The Appointment I Rescheduled Four Times Before I Actually Went

The card on the fridge

There was a little reminder card stuck to my fridge in Durban for the better part of a year, held up by a magnet shaped like a pineapple that my daughter bought me as a joke. The card was for an appointment I kept making and kept moving. Every time the date came close I would find a reason. A parent meeting at the school. A cold I did not want to spread. A weekend my sister was visiting from Pietermaritzburg. Perfectly reasonable reasons, every one of them, and all of them lies of a certain kind, because underneath was the real reason, which was that I did not want to go.

I am a primary school teacher. I have spent nearly thirty years telling small children to be brave about things that are good for them but not much fun, dentists and injections and swimming lessons in cold water. I say it with real conviction, hand on heart, march them off. And there I was, fifty-two years old, moving a health appointment for the fourth time because I did not want to face it. If one of my learners had behaved the way I was behaving, I would have had a quiet word with them.

Why I dragged my feet

I should say there was no lump, no scare, no doctor wagging a finger at me. That is almost the point. If there had been a fright I think I would have gone running. It was precisely because everything felt fine that I kept telling myself there was no hurry. Fine is a very comfortable place to hide.

Part of it was fear of what they might find, the ordinary human kind of fear that we all pretend we are too sensible to have. And part of it, if I am honest, was a bit of squeamishness and a bit of that South African tendency to just soldier on and not make a fuss about yourself. My mother was of the generation that did not go to doctors unless a bone was showing. I absorbed more of that than I realised. You put everyone else first, the children, the husband, the learners, and your own body goes to the back of a very long queue.

The card stayed on the fridge under the pineapple magnet, quietly judging me every time I reached for the milk.

The friend who would not let it go

What finally moved me was not a poster or a pamphlet. It was Thandeka.

Thandeka and I have taught at the same school for over twenty years, and she is the kind of friend who does not let things slide. She had been for her own check earlier that year, mentioned it to me over tea in the staff room, and I made some vague noise about how I really must go sometime. She looked at me over her mug in a way I knew well, the look she gives a child who says the dog ate their homework, and she said, sometime is not a date. Then she took out her phone and asked me, right there between the milk tart and the second bell, when exactly I was going.

I did not have an answer, and she knew I did not, and she did not let me wriggle out of it with a laugh the way I usually did. She said she would come with me. Not to the appointment itself, but she would drive with me and wait and we would have lunch after. She made it a plan with another person in it, which is a very hard thing to reschedule, because you are not just letting yourself down anymore.

The morning itself

So on a Wednesday during the school holidays, with Thandeka in the passenger seat telling me a long story about her son's driving lessons to keep my mind occupied, I finally went for the Breast Examination I had been avoiding for a year. I remember gripping the steering wheel at the robots on the way and Thandeka reaching over to pat my hand without breaking her story about the son and the reverse parking.

I had built the whole thing up into something enormous in my head. The reality was almost annoyingly ordinary. There was a friendly woman at a desk, a form to fill in, a short wait during which I read the same page of an old magazine four times. The Mammogram itself was quick and a bit uncomfortable in the way you would expect when a machine is involved, but it was over far faster than the year I had spent dreading it. The radiographer was calm and matter of fact and talked me through each step, and I kept thinking, this is it, this is the thing I moved four times, this is the monster under the bed.

Afterwards I sat in the little changing cubicle for a moment longer than I needed to, doing up my blouse, feeling faintly ridiculous. All that avoiding. All those reasonable lies stuck to my fridge. For this.

Lunch, and what Thandeka said

We went for lunch afterwards at a place near the beachfront, and I had a proper plate of prawns because I felt I had earned them. I was chattier than usual, the loose, silly way you get when a tension you have carried for a long time finally lets go. Thandeka let me babble for a while and then said something I have thought about often since.

She said the hardest part is never the appointment. The hardest part is the deciding, and you already did that, so the rest was just admin. She was right. The genuinely difficult thing had been the year on the fridge, the moving and the excuses, the private wrestling I did entirely alone. The actual medical part took a fraction of the time and none of the courage I had been hoarding.

I do not want to turn this into a lecture, because I cannot stand being lectured myself and I would be a hypocrite to hand out advice I ignored for a year. I will only say what happened to me. I let something simple grow into something huge by refusing to look at it, and a stubborn friend with a phone in a staff room cut it back down to its actual size.

The magnet holds a shopping list now

The card is gone from my fridge. The pineapple magnet holds a shopping list these days, which feels like the right kind of ordinary. When the time comes for the routine follow up down the line, and for the Mammograms that will be part of the rhythm of my life from now on, I would like to think I will simply go, the way I tell my learners to simply go and get their vaccines, without the year of theatre in between.

I am not certain I will be that brave, if I am honest. Old habits sit deep. But I have Thandeka, and she has a phone and a certain look, and I have a very clear memory of how much smaller the real thing was than the version I built in my head. Mostly I have the knowledge that the worst part was never going to be the appointment. It was always going to be the deciding, and I have already learned how that ends when I let a good friend push me over the line.