Lost in the Reflecting Pool

by Diane Pomerantz

  “You know that you’ll have to have a lot of tests and scans before surgery, and it won’t be until after the surgery that recommendations for treatment will be made,” she said, continuing to give me a lot of information. She talked about pathology reports and genetic testing. All words.

  I left the office, got in the elevator, and walked from the dimly lit lobby of the building out into the sunlight. The shift in light made my eyes water. The burning sensation was intense, and I had the overwhelming feeling I couldn’t see at all. Maybe my mascara or eyeliner had gotten into my eyes, or maybe I was going blind.

  Chapter Thirteen

  NEEDLE PRICKS AND PROBES, TESTS AND SCANS—THAT was my life for the next few weeks. My father and friends accompanied me to some of those appointments; others, I went to on my own. My schedule was so full, there were so many things to do and places to be, that I had little time even to think about cancer. Charles didn’t accompany me for any of the appointments, but at the time it seemed to be okay. This had always been the way of our relationship. His practice always had priority. I accepted that. I think that at that point, most of my friends who were married to physicians had probably had similar experiences.

  Charles did come with me to all of the doctor consultations, and that felt important. At those moments, when I stopped and thought about the diagnosis, I felt blessed that he was there for me. I recall walking out of one doctor’s appointment and starting to cry as I thought of what lay ahead.

  “Don’t worry, we’re in this together,” Charles said, as I leaned against his chest and wept, feeling the safety of his embrace, believing his words implicitly—or perhaps believing them automatically, without thought.

  Charles and I spoke about which surgeon to use, we agreed, and I decided to go with Dr. Carlton, because I liked her best and no one had said anything different than she had said. The impression was that it was a two-to-three-centimeter mass. The initial surgery was a lumpectomy with reconstruction on the other side to “even me out.”

  Charles came with me to the initial surgery but disappeared into the hospital library, so when the doctor came out to tell him how it had gone, he was nowhere to be found.

  “I told them where I would be,” he said incredulously.

  Friends and neighbors were bringing dinners and arranging meal trains. I was in awe of how many people reached out with love and support. I mentioned this to Charles one night, how good and kind people were.

  “Don’t think it has anything to do with you. Cancer makes people nervous. That’s why they’re calling and reaching out—they’re just anxious. It really has nothing to do with you . . . just say the word cancer, and people get scared.”

  I know that I heard him. I have never forgotten his words. Yet the moment passed and I said nothing.

  As it turned out, the lumpectomy was not adequate. Dr. Carlton called Charles before calling me. I felt okay with that. Unlike with other things in my life, I was feeling okay with being dependent. I didn’t want to be in charge. At that moment in time, I wanted someone to take care of me.

  “The margins were not clean,” Dr. Carlton said, meaning that cancerous cells still existed in the remaining tissue. “We need to do a mastectomy.”

  The second surgery, two weeks later, was scheduled for noon. That morning I baked brownies and cookies and prepared dinner for that evening, I would return home the next morning. As I look back, I was acting as if I were going in simply to have a wart removed. My dad drove me to the hospital, and my friend Peg was to pick me up the next morning. I was pretty irritable with my dad. It was only much later that it became clear to me why I found his wanting to be there for me so difficult for me to tolerate: I wanted and needed my husband.

  I arrived at the Women’s Surgical Center and was surprised to find it a wonderfully nurturing experience.

  “Here’s a gown and a robe and some slippers, hon. I’ll be right back after you change,” Tina, a fifty-something nurse with soft eyes and a gentle voice, assured me. When she returned a few minutes later, she handed me a heated blanket.

  “You may want to wrap this around yourself; it can get awfully chilly in here,” she said, as she draped the blanket over my shoulders. At that moment, I had no idea what symbol of comfort a heated blanket, and those who offered it, would become over the course of the next year.

