Of High Risk Plans and Poetry

Mother and daughter, breast oncologist and patient: the poem “Thirty-Five” brims with loaded dualities that deftly illuminate the poet’s layered feelings about her increased risk of breast cancer. The alchemy of poetry allows her to inhabit 2 places at once, present and past, in the doctor’s office undergoing a clinical breast exam and at home with her mother as she helps her recover from having her “heavy breasts…cut away.” The poet’s unerring eye for detail communicates the particularly unnerving tension between risk and intimacy, in such lines as “The doctor asks me to sit up, hands me a/print-out fortune, prophesied by a risk calculator/that knows the density of my breasts and that I was 12/when I got my first period but could never know/the sweetness of the raspberry tea my mom brewed/when I had cramps...” Breasts are the locus of connectedness and warmth, and the objects of impersonal medical scrutiny and intervention. Even the poem’s form, unrhymed couplets, underscores the wrenching sense of ambivalence here, between her love for her mother and her fear of what their shared genetics declares she may have inherited. The poem reminds clinicians that our patients and their stories can never be reduced to risk factors and diagnoses. More than experts counseling patients on “the High Risk Plan,” as physicians we are called to recognize each “…strand in a life spun/so much thicker than the flimsy cotton of this gown.”