About three weeks ago, after a routine mammogram, I learned that the radiologist had identified a spot on my left breast. I needed a follow-up scan.

I stayed fairly calm in the intervening weeks. I slept and ate and went to work et cetera, but of course I felt like a thousand-pound anvil was poised over my head. I talked to a few other women who'd gone through this process or had knowledge about it, and they were optimistic. Their conversation was a huge help, but still: if a crisis were coming, I needed to be mentally prepared. And so I tried to be ready, in a non-panicking, non-hysterical way, for really bad news.

Finally yesterday morning arrived, and I drove across town and up the hill to my follow-up mammogram. It was a usual sort of day at the hospital: hallways filled with misery, helicopter landing on the roof, grim-faced families in elevators, bleary doctors clutching oversized cups of coffee.

Eventually, the radiology tech bounced into the waiting room, caroling, "I thought I'd see you again." This was not reassuring.

She wielded her power, which is to say I went through another round of topless squeezing in an ice-cold office, and then she told me to go back to the waiting room. The radiologist would pronounce my doom shortly. So I sat in a blue vinyl chair and watched a big stinkbug that was posing on the tile floor, waving its antennae like it was trying to get a nurse's attention. Magically no one stepped on it. I wondered if stinkbugs were used as augury in ancient Greece, and, if so, were they reliable? As good as eagles and the entrails of goats? Or more like last-ditch-effort omens?

And then the tech bounced back into the waiting room, crooked a beckoning finger at me, and pulled me into a confab around the corner. "Completely benign," she sang. "Nothing to worry about. Back to your regular screening schedule." My eyes filled with tears, and she flung her arms around me. Behind us orderlies were wheeling a moaning woman through the corridor, and I was standing in a puddle of bad overhead lighting being embraced by a stranger because I was well. The world is a mixed-up story.