  Tina was at my side for the entire procedure, and I felt nurtured and held in the womb of maternal comfort. The entire team was women, and it was as if I were being cradled and lulled. When I was rolled into the operating room, the resident gently stroked my arm, while one of the nurses rubbed my neck. A second heated blanket was placed over me to remove the OR’s ever-present chill. The experience as it was made Charles’s going to work that day, and his saying he’d be there by the time I was in recovery, less noticeable.

  Charles did speak with Dr. Carlton after the surgery. I don’t know what was said. I know only that Elli was there and that whatever she heard terrified her. She ran from the waiting room screaming, and it took hours for my father and then Charles to comfort her. I imagined it had to do with my prognosis. When I returned home, she was remote and distant. Thinking about this now both enrages me and leaves me feeling limp with helplessness.

  Both surgeries were without complications, and I was up and about within days. I returned from the first surgery to find that friends had planted flowers in front of the house. Dinners were delivered by friends and by people we hardly knew. The world was a place where I really wanted to be. I felt intense gratitude for my husband and children, and intense fear that I would lose them all.

  About ten days after the mastectomy, I had to go and get the drains and sutures out, as well as hear the final pathology report. When my mother had had breast cancer thirty years earlier, she’d had three nodes and lived another twenty-five years in good health. So I prepared myself for some lymph node involvement—two, maybe three—and maybe a three-centimeter mass. Charles and I both went to work that morning, and my friend Liza, who was there at every step, took me to my appointment that afternoon.

  I was becoming even more aware that Charles would never think of canceling patients for me. He was so unlike my father, who adored my mother. My father would have done anything for her. She was his priority. I knew that was not the case in my marriage. Charles liked that I could manage on my own. It would have been so nice to have someone to lean on. More and more, I could see it would not be that way. Did that mean he didn’t love me? I wanted to think not, but those thoughts were harder and harder to push away. I could manage these things on my own. It was all so confusing.

  “Thank you so much for being so good to Di,” Charles said, as he took Liza’s hand and squeezed. He appeared so genuine that the fact that he wasn’t going with me seemed less odd.

  We didn’t have long to wait before Dr. Carlton called me in. “Isn’t your husband here?” she asked, surprise in her voice and her eyes. Physicians usually paid more attention to a spouse’s illness, if only to show that they understood what was going on.

  After a brief silence, she went on: “Diane, it’s not good. The mass was much bigger than we thought. It was over six centimeters, and you had ten positive nodes.”

  “How?” I gasped. “Six months ago, there was nothing there; the mammogram now didn’t even show anything!” I couldn’t hold back the tears, and she hugged me until they abated.

  When I walked back to the waiting room, where Liza waited for me, I couldn’t speak, but it was written all over my face. My thoughts drifted to my mother. Finally, I had outdone her, and it wasn’t fair!

  Liza drove me home in silence. There was nothing to say. I felt as if I had indeed been handed a death sentence. She dropped me off at the end of the drive. I unlocked the door of our two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, walked into what we called the music room, looked at the old family photos lining the mantel, and began to weep. It was then that I called Charles. When he came home, he held me and cried with me.

  Ther
e wasn’t much of a time lapse between each step. Once I got the results of the pathology report, it was essential that I start treatment as soon as I recovered from surgery.

  Charles and I went together to meet the four oncologists I considered using for treatment. The recommendations were the same from all of them: surgery, eight rounds of chemotherapy, high-dose chemotherapy with a rescue stem cell transplant, and then thirty daily radiation treatments.

  Treatment would take about a year. The decisions had to be made so quickly. I did think Charles was there for me, but then one evening shortly after the mastectomy, when he had returned home from work at his usual eight or nine o’clock, I started to talk to him, wanting to feel his strength, wanting the connection, the closeness. I was telling him something about wanting to find the preciousness in each day. He looked up from his plate and newspaper and with cold detachment said, “Is this cancer thing all we’re going to talk about for the next year? How about before you start talking, ask if I want to talk about it?”

