by Janet Elder
“Call me when you get to work,” Rich said, as he walked me to the front door. I walked out of our apartment and toward the subway. I felt invisible. I engaged the man at the newspaper stand in a longer conversation than my usual “thank you,” now asking about his family and how his children were doing in school.
I descended the concrete steps into the subway, this time in a way I don’t recall ever doing before, by holding on to the cold, metal handrail for support. My train came right away. Rush hour had long passed, and there were plenty of seats, but I didn’t take one. I stood, grasping one of the poles, studying the faces of my fellow passengers, particularly women, wondering if any of them had cancer.
Once I was safely inside The Times, I sat down at my desk and did what any journalist would: I started researching breast cancer. I put off returning e-mails and phone calls. I typed “breast cancer survival rates” into Google. One million, one hundred thirty thousand citations appeared.
Newsrooms are full of people protecting secrets. Usually the secrets have to do with who was willing or not willing to go on the record about a public official’s wrongdoing or about some corporation that’s been making gazillions in some questionable way or about an athlete who isn’t quite as superhuman as his fans have come to think. The burden of carrying the secret is shared between reporter and editor, and sometimes a wider circle than that. But my secret was about me, and I wasn’t ready to share it with anyone. The burden of carrying it for now was mine alone.
Still, there was comfort at work, in the familiar banter of colleagues I had worked with for decades, in the routine of the day—talking to reporters about their stories, answering e-mails, reading stories, and sitting through the afternoon meeting where decisions are made about which stories will appear on the next day’s front page.
I was going to need those comforts to get me through the next few days. Rich had to go out of town on Tuesday and would not be back until Thursday, making waiting to hear from the doctor even more difficult. I’d be alone with Michael after work each day, making dinner, overseeing homework, getting him to bed each night. I would have to put all my worries about cancer out of my mind. There are no better readers of people than kids. If I was going to keep my secret from Michael, I was going to have to work at it.
I tried to keep my mind occupied with work and Michael’s life. Each night, I made one of Michael’s favorite dinners: spaghetti and meatballs, macaroni and cheese, or salmon. And each night I went to bed shortly after him, at around 9:30, so I would not have to lie in bed awake and alone in the dark thinking about cancer. I was less fearful about being awake and alone too early in the morning, when it was at least light out and I’d be able to busy myself with reading the morning papers, than I was about being awake and alone at night, prey to fear. I could have used the comfort of a dog.
After breakfast each of those mornings, Michael and I would board the crosstown bus for the west side, where Michael goes to school. I’d walk him to the school’s front door and then take the subway down to Times Square to my job at the newspaper. I always liked taking Michael to school; it was a rare opportunity to just sit on the bus together and talk for a while.
Thursday finally came. I left work early in order to make the call to the doctor in the privacy of my bedroom. When I arrived home, Michael and his babysitter, Caroline Clarke, were sitting at the dining room table playing Stratego, one of their favorite board games. “Hi Mom,” Michael called when he heard me come in. “I’m winning,” he said as he and Caroline continued moving their red and blue armies around the board trying to avoid setting off bombs.
Rich had said he’d do everything he could to be home by the time I called the doctor. But it was getting late, and I could not wait and risk calling after office hours only to find the doctor had gone.
I went into my room, closed the door, pulled a reporter’s notebook out of a drawer, paced for a moment, and then sat down at the desk. I reached for the phone and dialed the number of the doctor’s office that I had written on a piece of paper earlier in the day and put in my pocket. I was calm. I asked for the doctor, saying she was expecting my call. “Hold on,” was the anonymous reply at the other end. I was kept on “hold” for ten excruciating minutes. “She’s busy right now and said your results have not yet come in and you should call back tomorrow.”
“But the doctor told me explicitly that she would have the results by now. Can you ask her to call the lab and get the results? I really can’t wait any longer.” Again I was told to hold on.
In a matter of seconds, the doctor got on the phone and said: “I do have your results, Ms. Elder; you do have invasive, lobular breast cancer. You should get in touch with your gynecologist, who will be able to recommend a surgeon.”
Just then Rich walked into our bedroom. I managed to ask the doctor, “Based on the lab report, what else can you tell me about the cancer?” She said: “It is slow growing, but the tumor is large. You will need surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.”
And with that, she hung up the phone.
CHAPTER 3
“HONEY, we have to get Michael a dog.”
Minutes after I hung up the phone with the doctor and told Rich what she had said, I was the one who was pleading. The diagnosis of cancer had brought a sense of urgency to my life. Michael’s emotional need for a dog was now unequivocal. I wanted to give him the dog he imagined in that PowerPoint presentation so many years ago—the one that will “give you a hug when you feel sad.”
My cancer treatments were going to be a long, hard road for us all—surgery, months of chemotherapy, radiation. I wanted us to promise Michael that at the end of all this sadness, he’d have his dog. I didn’t want Michael to lose any of his innocence or buoyancy or sweetness or faith in the goodness and promise of life. I didn’t want him to spend the next six months worrying about me, overhearing conversations with words in them like survival and depressed immune system; I wanted him to spend those months excited about getting a dog.
“Okay, okay, we can talk about it,” Rich said.
