I was only 41, raising a nine-year-old son as a single mother, when I learned that I had breast cancer. I didn't want my son, with whom I was astoundingly close, to fear losing me--a fear I had experienced at age ten with respect to my own mother, of blessed memory, when she had surgery for ovarian cancer. I succeeded in hiding my fear from my little one, sharing it only after my lumpectomy had been performed and I felt safe because all my lymph nodes were clear.