Waking from the fog of anesthesia, Naomi Lederach faintly heard the impersonal words of the nurse beside her: "This bilateral mastectomy is ready to go back to her room." The sentence dug into her hazy brain as Lederach, a nurse herself, struggled to understand what was happening. She sat upright on the gurney and shouted, "That's not me! I just had one breast reconstructed!" The room filled with silence.

She was aware enough to sit up again and look at her chest - it was completely flat. Neither breast was left. Lederach turned to the nurses, yelling, "That's not me! What happened?" She received no answers, and slowly slipped back into the fogginess.

Over the next days in recovery, her nightmare continued. "When I came back to the room and really began to face what had happened, I was devastated," she remembers. None of the nursing staff would talk to her about the operation. Fearing a lawsuit, they refused to tell her even the simplest information about her blood pressure or medications.

The doctor was even less help. Whenever he saw her, he was followed by an entourage of residents and interns, and said nothing about her procedure. Not wanting to put him down in front of his students, Lederach found it impossible to breach the subject.

Over the years, Lederach had had five breast biopsies. With the discovery of a sixth lump, and knowing her family's strong history of breast cancer, Lederach's physician recommended a subcutaneous mastectomy. She read up on the procedure in professional journals and involved her husband in the deliberations. They visited with the surgeon - a very professional man who came highly recommended and carefully described exactly what would be done. After months of mulling the decision over, and with the new lump very apparent, they decided to go ahead with the operation - on her right breast. She had never had problems with the left.

Three months after the operation, after the healing process was complete and all the stitches were out, Lederach had her last appointment with the surgeon. She was finally able to ask him what she had so desperately needed to know all along: Why?

She asked if it was some sort of miscommunication, or whether had he planned this. "Did he have any idea how it felt to be in that hospital, under his care, feeling as though he had no feeling at all for what had happened?"

The physician still refused to acknowledge that an error was made. "I think he was very afraid, of course," Lederach said. She reminded him of his orders that no medical personnel should talk to her about the operation.

"Well, that's the legal advice we get," he responded.

"Why are you getting legal advice about this if nothing is wrong?" she countered.

He became very defensive and angry, "Well, I can see you haven't worked through this. I will recommend a psychiatrist. I'll write up a referral for you."

"I see psychiatrists every day. I work with them, they are my good friends, and they have helped me to deal with this. And all I'm asking from you is, what happened?"

"I naively thought we could have some sort of resolution to this, in a way that would satisfy," she remembers, "and there was just no way that was going to happen." She became so distraught that she began crying, got down off the table and went to her car. As she drove out on the freeway, Lederach "screamed and cried and poured out my anger and hostility and the devastating feelings I had, all the way home."

Over the next two years, she thought about what she should do about the situation, and got a lot of different advice. "People would say, 'You owe it to the public to sue this man, so that he doesn't do it again.' Others, of course, from my historical peace church tradition said, 'You really can't sue…You're not supposed to sue your brother.'"

Lederach was very angry with the doctor, and making this decision was extremely difficult. She consulted lawyers to find out what a lawsuit might mean. They assured her she would probably be awarded a large settlement. That knowledge gave Lederach a different kind of feeling, a sense of power - a temptation to hurt the man who had caused her so much pain. "When someone comes to you and is vulnerable and says, 'Will you forgive me?' then it's not so hard to offer forgiveness. [But] where there is a refusal to admit that anything might have been done wrong, and forgive anyway, can I do that?"

After eventually making the choice not to sue, Lederach learned that forgiveness is a long process. "I consciously chose, and choose, to forgive him, whether he wants to be forgiven or not. There are times that it comes up, and I get all angry again. And so I chose to reinterpret that history through forgiveness. Not to forgive ties you to the past. And I don't want to be there. I want to move on beyond that."

This story is transcribed from a radio interview originally aired by Your Time April 20-24, 1987.