“We have to do this,” I said. “Michael has been right all along. He does need a dog, and now he needs a dog more than ever. What better antidote to all this worry and gloom than the anticipation of a puppy?”
And then I realized that both Michael and Rich could be in for an emotional maelstrom. “We don’t know what is going to happen to me,” I said in a voice as devoid of sentiment as I could manage. “If I get worse instead of better, a dog will help Michael and maybe you, too.”
Rich asked the obvious but reasonable questions: How much will this cost? Who is going to train this dog? and How were we going to manage it all? He said he knew right then and there that the dog walking would fall to him.
“No, it won’t, really,” I said. Reminding him of what our neighbors with the toy poodle had told us, I said: “Jennifer told me you can paper-train these small dogs.” Then, to bolster my case, I added: “The walking isn’t really a problem. I can do it in the morning and at night. Caroline can do it in the afternoon.”
My pitch to Rich was starting to sound eerily like the one Michael had been making to me for so many years. I tried to explain that all this would eventually become Michael’s responsibility, just as soon as he was old enough to go out unsupervised on New York City streets. Rich was not persuaded. He gave in anyway.
Once the decision was made, Rich, typically, was fully onboard, though he had one stipulation: “It has to look like a boy’s dog. I don’t want us to get one of those small white dogs that looks like a woman’s slipper, or looks like it belongs to a girl,” he declared. “If it’s going to be a small dog, let’s at least get one that’s a dark color, like black.”
I decided to resist my usual urge to jump all over Rich for what I considered an utterly ridiculous remark. What about the legions of women in New York whose entire wardrobes are black, I wanted to say. Never mind. He had agreed to a dog, and I was thrilled.
Rich and I al
so agreed that the puppy couldn’t arrive just yet. Although we had not yet lined up a team of cancer doctors and were still operating in the dark, we knew enough to realize that having a new puppy in the house would have to wait until the treatments were completed. The chemotherapy would make me sick a lot of the time, the radiation would deplete my physical energy. For now it would be enough for Michael just to know his prayers had been answered. For me, just thinking about getting the dog for Michael was already giving me comfort.
It was going to be good for us all to have a puppy, a new life at the center of our lives, a declaration of faith in the future. Michael was older now, and I was less worried about leaving him asleep in the apartment alone if Rich were away and I had to walk the dog at night. Auntie Babs could take care of the dog when we went away. We could do this. We had to.
Rich and I decided to tell Michael on his twelfth birthday, May 10, that he would finally have the puppy he had wanted for so long. Although we wouldn’t be able to get the dog until the fall, the sooner he knew about the dog, the sooner he and we would have something to distract us from cancer.
By sheer coincidence, May 10 was also the day we were scheduled to get the postsurgery pathology report. You cannot know the extent cancer has invaded your body until you get that report. Once I had it, I would know how far the cancer had spread, how many lymph nodes were involved, whether or not I was a candidate for some of the newer drugs that offered promise for long-term survival. A friend who had been treated for breast cancer cautioned me that the week of waiting for the pathology report can be psychologically debilitating. In fact, her exact words were “It will be the worst week of your life.”
It was the worst week of my life. The salve was plotting and planning how Rich and I would tell Michael he was finally going to get a dog. We could say it outright, or we could give him some telltale gifts, like a leash, or a bowl, or a doggie bed. We decided instead to make a poster with a picture of a small dog. That way, he’d have both a keepsake of the moment and also a minute to take it all in. And we’d have the unparalleled joy of seeing Michael’s face when he realized he was about to get a real, living, breathing dog of his own, the pet he had ached for most of his life.
A few days before Michael’s birthday, while Michael was out of the house, Rich went into Michael’s room to use Michael’s computer, which was attached to our color printer, to print out the announcement he had made:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHAEL!
FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU WILL BE GETTING A PUPPY OF YOUR VERY OWN. START THINKING OF NAMES AND MAKING A PLACE IN YOUR ROOM FOR HIS BED.
WE LOVE YOU,
MOM AND DAD
Below the note was a picture of a black toy poodle, sitting on a sun-drenched lawn, looking straight at the camera, with a tennis ball in front of him. Like Rocket, this toy poodle had a “puppy cut,” rather than a “poodle cut,” which made him look more like a shaggy dog than a poodle, more American than, well, French.
While Rich was busy with the poster I went out to try to find a tiny stuffed black dog that at least resembled the one we had in mind to accompany the announcement. I walked to a nearby toy store, about fifteen blocks from where we lived (a reasonable walk by New York standards). I found just the right little stuffed dog.
It was a lot more fun thinking about how surprised Michael was going to be in a few days when he opened the poster than thinking about that pathology report.
Little did we know, however, that our carefully plotted surprise would be thwarted by a simple oversight. While I was at the store Michael had come home from school and sat down at his computer to do homework. Microsoft Word, the program he uses, and the one from which Rich had printed the poster, keeps track of the names of the last several documents the computer user has worked on, even if the file was never saved on that computer. Sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen, Michael looked for his history notes and saw the list of the most recently retrieved documents. There, at the top of the list: MIKE’S BDAY DOG. He was flabbergasted.
