I suppose a moral of this story is that if doctors say that there’s a great likelihood of cancer, don’t fold.    

Last week my family was told that a CT scan showed a large mass on our mother’s bladder. “I’m more than 90 percent certain it’s malignant,” a urologist told me at the hospital where Mom had been admitted because of bleeding.

At 94, Mom is immobile, has dementia, and lives in a nursing home, so we’re prepared for her death. But we were hoping that she can go painlessly.

The urologist and the surgeon who stopped into Mom’s hospital room didn’t even recommend a diagnostic procedure for a frail nonagenarian. They said that cystoscopy has some risks, though minor. After the conversation with them, I told my siblings that I saw no reason for the cystoscopy if we weren’t going to consent to treatment.

The other three wanted proof, however. They had the support of Mom’s cardiologist, who I suspected thought that he knew more about others’ specialities than they did. 

During the couple of days we waited for the cystoscopy, we had a conference call with the hospital’s palliative care doctor. We discussed how to talk to Mom about the cancer, what to expect from hospice, and whether life expectancy would be estimated.

As Mom was being prepped for the cystoscopy, one of the urologists upped the cancer prediction to 100 percent. A half-hour later, when Mom was in recovery, my brother texted us that no mass was found. The urologists now say that there might have been a cyst that burst or clots that bled away.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Rick ended the text. “I do now,” one of my sisters replied.

I would understand if a cancer patient half my mother’s age were to think, “Why is an old woman spared and not me? The universe is unfair.” 

I’m relating this tale not because I’m rejoicing but because it might be an instructive example.  

I didn’t doubt the initial assessment, so confident were the doctors who spoke to me. If my siblings, usually more trusting of authority than I am, hadn’t insisted on a cystoscopy, we would now be enlisting hospice, informing friends and relatives of the bad news, and watching Mom for signs of decline. 

There were more ironies. It seemed uncharacteristic of physicians, loathe to be found wrong, to express such positivity without a diagnostic test. Rick said the incident proves the value of second opinions. If we’d enlisted a second opinion, however, it would have been from another urologist. Our second opinion came unsolicited from a cardiologist who, I found out later, had told Rick there was an outside chance the mass was a cluster of blood clots.

Escaping cancer doesn’t guarantee that Mom has much more time. She has multiple ailments and is past her life expectancy. But at least for now she isn’t facing a painful death.