jenny lynn lambert

Ashland MFA Alum

Schrödinger’s cancer

I’ve been thinking a lot about Schrödinger’s cat. You know the one—stuck in a box with a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, and a bottle of poison. Theoretical physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, created this feline thought experiment to explain a paradox of quantum mechanics I don’t fully understand. Superposition is what he called it. All I know is if I can’t see the cat in the box, then there’s a fifty-fifty chance the animal is either alive or dead. In my mind, it’s both until I lift the lid.

When the radiology department called me back to investigate the “structural abnormality” found in my mammogram, I wasn’t worried. I’d been through this a few times before. I have dense tissue. The mammogram was fuzzy, and they just wanted to double-check.

The cat was alive in the box. Or, at least I was ninety percent sure as I lay on the table for the ultrasound. It wasn’t until the technician grew quiet that I glanced at the monitor over my right shoulder. She had probably zoomed in, but the shadow was large. I looked at it and looked at her, and she avoided my gaze. She barely excused herself before summoning the radiologist who was studying the images in real time from an office down the hall. And I lay there, with shallow breaths, staring at the ominous black hole on the screen.

The radiologist entered, a petite woman with graying hair and a young face. Her frozen smile confirmed what I already suspected. She informed me of the size of the mass—two centimeters. She mentioned the word biopsy, and all I could think was my mom had had breast cancer. My grandmother had died of uterine cancer. My aunt had died of stomach cancer. My father had died of throat cancer. The lymph nodes in my armpit had been sore.

I knew she wasn’t supposed to tell me what she thought. There was no way she could know for sure from just looking at an image, but I asked anyway: “What are the chances this is cancer?” I was still hoping for at least a fifty-fifty shot. She said she was “very concerned.”

"We’ll get the biopsy done quickly, within the week. Just hold on and try not to worry.” She knew she’d already said too much. The Geiger counter was clicking. The tube of poison was cracking. The cat was sniffing at the change in the air.

I waited fifteen days for that biopsy and the results. In that eternal wait, the tumor was both malignant and benign. I both had cancer and did not have cancer. Shrödinger’s cancer, I called it, and imagined being on an episode of Big Bang Theory. Try as I might, I could not believe the cat had survived. I had cancer. I knew it. And more than that, I was sure it was a fast-growing, aggressive form that would kill me before five years were up. It had spread to my sore lymph node. It had metastasized to other organs. The tumor was just too big to be missed on my last mammogram if it were anything but the worst kind.

The call finally came, and my doctor asked if I was driving. Of course, I knew what that meant. The next words I heard were, “invasive ductal carcinoma,” the diagnosis that my sister-in-law, a nurse, told me she hoped I wouldn’t have.

The cat had grown still. I opened the lid and peered in to confirm it wasn’t moving. The Geiger counter had detected radioactivity, the bottle had shattered, and the poison had been released. A dead cat in the box was the result of just one single atom decaying. It was a fitting end since the malignancy in my body started with just one single cell going haywire.

I had to sit with the diagnosis for another week before learning which stage of cancer I had—treatable or terminal. Another Schrödinger situation in which I had too much time to contemplate cancer. How cancer is so much sickness. So much pain. So much suffering. I’d witnessed it first-hand over and over again. More than anything, I didn’t want my family to watch me waste away as they helplessly stood by. Anticipating the worst, I even thought about googling “how to make suicide look like an accident.” I’m not proud of it, but this is where my mind goes when left in a dark box for too long.

At my first in-person oncology appointment, I learned that the cancer was not only treatable, it was curable. Slow growing, estrogen fed, the best breast cancer you’re going to have if you’re going to have it. The tumor had grown slowly after all, hidden in a mass of dense tissue and a bundle of nerves near my ribcage. A surgeon would remove it and a cancerous lymph node. I would undergo radiation treatments every day for five weeks. I would take an estrogen inhibitor for five years. I would survive.

This cancer would not kill me like the poison killed the cat. Unlike the radioactive reaction that triggered the Geiger counter to break the toxic bottle, radiation would save my life.

I gently lifted the cat out of the box. It wasn’t dead. It was just sleeping. It raised its scruffy head and meowed, stretched itself up on its tiger paws and bounded away. I learned something from the cat. If life and death can exist in superposition, I must focus on life.

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About the author

Jenny Lambert received her MFA in creative writing from Ashland University. She is the author of the young adult dystopian novel The Memory Visit and its sequel. She currently lives is Concord, California, where she is writing a horror novel that keeps her up at night.