  I wanted him so much, I needed him so much, that I ignored so much. And after that comment, I didn’t talk about my illness with Charles.

  THE sun peeked briefly through the clouds one fall Sunday afternoon shortly after the surgeries. We took the children to the park, where they could ride their bikes and look for tadpoles at the water’s edge.

  Charles and I sat on a bench. It was quiet, and there was a slight chill in the air. I reached for his hand. The muscle in his cheek twitched.

  “You seem so tense.” I touched his hand.

  He flinched. “I’m angry; I don’t have time for this, and I can’t do any more than I’m doing.”

  I withdrew. I hadn’t done this on purpose. Confused loyalty left me swimming upstream. Alone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MY GRANDFATHER WAS A DAPPER LITTLE ENGLISHMAN. I adored him. He died when I was sixteen, and several years later, I began to have a recurring dream. The first time I had the dream was after I had broken up with the love of my life; I was twenty. In the dream, I sat in a darkened movie theater. On the large screen in front of me, as the credits began to roll, my grandfather’s smiling face appeared. Then, just as quickly, before his image faded, he nodded his head and winked at me. The screen became blank, and I knew that he was telling me everything would be okay. The image was so simple and yet so powerful.

  I had that same dream the night Dr. Braken had said to me, “Diane, it’s cancer.”

  For a long time, I told myself that the year before my diagnosis, things in my marriage were getting better. That year, Charles and I had more sex and moments of that old laughter.

  But when I look back now and read my journal entries from that time, there is no doubt that things weren’t getting better at all. Charles was more openly cruel, provocative, and sadistic toward me than ever before. By the time I got my cancer diagnosis in September 1998, my internal footing in the world was already terribly shaken.

  Early in 1997, I was more in touch with my withdrawal and depression than I had ever been. I not only felt like a lunatic, unable to control my rage at Charles, but also felt wounded and filled with shame—shame and humiliation about the rage, exposed and shamed about my failure as a wife. That was when I started analysis with Dr. Putman and when I finally began to remove my blinders and touch with tentative fingers the depression that had been there for years. That was when I wanted something different with Charles, when I took those first, faltering steps toward knowing who I was—knowing myself. That was my first step toward saying, I am me. I am separate.

  It was a while before I even told Charles that I had started analysis. I saw Dr. Putman four times a week, at a very discounted rate, so it was as if I were paying for only one weekly session. I didn’t tell Charles, because I knew he would disapprove. He would complain about the cost, even though it was drastically reduced and was a full business tax deduction. On the surface, money was always the issue. It did not matter how much money we made. Even before children, even though we did not have an extravagant lifestyle, according to Charles, we were always on the brink of “financial disaster,” and he could always rationalize the “whys” of it. Beneath the surface, I believe, Charles’s disapproval was really his need to be in total control of me. In his eyes, for me to be in analysis would mean that I would be moving away from him, and that was unacceptable

  As I told Dr. Putman about the rages, the loss of control, with frozen watchfulness I awaited her disapproval. It did not come. For the first few months of my analysis, the rages continued, even escalated. She was my witness, and I gradually began to bare my soul and share my shame.

  “On Saturday, I found a beautiful bisque wall hanging at Great Finds and Designs. It was lovely, something my mother would have liked, and it was only thirty-five dollars, so I bought it,” I told her. “That evening, I hung it in the dining room and asked Charles to come and take a look at it. He came in, and of course he didn’t like where I had hung it. As usual, he suggested that I hang it on the opposite wall. He always does this. It’s like he has to have things a different way, just for the sake of getting his way. But I did it and then called him back in. He came back into the dining room and said nothing, just looked disapprovingly at it and began to adjust how it was positioned on the wall. As soon as his fingers touched the corner, it came crashing to the floor.” I paused.

