I have cancer.

Those are hard words to write. I found out last Thursday when I got the results of a biopsy after having had my uterus scraped the Thursday before.

Endometrioid adencarcinoma, the surgeon said. For a moment, I felt a flash of anger: My body had betrayed me!

I’d always been fond of my uterus; it cradled two beautiful daughters for me. But now it harbored an alien force. I fought back tears as I tried to listen.

The surgeon explained the stage of cancer couldn’t be known until the uterus, the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, and nearby lymph nodes had been removed and examined by pathologists.

I was scheduled to see a specialist, an oncological surgeon, the next morning, last Friday.

I then discovered that, harder than learning I had cancer, was calling the people I loved to tell them. I like to be someone who can be counted on, someone who helps others.

I spent most of the night online, reading about my kind of cancer. It was largely good news. According to the National Cancer Institute, 61,380 women are expected to have endometrial — also called uterine — cancer in 2017, and 10,920 of us are expected to die of it.

On Friday, at the time of my appointment with the surgeon, I was supposed to interview Cindy Pollard, owner of the Home Front Café, which she presides over as a warm hostess to what has become Altamont’s living room, a place where people hang out and feel at home.

Cindy graciously agreed to be interviewed a few hours earlier than scheduled.  As she talked about the soldiers and sailors who had come to her café — both decorated heroes and unsung heroes — I was heartened. She concluded the podcast with the story of a soldier who had landed on Omaha Beach as the Allied forces invaded German-held France in 1944.

He was young and scared, with his face in the sand, when he realized the man dying next to him was a boyhood friend who called out his name. The memory still haunted him all these years later and he wept as he told the story, a story even his own daughter had not heard before.

Cindy told him, “How horrible that must be for you. But think how comforting it was for the man...that he knew someone at the very end.”

That was a story that, at that moment, I relished hearing. I was not young and facing death in a battle. I am old — 63 years — and have lived a full and fulfilled life. I have had the chance, for more than 30 years, to break news and to tell the stories, often in obituaries, of the exceptional and everyday lives of people around me. All of them matter.

My husband left his work at the courthouse in Albany to meet me at the surgeon’s office on Friday where we heard the details of my upcoming hysterectomy. If all goes well, six robotic arms, controlled by a doctor, will reach through tiny holes to cut loose my innards; they’ll flow out the same channel through which my babies were born.

At the end of the session, as my husband and I each headed off to our separate places of work, the doctor stopped us in the corridor and told us instead we should go have lunch together. No one ever died, he said, wishing they had done more work.

We followed his prescription. We looked into each other’s eyes as deeply as we had when we first fell in love 46 years ago. The only bit of sadness I felt was recalling the column my friend, Eileen Leonard — a vibrant mother who wrote for The Enterprise with breathtaking efficiency — had written for the paper when she thought she’d beaten her breast cancer. She wrote of how she and her husband had shared a meal after visiting the doctor and of how important it was to make room in a busy life for the people you love.

But I returned to our newsroom because my work is central to my being. (Our staff is so small that any absence is keenly felt.) There I worked to catch up with the editing and stories I’d missed in the morning. My co-publisher worked, quietly, at his desk, too, and it was comforting to have a sense of purpose. We did our usual podcast of the week’s news and went back to our silent tasks.

As twilight brought its mellow light to a rainy day, I heard footsteps running up the stairs to our newsroom. My daughter Saranac had arrived. I hugged her hard, happy to hold the goodness that had come from my womb. My elder daughter, Magdalena, had visited the weekend before.

I love my family beyond what words can say.

I also feel — and perhaps this is strange — connected in a very real way to the people who read our newspaper. I’ve met many of you over the years and told your stories. Others I’ve never met and probably never will. But, as I work, day after day, at my computer, I feel as if I am writing for you. Whenever I am faced with a tough decision — and there are many for the editor of a small paper — I always ask myself this question: What would best serve the reader?

That’s why I’m writing this now. I believe in being honest, and readers will notice the absence of my stories and editorials during the weeks in which I am being treated for cancer.

My co-publisher and I each work 80 hours in a typical week so I felt, even though he said he could take on more, that it was humanly impossible. Instead two loyal Enterprise journalists are coming to our rescue.

One is my daughter, Saranac Hale Spencer, who will be covering my beats. She started writing at The Enterprise after graduating from Cornell with a degree in philosophy. She left for a job at a Philadelphia daily, The Legal Intelligencer, and then moved on to report for a much larger daily in Wilmington, Delaware, The News Journal.

The other is Andrew Schotz. He started at The Enterprise a month before graduating from the University at Albany. And longtime readers will remember he later co-edited the paper with me for three years before becoming a reporter for a daily in Maryland. He won so many Associated Press prizes there that he couldn’t fit them on his dresser. He gave one to me. It’s a bust of Mark Twain with this quote on its wooden base: “There are only two forces that carry light to all corners of the globe: the sun in the heavens and The Associated Press down here.”

Andrew since was a managing editor of a suburban D.C. weekly chain owned by The Washington Post, and most recently became a city editor of The Frederick News-Post in Maryland. To have two such top-notch journalists filling in for me leaves me without a smidgen of doubt that our readers will be well served.

Soon after Saranac’s arrival on Friday evening, we walked in the soft rain. We took our usual route on Brandle Road — she with her bloodhound, Beulah, and I with my Airedale, Willy. Fog shrouded the Helderbergs, and out of the gloaming the impossibly green brilliance of spring emerged — wide swaths of field and new leaves on trees. Pear trees in the Capuanos’ restored orchard blossomed white through the mist. The melancholy sound of a distant train whistle was punctuated by the mating calls of spring peepers. The air smelled new.

I was glad, very glad and grateful, to be alive.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer