This time last year, I was still in her body.

My first picture was taken in September, just like the first days of school. I didn’t smile. I looked like I’d been caught by surprise, like the kids pulling pranks in the dark of night, frozen in the glare of a handheld spotlight.

And boy, did I look like I needed a good trim, or at least a smoothing down of the wild hairs. A spider web, that was what the surgeon had called me, as he described me to my host.

Surely I look better than a spider web! I am offended!

How fitting for October. After all, it’s the month of Halloween, the orange-purple sunset of the year, along with pumpkins and ghosts and black cats and scarecrows and hay bales. 

It’s not the best month for pink. It’s not in my color wheel, but oh well. Pink is one of my calling cards.

My host couldn’t even feel me, as I hid behind that bully of a cyst that misbehaved each month, expanding due to a surge of hormones before receding to its usual size. 

My host thought the cyst would be the problem, had mammograms starting when she was 23 years old, along with occasional ultrasounds, for there was a family history. You know, there are certain families I seem to like better, and I fit right in like old Aunt Betty at a reunion. I feel so welcome and at home listening to their stories about little old me, all told over fried chicken and sweet tea.

But I’m so random too, for I can crash a party like a drunk friend of a friend, the one that everyone hates by the end of the night.

You never know where I might show up, and if given enough time, I can set up shop like a mother-in-law.

But no, my host had to go and have her picture taken, like clockwork, and by default my picture was taken too, so here I am, on display for the entire world to see.

Yet I remained safely stowed away for the entire month of October, before anyone really knew who I was, but they had their suspicions.

I was there at a Friday night football game, when all my host could do was to think about what was coming on Monday. But at that game, she broke up a fight between two teenage girls, their fists clasped in each other’s long hair, and she forgot about me for a little while.

I was there on Saturday, celebrating her birthday alongside her, when she visited the animal sanctuary and used tongs to feed lettuce to those broom-haired capybaras.

I was there that Monday for the biopsy and somehow evaded the needle. The radiologist said that she would be praying for good results, but even if I turned out to be nothing, I would still have to be removed.

That was the day my host put a few things in perspective, for she got to see the bigger picture, literally. 

I really was a tiny thing, and to the untrained eye, I was just one more shady blotch on the image.

An architectural distortion, they called me. Half the time, I am benign. The other half, well, I can be more sinister. Even in the picture, I don’t think you can see me that well, for I like to pucker the tissue around me like a draping curtain and cloak myself in shadow.

So I was still there at the regional volleyball tournament when my host got the call from her surgeon, but his first words were muffled because of the loud cheering in the arena. She jogged to a nearby restroom, her heart pounding, and she asked him to repeat the message.

The preliminary results are negative, she heard, as the toilets flushed.

That beating heart. I knew my host well, and although my life was short, I had spent all that time close to my host’s heart. I felt each pulse, deep as I was within her body. I wanted a heart of my own, to feel, to think, to live.

To grow.

My host missed the start of that game to take the call after recognizing the number. She knew she could have called the office and received the news later, but who has that kind of self-discipline? Certainly not my host.

And for the rest of that day, she lived in lightness of spirit, momentarily freed from the burden of worry.

For as strong as she wants everyone to think she is, she wears a good mask. Yes, she gets up every morning by 6:00 or sometimes earlier. She does her job and goes to the football games, the volleyball games, the softball games. She goes to church. She cooks dinner and goes to bed by 10:00, or later if she’s got one of her supposed writing projects going, as if she thinks she’s got some kind of great talent, like she has anything of value to say.

She’s got me to thank for that, you know. I’m the one who gave her the kick in the butt to get on with it.

Maybe that will be my legacy.

I only live in pictures and memories now, for I was finally terminated during an excision last November. I didn’t see the light that day, though. It was only in a lab that I was teased out of my corner, snug as a bug within a clear margin of healthy tissue.

Later that week, on Friday afternoon, my host got a call from the surgeon. The pathology results had come in.

Stage 0, ductal carcinoma in situ, ER/PR+. That’s not a very sexy name, but at least you can all know the truth about me.

My host had just gotten home from work when the call came. She didn’t break down. Instead, she scrambled for a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote down what the surgeon said, and told him thank you and goodbye.

She sat down on the couch for a few minutes, stone-faced, and then she got up and walked the dog.

You want to know how big I was? Three millimeters.

Teeny-tiny. The smallest breast cancer in the world, said the surgeon.

And what did my host do? She went all the way in February with a bilateral mastectomy and said goodbye forever to that lumpy, undependable tissue. She no longer trusted it, and this was her chance to fix it for good. 

It would be hard for me to get a toehold there again.

It’s a year later since it all began, and she still thinks about me every day. I can’t say if any little bits and pieces of me escaped, but I was in a duct, you know. My host thinks of that, how the ductwork of a building functions, how the air circulates throughout the entire structure.

The MRI showed clear lymph nodes, but I only need one cell to start anew.

The doctors say there is a very slim chance that I will return, so if my host notices an unusual spot on her skin, experiences strange headaches, or suffers from bone pain, she should see a doctor.

The plastic surgeon chuckled after he told her that. My host chuckled too.

What else could she do? 

Maybe she could write about me and introduce me to all of you in the name of awareness, as we call it in my world. Some of you I’ve visited before, in other shapes and forms. Still there are others who will discover one day that I’m an unexpected guest at their table. Just know I don’t bring the banana pudding to the party.

But if you want to wear pink or purple or teal or whatever color reminds you to wage war against me, I won’t stand in your way.