A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir

by Linda Zercoe

  Were these some of the attributes of being female? I presumed I had two X chromosomes in each of my cells, does that make one a female? Yes, it does, by medical definition. Also, I still had my genitalia. So I concluded I was still female. I rationalized that nobody else could see the erasure of the now missing critical pieces of me, obliterated forever.

  The XX part of me gave some fantastical notion of the idea of having a funeral service for these parts, complete with some burning (candles, campfire) and other women dancing, chanting in circles with flowing dresses as part of a grieving process, signifying the end of some era in my life. But it was brought up short by the strong current of male yang within me that said I was being ridiculous, Snap out of it.

  In spite of the yang, I still felt heartsick and sad. Why was it that even though my former breasts were referred to as nothing more than sweat glands and their reconstruction good enough to fill a bra, I missed my breasts, their softness and excitability? And now that the uterus and associated reproductive organs were removed—the cause of melancholy, nervousness, depression, and hysterical fits, at least in misogynistic historical circles—I still felt all those things. Life is too bizarre!

  My trips to the backyard also helped me wrestle with the notion of my sexuality. I finally deduced that sexuality was “all in my head” and therefore hadn’t been removed. However, my interest in sex depended on the state of my marital relationship. When it was good, I felt sexual; when it was bad, I felt asexual. But I thought that was probably true for most people. I thought, Too bad that it wasn’t mostly good, because when things were good, the sex was great.

  I continued playing with my dolls. The collection by this time was obscene. I had multiple dolls in each major room of the house; I continued to change each doll’s outfit based on my mood and the season. I delighted in costumes like Champagne Supper, which the preferred customer catalog described as follows:

  Romance blossoms during an intimate candlelight dinner in London. How could he resist her in this sumptuous gown of rich copper satin with fur collar and cuffs on the hourglass jacket? Cream roses accent the uniquely cuffed bodice, while two underlayers of gold crinoline add feminine fullness to the skirt. The outfit includes topaz rhinestone and golden jewelry, lined clutch purse with hand strap, gloves, seamed hose and shoes—Circa 1957.

  I collected outfits like Hello Hollywood, Hello and Goodbye New York. I couldn’t resist Love Letters, which included the costume’s story in the booklet:

  In the film “Love Letters” pen-pals plan to meet. He writes: “How will I know you?” She responds: “I’ll wear something red.” What an understatement! Love Letters is a two-piece cocktail suit in an explosion of vibrant red, circa 1947, trimmed with red bows and a red organza rose. Includes trimmed red hat, red bead hatpin, red gloves, handbag and shoes (all with red crystal beading), seamed hosiery (not red!).

  I created a doll townhouse complete with all the official Gene furniture and doll props on the shelves of the armoire in our bedroom. (Armoire needed but purchased with Gene in mind.) The credenza at the front door was a doll scene that continued to change monthly. Doug said nothing of this. He was actually very tolerant.

  Kim was accepted into Philadelphia School of the Arts’ Musical Theatre department as a transfer student, so we headed to Philly to check it out. She met with numerous faculty members and was even offered a monetary scholarship. In the end, though, she decided that she wanted to take more academic classes and not just classes in performance, dance, and voice. She decided to finish her associate’s degree and then transfer to a four-year college for some yet-to-be-chosen major.

  I went to see a psychiatrist and was started on yet another antidepressant. I also started seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist. If I needed to pay someone to listen I thought maybe this would be a new twist, to find someone who could help me change some of my patterns of thinking, anger, depression, sadness. I just wanted to feel better, sooner rather than later.

  I kept myself busy, my usual modus operandi. Nothing was clicking on the job scene after several interviews. I started working on crafts, mosaics, painting flower pots, and adding whimsy to the house on the order of Mary Engelbreit. I refurbished my childhood toy box and stenciled the laundry room.

