Sick With Uncertainty

Lizzie Stark, author of Pandora’s DNA: Tracing the Breast Cancer Genes Through History, Science, and One Family Tree, discusses the maddening ambiguity that comes with having a BRCA mutation:

As a woman positive for a BRCA mutation, I bear this uncertainty doubly, both because I am frequently screened for cancer and am therefore more likely to receive ambiguous results, but also because the BRCA test itself is a sort of screening for pre-cancer. I may not have any precancerous lesions inside me, but I have been told that I have a potentially life-threatening mutation inside every cell of my body. After my genetic results came back, I no longer felt like the physically healthy twenty-seven-year-old newlywed that I was. Instead I became someone who went to the doctor more than ten times a year, like a good patient, to make sure I wasn’t sick yet. I lived in a state of betweenness, in a no-man’s-land straddling the worlds of sick and healthy.