My Breast Cancer Survivor Twin

Not long ago, I was working on a watercolor in a public place when a woman stopped by to make conversation. I thought nothing of it. She wasn’t the first—people seem to enjoy watching an artist work—and like most of the others who’d come by, she was older. But it wasn’t my painting that caught her eye. It was my digital camera.

“I got a digital camera for Christmas,” she told me. “I’ve never been able to figure out how to work it.”

I said I’d show her how. Living close by, she soon retrieved her camera, still in its box, and we spent the next hour taking pictures of each other and everything in sight. Meanwhile, we talked. She was as chatty as I was. And that wasn’t the only thing we had in common.

“I was on my way to the library,” she said. She was returning a book I’d just finished, a novel by Jodi Picoult. She’d been, as I had, an avid reader of fiction since childhood.

We both grew up abroad and love to travel. We often travel alone, and like it that way. We both have outrageously high cholesterol, suffer terrible side effects to statins and neither of us will take them. We're both almost vegetarians.

And we’ve both been diagnosed with breast cancer. Same diagnosis. Same side. Same treatment.

 “When’s your birthday, I asked, wondering if I really wanted to know.

“January 18th, ” she said.

“Mine’s the 19th.”

We looked at each other with astonished recognition. Were we some sort of twins? We wondered. “Our first names even rhyme,” I said. (I promised not to reveal hers.)

“It’s even better than that,” she said. “That’s just a nickname. My real name is Mary.”

Okay. That was enough. We’d exhausted ourselves with similarities. But I had one more question for her:  “How long have you survived breast cancer?”

“Twelve years,” she said. “So far.”

Wow. Ten years longer than I had, so far. “Twins,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”