  During the spring I was co-coaching Brad and his friends, seven 9 and 10 year olds, for a Destination Imagination competition. The children selected a “challenge,” constructing a roller coaster that would maximize the number of oranges that would successfully make the trip in the time allotted. This had to be built on a limited budget and within very tight parameters for size, height, weight, etc. We visited the roller coaster exhibit at the Tech Museum in San Jose. We visited hardware stores. The kids had to come up with all the planning and solutions to the problem at hand. It was hard to be quiet and not lend advice, but without intervention they negotiated, planned, designed, and executed their solution. The other coach’s garage became the construction site as the prototype for the project emerged—between our lessons on tool safety.

  On the day of the competition we all drove up to UC Davis. The energy and excitement in the car was effervescent. At the competition, they completed the egg portion of the program, successfully transferring an uncooked egg seven times around a circle using a spoon (after numerous not-so-successful practices and clean-ups).

  When their team was called to assemble and compete with their roller coaster, I held my breath and then cheered once the buzzer started the action. The kids worked together like a pit crew for NASCAR. There were a few glitches, but they calmly picked up and moved forward. Each of the team members had a job to do. Every orange went through a roller coaster course, and the fruit that successfully made it to the collection box at the end was worth one point. The gymnasium sounded like the Final Four, all for the grade school kids. Doug quietly stood manning the video recorder.

  Brad’s team came in fifth for the State of California. Brad was so happy, proclaiming, “This is the best day of my life!” Being part of that day and his joy made my living worth whatever it took to stay alive.

  That summer was five and a half years since the first breast cancer diagnosis and four years since the second. When I wasn’t overscheduled, I continued to ruminate in the backyard. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I see my life as a huge gift, and cancer, as the spinning of straw into gold, making lemonade out of lemons, the turning point? Was I just happiest being miserable? I knew somewhere in those years I had lost my sense of humor and my love of life.

  Cancer may not have killed me but it killed a part of me that wasn’t in the body part cemetery. The problem with this war is that you can’t identify who is the enemy and who shares the battle cry. The war is with your own self. Every instinct is to hate the enemy, but when the enemy is your own body, the anger turns inward, and becomes depression. The surge of battle is intuitively thwarted at the onset. There is nowhere to run or to hide. The problem with all these questions, questions, questions is that there doesn’t seem to be an answer. Therefore, Cancer is the ultimate rhetorical question. The question, always the same with the Big C, is why?

  The sickest part of all of this was that the rest of the world, including most of my closest friends, knew nothing of the demons chatting up a storm inside my head or the clouds of smoke billowing in the backyard. I believed the rest of the world saw me as fun-loving, having a zest for life, sometimes even wild and crazy—someone who was making the most of her life. But as Doug told me, “They don’t really know you.”

  During the summer my upper back began to bother me. I assumed that I must have pulled a muscle, or that maybe it was stress and tension. Then I thought maybe it was due to the different sizes or weights of my reconstructed breasts. When it didn’t seem to be getting much better, after weeks of Advil and heating pads, I went to my primary care doctor and was referred to physical therapy. They worked with deep heat, ultrasound, moist hot packs, and massage, and we pinpointed the focal points of the pain as primaril
y in the right rhomboid muscles under the shoulder blade and a few intensely painful areas along my spine. After a few sessions without seeing any improvement, they told me that they didn’t know what else they could do. After seeing how upset I was, they decided to keep trying.

  Pain wears you down and makes you very cranky. I was on one antidepressant during the day, a different one at night, hormone replacement therapy, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for the pain. This was in addition to all the vitamins, antioxidants and herbal supplements I now took every day.

  My love for my children, my dog, and the make-pretend world of my dolls was all that seemed to keep me going. The cognitive behavioral therapist wasn’t helping in any recognizable way. I was just paying him $100 per hour to listen to my miseries.