  “What happened next?” Dr. Putman asked

  “I just stood there; I didn’t have a chance to say anything, because the first words out of his mouth were ‘If only you’d hung it properly, that wouldn’t have happened.’ There was no ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Oh, I know how much you liked that.’ Nothing but telling me that it was my fault that it lay smashed in pieces, the pale colors shattered across the dark pine floorboards. That’s what made me angry. I screamed, ‘Damn you! You fuckin’ bastard!’ and I flung my arm out and it hit one of the dining room chairs. It went flying, and its back cracked in half as it hit the floor. Once again, I was the lunatic.” I laughed as I told the story, but not because it was funny.

  “You’re very attuned to Charles’s anger, aren’t you?” Dr. Putman asked, after a long silence.

  I wondered about that, and my thoughts drifted to how Charles’s concern with money was becoming worse. Now when he fantasized about how we might escape financial ruin, he didn’t talk of winning the lottery; he spoke of a “fiery crash on 95.” The first time he brought it up, we were sitting in the family room.

  “I suppose, more and more, I do see how much rage Charles has.” I paused. I always felt a tinge of betrayal when I spoke of Charles.

  “I don’t think I told you about the ‘fiery crash on 95,’” I continued. She was silent. “The first time he said it, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him what he meant. He had this strange, sheepish smile but very casually said, ‘Well, if my parents got into a fiery crash when they were coming to visit us, then we’d get my inheritance sooner, rather than later, and we’d have no more worries.”

  As I shared that with Dr. Putman, part of me wondered what she was thinking. Did she stiffen and become numb inside, as I had when Charles had first said that to me? She remained silent.

  “He says it all the time now. It’s become just words; I’m anesthetized.”

  I remember thinking at the time, although I didn’t say it to Dr. Putman just then, Isn’t saying something so angry and aggressive kind of implicitly abusive to me, too?

  I pushed that thought far away, and in the gentle silence that followed, I felt no judgment. Dr. Putman’s gray tabby cat, Margot, jumped onto the couch and cuddled into me. I suddenly froze and then sat up quickly. I moved to the peach-colored armchair that faced Dr. Putman. I felt an urgent need for a real connection.

  When I found my voice, I said, “I’m not sure what just happened. I felt this overwhelming sense of panic and terror.” Time and space seemed to come together, leaving me feeling unbalanced and disoriented, looking down upon myself. I was glad I could look
into Dr. Putman’s eyes. I needed to feel grounded at that moment.

  Yes, for a long time after my diagnosis, I told myself that things had been getting better that year before I had been diagnosed. I’d been trying for so long to ignore the depth of Charles’s anger, but it had gotten to be too much. He was a master at provoking me. He always spoke so calmly, so rationally, but the tension between us was palpable, his contempt and denigration so clear to me. He was persistent about anything he wanted me to think or do—about things that had nothing to do with him, like whether or not I dictated my reports. I felt badgered, I’d leave the room, and he’d follow me. Then I would explode. After I raged, he was less tense, more relaxed, almost relieved. It was if my rages were the way we got rid of his tension. My stuff became the focus, and he felt better. I saw the pattern. Once my rages stopped, his tensions and criticalness became unrelenting.

  “It’s crazy. After I rage, he’s fine; he’s so calm. Not me. I feel as if I’ve been shaken to the core, torn apart, have a crack that sometimes feels irreparable,” I told Dr. Putman.

  “Perhaps you’re changing, moving between less productive ways of dealing with Charles and ways that will serve you better. You have said that in some ways, you and Charles are connecting more. There’s more sex?” Dr. Putman’s eyes were softly serious as she spoke.

  Maybe that was it. I wasn’t sure, but perhaps . . . Sex and anger: not unusual bedfellows.

  I suppose one of the reasons I thought things were getting better that year was that I was making some changes. While my rages continued for a time, they did eventually stop, and other things within me seemed also to be changing. I started to feel better about how I was handling things: with more dignity, without the frustrated screams. I was beginning to feel more capable and as if I had some power.