For a moment, Michael just sat there, staring at the words. He hesitated before mentioning what he had seen. But, as he would later say, the thought of his own dog soon “crowded out” all other thoughts in his head. He got up so quickly from his chair, he nearly knocked it to the ground.
“Dad! Dad! Dad!” he called, as he burst through the door of the room where Rich was working. “Is it really true? I know I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I couldn’t help it. Is it really true? Am I getting a dog?”
At first Rich could not figure out how Michael could possibly have divined that his prayers had been answered. And then Michael explained, “Dad, I know I’m not supposed to know, but I turned on my computer and saw …”
“Oh, Mikey, we wanted to tell you on your birthday. I printed our letter to you off your computer and I forgot to erase the evidence,” Rich said as he got up from his chair. “Yes, honey, you are getting a dog, just as soon as Mom’s treatments are over.”
Michael ran to Rich, threw his arms around him, jumping up and down, shouting: “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”
I walked in the front door soon after. Michael, hearing my key in the lock, flung the door open before I had a chance to turn the key. “Thank you, Mom, thank you so much,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and hugging me. “I can’t believe this is finally happening. I can’t believe I am going to have a dog.”
Rich followed close behind Michael, explaining what had happened and how it was that Michael had come to know that his dream of owning a dog would be realized.
The next day at school, Michael told all of his buddies and his teachers that at long last he would be getting a dog. “They were so happy for me,” he reported back.
The elation lasted. It swept us all through the beginning of my chemotherapy treatments in June, and into the summer months. Michael went away to camp for most of July. His letters home were filled with reports of baseball games won and lost, new friends made, and how he could not wait to have his new dog in the fall.
By the time we picked Michael up at the end of the month, chemotherapy had left me bald. The first thing he asked when he got into the car was if I would take off my scarf so he could see and touch my head.
“That is so cool,” he said as he ran his fingers across the top of my head. Michael seemed completely un-fazed.
I had bought a wig in advance of going bald. I didn’t realize until I was actually facing my bald self in a mirror that I just wasn’t someone who could wear a wig. There was no pretending I had hair.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to wear hair to work. Some women feel their workplace demands it. I did not. Still, one of the toughest days for me was the day in late June when I walked into the newsroom of The New York Times, bald. I walked into the building, past the security guard, and got into an empty elevator. I pushed 3. Our newsroom was still on Forty-third Street then, and the elevator doors had a mirrorlike finish. People were forever trying to look at themselves discreetly behind the closed doors, sucking in their stomachs, or straightening their ties. More than one woman was caught with a hairbrush or lipstick in hand. Now I was there alone, staring at a bald stranger dressed in a blue-and-white summer skirt and blue blouse, wearing a ridiculously expensive silk headscarf.
I didn’t have time for a deep breath. The elevator doors opened and there stood my boss, Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor. He looked up from the stack of papers he was reading, looked at me over his half glasses and said: “Hey, Janet, how are you?”
I blurted something out about how self-conscious I felt at that moment, and how apprehensive I was about walking into the newsroom without hair. “You know,” he said, “I think you look great. It only took me a few seconds to get used to seeing you this way, and that’s what it will be for everyone else.”
It was an extraordinarily sensitive remark. I took a deep breath and walked through the newsroom. Like most things we fear in life, the reality wasn’t so ba
d.
No one seemed to flinch at my bald state except me. Adam Nagourney, a friend and colleague who works in Washington, had been sending me constant e-mails throughout my treatments. Shortly after I sat down at my desk that day, one arrived.
“How are things?” came across the transom that day in June. “I lost so much hair I had to have my head shaved. I’m bald,” I sent back. Within seconds, Adam’s response landed in my in-box. “AWESOME!” I laughed out loud.
A week after Michael came home from camp, we made our annual August sojourn to Nantucket. The air, the sun, the water were all restorative. Midway through our vacation, I left Rich and Michael on the island and I returned to New York for a couple of days to have a chemotherapy treatment. It was the sixth treatment, only two more to go, followed by six weeks of radiation. My sister Louise came with me for the hours-long session and then spent the night. She is a gentle soul and made the disruption to my relaxing beach vacation seamless.
During the months and months I underwent cancer treatments, I went to work as often as I could. When I was home, Rich tried to take time from his work, too, and we took long walks in nearby Carl Schurz Park. Being outside always made me feel better, no matter what the weather was like. It also gave us plenty of opportunity to dog watch and get a sense of different breeds.
Carl Schurz Park, home to Gracie Mansion, where New York City’s mayors usually live, is up against the East River. It is one of New York’s hidden treasures. The park is small, with an active corps of volunteers who hold a neighborhood tree lighting and caroling event at Christmastime and tend to its bright yellow daffodils and purple irises in the spring and its cosmos and black-eyed Susans in summer. Just when the heat is beginning to feel as though it has run its course, volunteers erect a giant movie screen on the roller hockey rink for a crowd overflowing onto the basketball court and, as night falls, show classic movies, like Annie Hall and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. All kinds of people show up: babies asleep in their carriages and their exhausted parents, older people in need of company, teens looking for a night out, and dog owners who arrive with their dogs.