Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life by Mary Cappello (Alyson Books, $15.95 trade paper, 9781593501501/1593501501, October 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read:

At first there were only looks and very few words. I didn't even have a name, so I asked her name, assuming that if I called her by her name, I might begin to have one.

"She" was the ultrasound technician who was examining the inner contours of my breast on a screen. Prior to my meeting her, there had been a mammography technician who called me back into her room in the hope of gaining a better purchase on the mystery, on getting the machine to hone in, to bore down into, to see. Behind the scenes, I also knew there was a doctor. Invisible as Oz's wizard, she was planted somewhere . . .

Mammograms, there's no question, are painfully unpleasant, but at least you +stand+ for them. In the ultrasound room, you are supine--which, in medical situations, as far as I'm concerned, is never good. Rather than look at the screen, I watched the ultrasound technician watching. I tried to read her face. It was peering, and at a certain point it became more alert, the way a scuba diver's might when he's found the endangered anemone he was in search of. But this nearly jubilant alertness turned almost immediately into its opposite. The nameless woman's face turned, there is only one word for it, grave. She gave me her face, her sad face, and she said, "You stay right here while I show this to the doctor."--Selected by Marilyn Dahl