Cancer Schmancer
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my mom asked.
“Hysterical,” I answered. But I wasn’t laughing.
Fate was playing a dirty trick on me, giving me an early menopause just when I was starting my life over again. I pictured myself getting night sweats and a lowered libido. I felt like damaged goods, imperfect.
So while I pretended to be the picture of health to the outside world, I secretly decided to see another gynecologist, Doctor #2.
Leesa, my exercise instructor, had said he was really good, that he was doing all kinds of breakthrough hormone treatments in women’s medicine. A magazine had even reported on his contro-versial, even radical, theories regarding the usage of natural thyroid and growth hormones to keep a woman in a perpetual state of youthfulness. I’ll tell ya, that just don’t sound kosher to me. I know there ain’t no fountain of youth. But meanwhile, I went to see him anyway.
As I sat in the waiting room a young woman entered the office and asked at the desk for her pills. She seemed to be in her twenties, but she could have easily been in her thirties. Perhaps she recognized me, I don’t know, but while she was waiting, she struck up a conversation.
“Is this your first time here?”
I nodded, slightly overwhelmed by her bouncing-off-the-walls energy.
“Let me tell you, he is a great doctor. A true genius,” she said, talking a mile a minute. “Look at my skin! Look at my hair! I’ve never felt better in my whole life. And I’m not the only one, all my sisters go to him. We all take his hormone replacement regimen 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 19
The First Pilot for MTV
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and we’ve never felt better or more energized!” Calm down, honey, you’re gonna explode!
Sounded more like Scientology than gynecology, I thought, as the nurse showed me into the doctor’s office. There, behind a large desk covered with bottles of pills, sat an older man with a foreign accent who wore clogs. He seemed very bullish on his arsenal of medications, but meanwhile he was still getting over the flu. So there you are.
Between sneezes and coughs, he questioned me about any family history of cancer. “There’s none on my mother’s side, but my dad’s sister died from ovarian cancer,” I said as I handed him a tissue. I remember saying with conviction, “I don’t have cancer.”
“I do extensive state-of-the-art blood tests,” he said. “I’ll need at least seventeen vials of blood, to be thorough.”
“Seventeen vials?” I said, recoiling.
“They’re small vials,” he countered. “And we send them out of state for the best analysis.” Where, Transylvania? Who was this guy?
In the meantime he talked about putting me on his program, which included the taking of a natural thyroid pill. I explained that I was already taking Synthroid medication for Hashimoto’s disease, a very common thyroid condition. (Thyroiditis is the most common disease among women. It’s hereditary, and all women should be tested for it by an endocrinologist.) It annoyed me that in this first visit he was already pushing pills.
His exam was pretty typical: stirrups, pelvic, and Pap. He couldn’t do the blood test because it had to be done on a specific day of my cycle. I got dressed and left, but I never returned.
So I went back to taking my Advil and business as usual. It was right around this time that a sitcom script I’d written was green-lighted to become a pilot for MTV. This was my first real venture on my own apart from Peter and The Nanny, and I execu-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 20
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tive produced and directed it as well. The concept was a Gen-X
Odd Couple. It was a massive undertaking, a real milestone for me.
As exhilarating as the experience was, it was also a rude awakening. I, who’d always had Peter by my side to support and console me after a long and hard day’s work, now came back to an empty apartment. Too tired even to go out for dinner, I’d sit on my bed working on my camera shots by the light of my reading lamp, eating food my housekeeper Angelica had left in the fridge. At this point Peter and I were sharing Angelica and her husband, Ramon, depending on them to keep our places tidy.
Some days they’d clean and cook for him, other days they’d do the same for me. I felt lonely, but kept trying to talk myself out of it. This isn’t a negative, I’d tell myself. But old habits die hard, and as much as I tried to convince myself I was a successful single person enjoying the solitude of her beautiful home, the old tape of feeling like a lonely spinster-in-the-making kept looping though my brain. Still, I forged ahead. MTV was spending a lot of money for this pilot and, come hell or high water, I was going to rise to the occasion.
I surrounded myself with many of the same people I’d worked closely with on The Nanny, which made things easier. But since literally every decision rested on my shoulders, I found myself working harder than ever. The amount of stress I was feeling might have worsened my symptoms. After hours and hours of standing on the hard soundstage floors I was beginning to feel it in my lower abdomen. Is this also part of getting older? I thought, while taking some Advil and stealing moments to sit down in my director’s chair.
It was on this project that I started to become friends with my associate producer, John, someone I’d also worked with on The Nanny. In all those years on the show, I can’t recall having had a single conversation with him, but on the MTV pilot that all 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 21
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changed. I’d always found him easy on the eyes. There was a Mediterranean look to him that I found very attractive. He had long dark hair, deep brown eyes, and a winning smile. His fea-tures weren’t pretty, but attractive in a more horsey, masculine way; like Travolta, I thought.