  Since I avoided all the darkest corners of my mind, I decided that some of my depression might be due to living in such a dark house. I felt that there was something wrong with the energy of the house. Feng shui was starting to become popular, so I hired a feng shui consultant to help me set things right. She told me that our house layout was all wrong but in feng shui theories there were remedies using crystals, water elements, plants, color, and mirrors. These were things that reflected light, redirected energy flow, and created balance. According to the consultant we had a problem with our career and money center. All the energy was rushing in a line through the front door, hitting the wall, and going nowhere. Our love corner was all wrong. We needed to add red for empowerment and to improve the career center, use carefully placed crystals to focus energy, buy a fountain, and other assorted remedies. I implemented some of her suggestions and became determined to remedy the entire house and to “feng shui” my life. But that would take time.

  In October, I flew to Chicago for the annual Gene Doll convention. The theme was “A Toast at Midnight” to celebrate the new millennium. It was amazing to be with hundreds of people with the same obsession. My eyebrows were raised by the scores of people—including men—who were wearing exact, life-sized replicas of the doll’s clothes and had not just one, but numerous costumes. The “Meet the Doll’s Creator” seminar was like a mosh pit at a rock concert.

  During the workshop on making luggage for the doll, I pinched the sewing needle between my teeth to pull the thread through the imitation leather and seriously chipped my front tooth. Here I was indulging on the order of Marie Antoinette with this doll obsession and now looked like I should take up residence in a double-wide down by the railroad tracks. What the hell was I doing? I decided to stop spending all this money on a doll and become a living doll myself—spend more time on my appearance and care for myself. Why didn’t I think of this before?

  Somewhere between the trip to Chicago and the repair of my tooth, I had a dream. I was in heaven with God, saint that I was. Everything was golden, glowing, and joyous. Doug had just died on earth.

  God turned to me and asked, “Well, what should we do? Should we let him in?”

  I didn’t have to think about it for more than one second. I said, “Of course we should.”

  I woke up realizing with profound intensity that, when all was said and done, love wins and I loved him. I think this was a message of hope and helped me to relax a bit, realizing that in time I’d feel better about everything, including Doug. I needed to start focusing on the big picture of life and remember the many positive qualities my husband had. Then I purchased a new car, a two-seat roadster convertible with personalized license plates. I sold my mommy car and said thank God and good riddance.

  The trips to the cognitive behavioral therapist and physical therapist continued, without much, if any, improvement being noted on either front. In December, from out of nowhere a huge pimple-like thing erupted on my face, growing from nothing to Krakatoa on my left cheek within a week. It didn’t seem to be a normal pimple; it was an eruption of another kind. After Christmas I went to see my plastic surgeon, somehow knowing this thing had to be removed. He did so immediately, sent it to pathology and informed me it was a keratoacanthoma. This news, which would probably be no big deal for most people, sent me reeling. This was yet another “-oma,” a low-grade skin malignancy. What else was going on that I couldn’t see? I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was teetering close to the event horizon of the black hole.

  The beginning of 2001 bumped along. I tried to focus on the steps necessary for Brad to apply to private middle schools, the testing and school visits. I called an architect to begin working on formulating a plan to remodel our house to fix the feng shui.

  In early March we found out that Brad didn’t get into any of the schools to which he applied. I was heartsick. I knew that he wasn’t particularly motivated about the testing. Who knows how he was on the school visit? My experience with Kim at this age was that this was the age where the garbage starts. I thought he might have purposefully sabotaged himself.

  The night of March 31, Doug and I went to San Francisco for dinner with friends. Our friends knew the chef at Moose’s restaurant in North Beach and we were showered with special dishes and wines. The next morning, Doug and Brad left for Tahoe to go skiing for the day.

  That day I fell into the black hole.

  Part 3

  Chapter 21

  The Cataclysm

  April–July 2001

  April 10, 2001

  I awoke the morning of April 1 in excruciating pain—a 10 out of 10. I could barely breathe. It was like I’d been run through from my upper abdomen to my spine with a spear and was left hanging on the wall.

