A few moments later, while scanning the line where the waves were breaking offshore through her viewfinder, she heard the woman’s voice behind her. She spoke English, but with a distinctly German accent.
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I can see that you’re busy and I am sorry to bother you.”
Maggie lowered her camera. “Yes?”
“It’s a little difficult to say this, but have you had that dark spot on the back of your shoulder examined?”
Maggie frowned, trying without success to see the spot between the straps of her bathing suit that the woman was referring to. “I didn’t know I had a dark spot there…” She squinted at the woman in confusion. “And why are you so interested?”
The woman, fiftyish with short gray hair, nodded. “I should perhaps introduce myself. I’m Dr. Sabine Kessel,” she said. “I’m a dermatologist in Munich. The spot looks abnormal.”
Maggie blinked. “You mean like cancer?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said, her expression cautious. “But if I were you, I’d have it examined as soon as possible. It could be nothing, of course.”
Or it could be serious, Dr. Kessel didn’t have to add.
Though it took five nights to achieve what she wanted from the shoot, Maggie was pleased with the raw files. She would work on them extensively in digital postproduction—the real art in photography these days almost always emerged in post—but she already knew the results would be spectacular. In the meantime, and though she tried not to worry about it, she also made an appointment with Dr. Snehal Khatri, a dermatologist on the Upper East Side, four days after her return to the city.
The spot was biopsied in early July 2016, and afterward she was sent for additional testing. She had MRI and PET scans done at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital later that same month. After the results had come in, Dr. Khatri sat her down in the examination room, where he quietly and seriously informed her that she had stage IV melanoma. Later that day, she was introduced to an oncologist named Leslie Brodigan, who would oversee her care. In the aftermath of these meetings, Maggie did her own research on the internet. Though Dr. Brodigan had told her that general statistics meant very little when it came to predicting outcomes for a particular individual, Maggie couldn’t help fixating on the numbers. The survival rate after five years for those diagnosed with stage IV melanoma, she learned, was less than fifteen percent.
In stunned disbelief, Maggie made her first Cancer Video the following day.
*
At her second appointment, Dr. Brodigan—a vibrant blue-eyed blonde who seemed to personify the term good health—explained everything about her condition again, since the whole process had been so overwhelming that Maggie could remember only bits and pieces of their first meeting. Essentially, having stage IV melanoma meant that the cancer had metastasized not only to distant lymph nodes but to some of her other organs as well, in her case both her liver and her stomach. The MRI and PET scans had found the cancerous growths invading healthier parts of her body like an army of ants devouring food laid out on a picnic table.
Long story short: The next three and a half years were a blur of treatment and recovery, with occasional flashes of hope illuminating dark tunnels of anxiety. She had surgery to remove her infected lymph nodes and the metastases in her liver and stomach. The surgery was followed by radiation, which was excruciating, turning her skin black in places and leaving behind nasty scars to go with the ones she’d collected in the operating room. She also learned there were different kinds of melanoma, even for those with stage IV, which led to different treatment options. In her case, that meant immunotherapy, which seemed to work for a couple of years, until it finally didn’t. Then, last April, she had begun chemotherapy and continued it for months, hating how it made her feel but convinced that it had to be effective. How could it not work, she wondered, since it seemed to be killing every other part of her? These days, she barely recognized herself in the mirror. Food nearly always tasted too bitter or too salty, which made it hard to eat, and she’d dropped more than twenty pounds from her already petite frame. Her oval-shaped brown eyes now appeared sunken and oversize above her protruding cheekbones, her face more like skin stretched over a skull. She was always cold and wore thick sweaters even in her overheated apartment. She’d lost all her dark brown hair, only to see it slowly grow back in patches, lighter in color and as fine as a baby’s; she’d taken to wearing a kerchief or hat almost all the time. Her neck had become so spindly and fragile-looking that she wrapped it in a scarf to avoid glimpsing it in mirrors.