The most frightening word.

Anomalies.

The word terrifies me. It's the sense of foreboding, the "something's wrong, but we aren't quite sure yet what it is" quality.

Three and a half years ago, a couple of weeks after my yearly check under the hood to make sure all the female parts are running properly, I got a call from my doctor's office. Anomalies, the nurse said. Need to make another appointment to discuss the test results.

I panicked. Saying that I have a family history of cancer would be putting it mildly. On my mother's side, there is not a single female relative that has gone cancer free. I was nineteen. So I did what any (relatively) normal nineteen year old would do. I called my mommy.

She made the appointment. I worked things out with my boss and my teachers to take off that day. And she drove 2 hours to come and get me and take me to the doctor.

I was so worried the entire time. Three years previous, when I was sixteen, there had been a similar situation. During my self-exam, I found a painful lump in my breast. After a few months of testing, it turned out to be a harmless cyst that would go away if I abstained from caffeine. Whew. I can't always stay away from coffee, but at least it wasn't cancer.

This was different. I was right to panic. Three years later, I did have cancer. Cervical cancer. My great-grandmother died of cervical cancer when she was 20. And I was diagnosed at 19.

I was a long-time secret smoker, having started at 14, but I was still floored. Cervical cancer. I envisioned myself skinny and bald from chemotherapy. My mother had her uterus removed only 2 years prior to this diagnosis. Three baseball-sized tumors had grown around it. She's been a smoker for over 40 years.

Cervical cancer. The doctor was trying to engage me, to tell me what the next steps were. I tried to pay attention and couldn't. This was too much. My mother had anticipated this and had persuaded me during the drive to allow her to sit in. She asked him all the questions that I couldn't. She got it all straight, hugged me, told me everything would be okay, and drove me back to school.

For the next weeks, I was a wreck. I tried to quit smoking, then decided that I was only going to die anyway, so there was no point. I went in for biopsies, which were inconclusive half the time. My boyfriend and friends did everything they could. I never had to spend the night alone. I dropped one class, and failed another. I was off the dean's list for the first time. I wrote, and re-wrote my will every other week. My birthday came and went. Now I was 20, just like my great-grandmother.

The doctor said in July that it was time to operate. School wasn't in session then, I was living with my parents. It was the perfect time. I was so scared that they were going to take my uterus away. Hey, I'm not overly maternal, but I still wanted the option. Turns out that it wasn't necessary. He described the operation to me in great detail, but the way I remember it was this: he was going to electrify a metal loop, and slice off the top few layers of my cervix. Like a cheese slicer. Just seeing cheese over the next few days was enough to send me into hysterical laughter.

Day before the operation. My boyfriend and another good friend came to stay the night at my house, so they would be there before, during, and after the procedure. We stayed up all night watching TV and talking about anything but tomorrow.

Day of. No one ever told me that they refrigerate the i.v. saline. My arm started to get cold and numb, and I freaked out. They put this dumb thing on my head to keep my hair away. My boyfriend told me I looked like a blue mushroom. The anesthesiologist thought he was my husband and started to try and get him to sign forms. My mother was grinding her teeth.

The operation went fine. The anethesia made me throw up. I couldn't pick up anything heavy for a month. I brought a note to my boss. For two years I went back every six months for another checkup. But no amount of "Everything looks fine" will ever erase the worry.

I quit smoking almost a year ago. Funny that even cancer wasn't enough to make me quit right away.

Later today I will go back again. Another checkup. Same doctor, same office. My mother offered to drive me, and wait with me.

I may be twenty-three now, but I've discovered that I'm still not too old to want my mommy.

Update: The machinery is still working great. And it turned out that my mom couldn't leave work that day, so I drove myself like a big girl.

and the world did not end.