In need of perspective? Go see a sloth

Baby sloth Fern was born in the rainforest exhibit in the National Aquarium.

When your doctor orders three mammograms and two sonograms, and then waits one nano-beat too long before saying “biopsy,” go see a sloth. Earlier this month, that’s what I did, at the National Aquarium in the Inner Harbor. Not for a second opinion, but a different perspective.

No creature on earth is better at looking upwards than a sloth. For most of their lives they hang bottoms up from treetops in South and Central America and enjoy a view of sky framed by leafy green. So, with “biopsy” ringing in my ears, I felt that’s what I needed: to look up at the blue, not down at the dirt. And, more importantly, I needed to slow down. Way, way down. And when it comes to slow, nothing beats a sloth.

If they really try, sloths can reach speeds of 13 feet a minute in the treetops, but on land they can’t even reach 10. Even their metabolism moves at a snail’s pace: A leaf may need a month to travel through a sloth’s digestive system. But then, who’s keeping track? Not a sloth, that’s for sure. Why would it? Not with all that blue sky to enjoy and tasty leaves within easy reach.

I was hoping for a little trans-species, sloth-to-human empathy. A type of silent interspecies communication, I reasoned, would give me the wisdom to look up and enjoy the view no matter my biopsy’s results. (Maybe I was indulging in a bit of self-aggrandizing melodrama, too.) With their cute snub noses, round eyes, and fixed, gentle smiles, sloths have wonderfully humanlike, benign faces. They simply look too trusting not to love. And loved they are! Around the world on October 20, International Sloth Day, and every day here in Baltimore, where clusters of children crane their necks and squeal “I saw it! I saw it!” I craned my neck, too. But all I saw was a brownish blob stretched high on a tree limb. Maybe a sloth. Maybe some rainforest moss. But definitely not any face-to-face interspecies communication to counterbalance my doctor’s “biopsy.”

The aquarium’s rainforest is home to an array of exotic birds, and apparently I annoyed one because a yellow-romped caique bombarded my head with a stick. Or maybe it meant its stick as a compensatory token for my not meeting a sloth face-to-face. Whatever that yellow-romped caique’s intention, I took it as a sign to leave. But first I stopped at the gift shop, where I picked up two books on sloths and stood in line to pay behind a young boy clutching a bright pink stuffed animal. I knew that shade of pink. Just hours before I had seen it everywhere in the Women’s Imaging Center at Mercy Hospital. Pink balloons, pink pumpkins, even pink rubber duckies, simply everywhere, because, if sloths are honored by a single day, breast cancer patients, survivors and researchers are honored by a month-long display of bright pink, a reminder as well as a semaphore signalling a plea for support. According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, this year alone, 360,000 women and men will be diagnosed with this dreaded disease. Think of it: that’s more than the populations of Everett, Washington; South Bend, Indiana; and Burbank, California, combined. Many will survive, but many will not. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that three years ago 42,211 grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters and wives died from breast cancer: just about 2,000 more people than the entire population of Annapolis.

I am ashamed of how casually callous I was when my godmother, my godchild, my neighbors and friends told me about their own diagnoses. I offered token sympathy, but no real empathy. No real appreciation for how they’d crossed a fault line demarking a “before” and an “after.” No true understanding of how the altered, upward-looking view that my histrionic reaction to “biopsy” drove me to seek from sloths, these women already had. Now I know better. One week after my doctor recommended I have a biopsy and two days after I actually had the procedure, I received a phone call: all my tests for breast cancer were negative. “See you next year,” the doctor said breezily. And she will, but the women she’ll see will be a slightly altered version of me. She’ll see the me who thanked her, then hung up and did nothing for a beat or two or more. Nothing but look out my window at the wondrously blue October sky. The me who’s learned to slow down. Way down.

Patricia Schultheis is a local writer. Her books include “Baltimore’s Lexington Market,” published by Arcadia Publishing in 2007; “St. Bart’s Way,” an award-winning story collection published by Washington Writers Publishing House in 2015; and “A Balanced Life, a memoir published by All Things That Matter Press in 2018. Her email is [e-mail].