“I was told you were good at giving bad news.”

My wife, Meredith, and I were dining at a place we had wanted to try since it opened. The Brooklyn restaurant, which describes itself as a “Jew.”–ish” bistro, was as cozy and familiar as I had hoped. The delicacies – latkes topped with slices of smoked sable, a gin martini washed in pickled brine – appealed to me as a bon vivant and descendant of shtetl broth. But that Thursday evening something wasn't right; not with the food, but with me.

Six days earlier, I had had a biopsy of my right breast after two irregular mammograms—one routine, one follow-up—revealed what appeared to be calcium deposits.

My wife assured me that biopsies, like follow-up mammograms, become more common as we get older. And, she said, they could yield false positives — especially if your breasts are as dense as memory foam, like mine. Other friends have shared similar experiences. I often joked that at our age it was a rite of passage to have our breasts poked, prodded and squashed in the vise of the mammography plates. But the observation feels different when presented as a punchline.

I did my best to seem fully engaged on our date, but Meredith—whom I've been married to for 13 years and worked with for 22 years—could tell I was hurting about my impending test results. So I confessed: I felt bad news hitting my gut, which, as personal history has dictated, is rarely wrong.

Sharing my concerns was enough to alleviate them for the time being, especially since there was nothing left to do but enjoy every delectable dish presented to us. By the time we walked home, I was so full from our meal that I had managed to put the biopsy out of my mind.

However, at 3am I was woken up by extreme nausea. I crawled into the bathroom, seeking the cold comfort of the tile floor. Before I knew it, I was saying goodbye to every bite I had enjoyed just hours earlier. With my head hanging over the toilet bowl, I ran through a mental checklist of possible causes: I hadn't finished my martini yet, so it wasn't alcohol. Meredith and I had split each dish and she was fast asleep, so it wasn't food poisoning.

Then, just as quickly as I was overcome with nausea, I was settled enough to go back to bed. By morning, I had almost forgotten my middle-of-the-night ordeal, until my gynecologist called.

I had chosen her as my doctor almost 25 years ago, in part because I always expected to find myself in this situation. My paternal grandmother and my mother's two sisters had breast cancer; one has the BRCA gene, the other died before such tests were available. I, like my mother, tested negative.

I also have a complicated relationship with my breasts, with my body in general, and initially attributed the discomfort to being a queer person who didn't conform to socially assigned gender roles. When I was twenty, I dressed myself in big, baggy clothes. In my early thirties, I stopped worrying about binaries and allowed myself to feel more connected to my body and comfortable with the way my breasts looked.

Although I felt more comfortable with their appearance, I was overwhelmed by the fear that I would eventually lose one or both of them. The first woman I ever fell in love with had precancerous lesions removed from her breasts while we were still in college; by the time she was 31, she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Six years later she died of the disease.

She wasn't the only friend who had breast cancer – far from it – but she was my age and I witnessed her struggle to live.

So it was imperative for me to find the right doctor. But the gynecologist's office was not a welcoming space for lesbians in the 1990s to discuss concerns or even talk openly about gender or sexuality. One of the first questions at every visit: “Are you sexually active?” – is practical yet fraught with presumption, and the answer to “yes” often raises questions about contraception.

I muttered that my contraceptive practice was to have sex exclusively with women – a little humor to lighten the mood. But no matter how I brought up my sexuality, an audible silence filled the room. The gynecologist grabbed her clipboard and took notes while I averted my eyes, sitting awkwardly on the edge of the exam table in a revealing hospital gown, flanked by two metal stirrups.

Once a doctor said mockingly, “So you're not having children?” I decided that these interactions were more demeaning than helpful and stopped my annual visits.

But when my aunt died of breast cancer in the summer of 1999, I knew I had to change course. I hadn't had a checkup in three years, so I went on a mission to find a gynecologist who could tolerate it; not doing so was too dangerous.

I asked my queer friends about their gynecologists, but none were recommended at the time—until I asked my friend Laura, a lesbian seven years older than me. She had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and sang the praises of the doctor who found the lump.

I asked Laura if a gynecologist's office could ever be comfortable for us. She insisted this was possible. She wrote down a name and number: Dr. Buxbaum, or Audrey (a doctor who was approachable enough to avoid formalities).

Even though Audrey was straight, she didn't make assumptions, Laura told me. Audrey asked and answered questions without judgment, and was very knowledgeable, attentive and compassionate.

“If you ever need to get bad news,” Laura said, “Audrey is the person you want to hear it from.”

A few years later, Laura succumbed to cancer. I was devastated, but she left me with an indispensable gift: the doctor I needed in an emergency.

And it was her name that showed up on my phone when that emergency occurred.

“How are you?” Audrey asked.

“I think you're going to tell me,” I said, realizing why I had thrown up hours ago.

Her voice brought me the news: my biopsy showed I had breast cancer, but it was caught very early.

I closed my eyes and inhaled. This will be fine, I told myself. It'll be fine.

“Should I deal with this right away?” I have asked. “I have so much shit on my plate in the next few weeks.”

This is me in crisis mode asking for more time, but Audrey wasn't surprised by my knee-jerk reaction. I heard myself beating off weeks' worth of work deadlines. But she didn't rush me to end the conversation. She had come over early that morning, she told me, so we had time to talk.

“I always expected to have this conversation with you one day,” I said. “Like, if I had to get this news, I would want you to be the one to tell me.”

“I'm told you're good at delivering bad news,” I added. “It turns out to be true.”

Audrey became silent. It was hard to say, but I knew I would regret it if I didn't share it. Going in for my annual checkup was something I had avoided until I became her patient. What would have happened to me if I hadn't found her?

Anticipating a cancer diagnosis does little to allay the fear of what lies ahead. But thanks to my friend Laura's recommendation, I found a doctor who had created a welcoming space for gay patients, and that may have saved my life.

Kera Bolonik is editor-in-chief of DAME Magazine. Her non-fiction book 'Gullible' is published by Dey Street/HarperCollins.