a woman usually doesn’t reveal. Inlaid in the skin covering the ribs was a long, clean scar like the line of foam a wave leaves behind.