He was much younger than I. Sixteen years, to be exact. But I was working for MTV, and had intentionally surrounded myself with young people. And I, who in my head and heart was feeling young for the first time in my life, enjoyed hanging out with all the Gen-Xers. There was something about John’s mild manner and laid-back attitude that appealed to me. I liked him, and with all the pressure I was feeling to do well, his became the calming energy I needed.
At first, except for occasional conversations about music we both liked, our involvement with each other was entirely work-related. This was my first time shooting in a single-camera format, and I needed someone watching the monitors to make sure I’d shot all I needed to edit the whole thing together. He became that right arm to me. If there was one thing I was insecure about, it was my camera coverage, and I needed his expertise to see me through that. But the vision was mine and the show had a great look to it.
I felt very accomplished when we wrapped the pilot. It was a real growing experience and something I remain proud of. I returned to The Nanny, but I wasn’t the same. I’d learned I could do other things, do them well, and do them independent of Peter.
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Thanksgiving
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peter and I returned from hiatus refreshed and renewed.
We were both unsure where our relationship was heading, but it was the sixth season of The Nanny and we entered it filled with hope and promise. Physically, though, I still wasn’t myself. Other changes began to take place in addition to the staining and cramping, and it heightened my level of concern.
I seemed to be bruising really easily. On the show I was doing a lot of physical comedy, and for a time I blamed it on that, but after a while the bruises were so big and ugly they couldn’t be considered normal. I remembered that movie Marvin’s Room, where Diane Keaton went to the doctor for something unrelated and he noticed these massive black-and-blue marks all over her thighs. So he ran some blood tests and eventually diagnosed her with leukemia!
I just couldn’t get that movie out of my head, and as if that weren’t enough, I was also beginning to notice
a change in my stool.
And I ain’t talking bar stools, either!
Now I was starting to connect the dots and wondered if all these changes weren’t symptomatic of the same thing. So I decided to call my internist, Doctor #3. I’d already seen two gyne-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 24
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cologists, who’d found nothing from my Pap test, pelvic exam, ultrasound, and mammogram. Based on the tests, it didn’t seem like my problems were gynecological.
Meanwhile every attempt Peter and I made to connect outside the studio failed miserably. Everything we’d once had together seemed to have deteriorated, and all that was left was the show.
We tried marriage counseling, but that didn’t work. I don’t think we were able to be completely honest with the counselor or each other, and after a few visits we abandoned that route. We tried to take a vacation together. I booked us in separate rooms, which was weird, but we were already living in separate homes, so what was weirder than that?
But I just wasn’t strong enough as my own person to get back together with him. I was still feeling a profound regret that I’d wasted my youth being the good daughter and the good wife, but never truly knowing what I needed. What I wanted.
Then Peter invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at his new apartment. He included all the couples who were our dear friends.
He catered it from a favorite restaurant, which we’d used for special occasions back in the ol’ days when we were together. He even ordered my favorite wine. I arrived with candy, flowers, and music, attempting to be joyous and gay.
It couldn’t have been easy for our friends who attended that night. To them, Peter and I were like an institution. Nobody but nobody would have ever imagined that of all the couples, we’d be the ones to split. Yet there we all were, trying to make the best of a very awkward situation. All the dinner guests were the same friends we worked with on the show, so there wasn’t a lot of catching up to do, and the conversation bordered on the mundane.
“So how’s everything?”
“Good, good. How ’bout you?”
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“Fine, fine.”
And that was the riveting stuff. Everyone was being so damned polite. Minding their p’s and q’s. It didn’t seem like Thanksgiving at all. Growing up, it just wasn’t Thanksgiving unless my mother got nervous and yelled, my sister got high-strung and slammed a few doors, and my dad overate to the point of indigestion and acute gastritis. Ah, the good ol’ days.
I remember in my early married years with Peter, we’d sometimes spend the holiday gorging on Chinese food. Nothing like spareribs at Genghis Cohen when you’re giving thanks. Another Thanksgiving we cooked for our friends but didn’t want the leftovers because it was all so fattening, so we made plates of food for the homeless and eight of us piled into the old Buick and drove around L.A. looking for the needy. Believe it or not, it was a hard sell. No one wanted my home cooking!
But that was then and this Thanksgiving, unfortunately, had a whole different feel. For me it was a colossal push. It felt like a shoe that didn’t fit. It was too much all at once: being in Peter’s place, with all the friends I really hadn’t been spending much social time with recently, and then simply Peter and I. We weren’t who we used to be, and we had no clue who we were then, either.
I felt so uncomfortable I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
And I guess Peter sensed that things weren’t right, because that night marked the turn of a dark corner in our relationship. When we returned to work, we fought the whole day. He said I didn’t seem like the wife and best friend I’d been to him for over twenty years, but more like an acquaintance. The outburst left me confused, guilty, and sick to my stomach.
Neither of us ever recovered from that fight in his office.