  I used the “hissing” and “heeing” breaths from Lamaze classes I took years ago to somehow get through the day. I also alternated between the usual feelings of hope and utter dread. Without eating or drinking and staying very still, I lived until Doug and Brad got home from skiing in Tahoe.

  Over the next 24 hours the pain dissipated somewhat but it was now radiating under my right shoulder blade. Even still, I managed to resume normal duties and I didn’t know what to make of what was happening. Over the next week the pain continued to subside, but I made an appointment with my primary care doctor, Dr. Donald, anyway, to see what he thought about this latest development.

  After examining me, he thought that I might have had a severe gall bladder attack and ordered blood work, including pancreatic enzyme tests for amylase and lipase. He called me at home a couple of days later to see how I was feeling and to tell me that these pancreatic enzymes were still significantly elevated, a week after the initial attack. When I told him that I was still experiencing abdominal pain as well as a nonstop headache, he said that he wanted me to go to the emergency room and be admitted to the hospital for tests. I couldn’t imagine what could be wrong but I knew it couldn’t be good.

  April 11–16

  After being given adequate pain relief in the emergency room, I realized how much pain I’d been enduring for weeks, even months. After doing numerous scans in the ER, they admitted me to the medical floor. I was a nervous wreck, squeezed in between two roommates, one moaning loudly in the process of passing a kidney stone, the other having some noxious intestinal problem. After much complaining to doctors about unrelenting migraine headaches (probably due to caffeine withdrawal), I was transferred to a private room for some peace and quiet and given caffeine in an IV drip, since I wasn’t even allowed ice chips.

  After the acute episode appeared to have been subdued with painkillers and forced starvation, the oncologist told me that the CT scan revealed a large (8 cm) tumor in my spleen that was not related to the cause of the pain. The visiting oncologist said that the large mass on the spleen was probably lymphoma.

  Before discharge, I learned from the doctors that the probable cause of the pain, which had now been named “pancreatitis,” was gallstones, possibly stemming from excessive doses of hormone replacement therapy or (they implied but I emphatically denied) a drinking problem.

  I was discharged from the hospital and instructed to schedule and attend numerous follow-up appointments wi
th specialists and to get more lab work done.

  May 14–17

  The severe abdominal pain continued. The only thing that helped was not eating, which has resulted in my losing 15 pounds. I located a gastroenterologist affiliated with Stanford Hospital and scheduled an appointment for a consultation, but before that could happen I was back in the hospital.

  I was moved from a semi-private room to a private room after, again, being plagued by headaches and insomnia. Then, while I was outside smoking, I suddenly became very weak and would have collapsed had it not been for Doug holding me up. In between scheduled radiology tests, I was informed that something was wrong with my blood and I would need to be tested for hepatitis, HIV, and other viruses and would then be seen by the hematology experts. Initially, my diet consisted of nothing other than an IV drip.

  My blood tests weren’t good (hematocrit of 35.4, a white cell count of 2.5, and a platelet count of 79). They said it might be a recurrence of the Epstein-Barr virus that caused the mononucleosis I’d had in 1972, or I could have a parvovirus. Everything else was negative. When no qualified hematologists could be found (due to the entire department’s attendance at some out-of-state conference), the residents descended, complete with a cellophane-wrapped smoking cessation kit, which was abruptly refused, citing that I was already dealing with enough.

  A CT with 3D reconstruction study of the pancreas revealed a prominent pancreatic duct with small “vague low attenuation in the region of the pancreatic head.” I was told no discrete mass was identified.

  At this point, they were thinking that the mass in my spleen might be a hemangioma (a benign blood tumor). After a couple of days of fasting, my diet was changed to clear liquids to replenish my now scant blood supply, much of which was currently located in the lab, still undergoing tests.

  Clara came to visit. In between interruptions from medical personnel, we shared the following moments of temporary sanity and laughter: