The Cancer Patient’s Book of Grammar Susan Scheid (bio) Examples of Proper Usage The possessive. The radiologist pushes against the patient's breast with what the patient conceives to be a pestle. "Have you felt anything?" The radiologist doesn't look at the patient—or even at the patient's breast. She looks only at a screen. The Comma: In a series. The radiologist examines the screen, pushes the patient's breast again, and reexamines the screen. "Have you felt anything?" "No." The radiologist asks again, "Have you felt anything?" "No." The radiologist leaves the room. The technician says, "You may get dressed and go now." To denote a parenthetical. A week, perhaps more, passes. The patient hears what the mammogram reveals, not from the radiologist, but from her gynecologist. "You mean the radiologist's office didn't say anything?" "No." "But you need a biopsy. I'm sure they're required to tell you." "They didn't." "I can't believe they didn't say anything." "They didn't." Punctuation Between Independent Clauses: When joined by a conjunction. The patient lies on her stomach, and her left breast drops through a hole. The new radiologist, a specialist, sits below her. "You'll feel a pop," he says, and his assistant puts her hand on the patient's back. "Do you have a breast surgeon?" The patient answers no, and she remembers how someone told her only five percent come up malignant. The radiologist says, "You're going to need to see a breast surgeon." [End Page 159] When not joined by a conjunction: Use of the semicolon. The radiologist leaves the room; the patient gets up and dresses. The radiologist comes back; he points out the trails of calcium on the mammogram. Use of the colon. This radiologist tells the patient what he sees: this radiologist isn't a coward. Issues in Composition Use of the paragraph: Example 1: The radiologist says, "We can't know for sure until we have the pathology report, but what we see on the mammogram is in situ. I want to stress that: what we see is ductal carcinoma in situ." "What stage is that?" "This could be stage zero, but, again, we can't know for sure until we see the pathology report." Example 2: "I have the pathology report from the biopsy. It's not what we thought, but it's still not bad." "Oh." "There's a little place where the cancer cells have broken through into the adjacent tissue." "What stage is that?" "Probably stage one, but we won't know for sure until the surgeon removes the tumor and gets the pathology report from that." Use of the active voice. The patient sees the surgeon. The surgeon recommends a lumpectomy. The patient has the lumpectomy. She takes a cab home. She vomits. Avoiding unnecessary words. The patient waits. An hour passes. The surgeon says he's waiting for the report. Use of the run-on sentence. That the surgeon says nothing else to her is a bad sign, the patient thinks, and she goes over again what he said, that he's waiting for the report, which she thinks means he's heard orally but doesn't want to say what he's heard, for if there had been anything at all good to say, he wouldn't have made her wait. She remembers, too, how, after being closed up in the cold room, she opened the door, but he came past and closed it again, and she thinks now he did that because he didn't want her to overhear something before he was ready to say it, and her worries are confirmed when, finally, he steps into the room, and, when she asks if the news is bad, he answers, "It's complicated." [End Page 160] Use of tense in summaries. The node has cancer cells. The margin of the tumor from the left breast isn't clean. The risk to the right breast is high. Word placement. The patient is wheeled into the room and rolled on a bed. She has two rows of stitches where once she had two breasts. Issues...