Elaine, our dear Elaine, who straddled that razor’s edge of being manager and friend to both of us, was the glue that kept the ship afloat. “Keep working,” she’d say to us. “Work is your salvation 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 26
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now.” And we did keep working. She was there through it all, every step of the way, with all her glorious wisdom. Doing whatever it took, she kept us from self-destructing and from bringing it all down with us.
By the time I went to Doctor #3, my internist, I was whipped.
Life seemed like one big grind and I didn’t know if the rewards of being true to myself were worth the pain and heartache. Doctor
#3 knew my life was in emotional turmoil and tried to ease my concerns over my physical ailments. He also downplayed my symptoms, chalking them up to a normal condition.
He checked my heart and my lungs. He looked in my ears, my eyes, and my nose. He felt my abdomen, even checked my re-flexes. My pulse, normal . . . blood pressure, normal . . . everything, normal. In response to my short menstrual cycles, he concluded, “Normal is what’s normal for you. If you’ve always had short cycles, then there’s no reason to think there’s a problem.” As for the midmonth staining, he sided with Doctor #1’s conclusion that I was at the threshold of being perimenopausal; he disapproved of the radical techniques of Doctor #2. Regarding my stool changing, he connected it to my diet, and told me I was
“eating too much spinach.”
So I decided to make an appointment with a hematologist, Doctor #4, to check out my blood. While I was there I thought he could check out my hormone levels, too. I was still afraid of the black-and-blue marks all over my legs and arms, though Doctor
#3 didn’t see it as a problem, since I’d always been a bit of a bruiser, and so was my mom. It was always a joke in our house each time my dad grabbed her arm too tight when he was showing affection. “Now I’m gonna be all black and blue! Why do ya have to be such a demonstrative lover?” she’d yell, socking him in the arm. Sort of the pot calling the kettle black, no?
None of my doctors, not even the hematologist, seemed par-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 27
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ticularly worried about my symptoms, so I tried to be light about the whole matter. I didn’t want to worry my parents and I never even thought to call my sister, who’s a nurse married to a doctor.
Work continued to be such a huge distraction I didn’t have much time to dwell on my fears anyway. I only kept pursuing more doctors because I wanted something that could be fixed. I didn’t want to accept that I was perimenopausal and be stuck with that forever. It somehow didn’t feel right.
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We’re Canceled
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by the time January rolled around, all my coping mechanisms were fried. I simply couldn’t deal with anything. People around me would wonder what kind of a mood I was in, or if I had PMS, if Peter and I were on speaking terms, or if we were fighting. I thought I was losing my mind, and I think so did everybody else.
My stress levels were through the roof. It was an out-of-control situation. Was I having a breakdown? Did I need to get off this treadmill I was on? What was it? As time went on the lower-abdominal cramping that had at first lasted only a few hours seemed to be stretching into a few days.
I felt scared, worried, misunderstood. I mean, even if the bruising and stool change weren’t significant, the bleeding and cramping signaled something wasn’t right, and at this point I wasn’t even connecting them to my intense mood swings. The perverse contrast between my own life and my character on The Nanny was beyond ironic. There I was fearing the worst about my health situation, while Fran Fine was healthy as a horse. I was conflicted about having a baby, while she was pregnant with twins. She’d found the man of her dreams, while my marriage was coming apart at the seams. As 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 30
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topsy-turvy as it all was, I frankly relished the time I got to play Miss Fine, because her life was so much better than mine. She was funnier, happier, and less complicated. She became my refuge. It sounds sad because it was sad.
I remember one taping when I felt so vulnerable and under attack by Peter, who was directing from the control booth while watching my image on all four camera feeds. He scrutinized my costume and seemed overly critical about how I looked in it. In front of everyone. He asked me to change three separate times, and he still wasn’t satisfied.
It might not have bothered me at all if I wasn’t in such bad shape emotionally, but it sure bothered me then. I screamed to him through the camera, “You wouldn’t treat another star this way!” I felt attacked, as though Peter were wielding his power as a weapon. Elaine sat in the booth with him as my image yelled at him on four separate screens. Later she’d tell me that he leaned over and whispered, “She’s got to get on hormones.” I definitely needed something. Maybe I was just being hypersensi-tive. Who knows?
Then my face started to break out, which really got me down.
As an actress, I couldn’t help feeling self-conscious going before the cameras with a huge headlight on my chin. The makeup department would make special provisions to try and conceal it, but I always knew it was there. Spackle might have been better. I remember saying I was glad this acne hadn’t happened during my teens, because even as an adult with some perspective I was having trouble coping.
They weren’t like regular pimples, either, but rather the kind that took forever to go away. And my breakouts began to occur with greater frequency until finally I was getting maybe two or three days of reprieve a month. The rest of the time I was frantically trying to arrest the situation. I’d go home and sit in front of my 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 31
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vanity and take off my makeup, exposing the acne I’d made best efforts to hide. All alone at night, I’d stare at my reflection in quiet desperation and weep. I swear, I was beginning to feel like Camille.