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So basically, I was back to square one. It was just like the doctor from City of Hope said. If I gathered too many opinions, it would just confuse me. I don’t think there’s a radiologist you’ll ask who won’t recommend radiation. Duh. But the physician at M. D.
Anderson had expressed concern about how low in the uterus my tumor was. Otherwise his opinion might have leaned on the side of Sloan-Kettering.
I didn’t know what to do. This was such an important decision. Elaine said I had to make a choice and once I did I had to live with it. If I didn’t do the radiation, I’d have to make peace 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 167
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with that choice and never look back with regrets, no matter what happened down the road. I wondered if I could do that. What if a year from now they found something? Would I beat myself up that I hadn’t received the radiation? On the other hand, if I got another cancer (God forbid), I could always seek radiation treatment then.
Perhaps I should take my chances now?
I don’t know exactly when it hit me, but I suddenly felt that 5 percent recurrence was something I could live with. Because there was 95 percent nonrecurrence on my side. What are we talking about here? Those are better odds than a motorist faces driving on the freeway, in L.A. at least! If the odds weren’t so stacked in my favor, I’m sure I would have thought differently. Of course, if the situation were different, the decision might not have been left up to me in the first place. But over and over again the doctors did all agree that I would not be making a mistake either way.
I remember saying, “My vaginal canal is all I have left. The last thing I want to do is shrink it.” Not with 95 percent in my favor.
They removed my ovaries, my tubes, my uterus, my cervix, my omentum, my appendix, and forty lymph glands, and everything but the tumor itself came back negative from both pathology reports. I mean, my own body didn’t seem to know it had cancer.
Not from the blood tests at least.
So based on days of research and networking I was able to make an informed decision not to move forward with the brachytherapy. I feel like my cancer is gone and won’t return. I did what was right for me. And whatever happens, I know there’s no turning back.
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The House of Blues
S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 0
iguess it was out of guilt that I decided to honor my commitment to walk the press line for the re-release of This Is Spinal Tap at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. I’d canceled a VH1 appearance a few months earlier when it turned out I was having the surgery that same week, and I felt bad about that.
It was hard to believe that Rob Reiner’s classic mockumen-tary was seventeen years old, or that I was old enough to have played an adult in a movie that had been made almost two decades before. Oy. But I thought it might be fun, so I invited several friends to go the premiere and then to the after-party at the House of Blues.
At the risk of sounding like a diva, I found trying to figure out what outfit to wear and how to do my hair simply too much. I was exhausted just trying to camouflage my fat! Oh, the trials of being an overweight celebrity. Wasn’t it enough I had cancer? Did I have to be publicly humiliated, too? Nothing fit, nothing looked good, and I just knew everyone was gonna say I looked better on The Nanny. Not to mention the movie from seventeen years before!
John and our friends were going to meet me at the theater, so I took the limo with Kathryn. Everyone was coming from work or 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 170
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wherever, so it was just the two of us. As the car drove east through bumper-to-bumper traffic, I kept flipping down the vanity mirror to check myself. Was my lipstick smudged? Was my hair still nice? I was so insecure, so ill prepared for the barrage of press I was about to face.
When Kathryn’s cell phone rang, it was the public relations people advising us to kill some time before arriving, because things had gotten off to a late start and they wanted to space the celebrities’ arrivals. Well, I didn’t need any encouragement and told the driver to head to Elaine’s house, which was nearby in the Hollywood Hills. This will be good. She’ll say something positive about the way I look and bolster my self-esteem.
As she flung open her front door to greet us, I stood in the entryway, all smiles. “Fran, Kathryn, come on in,” she said with great fanfare.
“We were early for the premiere, so I thought we’d say hello,”
I said in the perkiest voice I could muster.
“How wonderful. Can I offer you girls a drink?” she asked.
A drink? What about the Fran, you look gorgeous part? The who did your hair? I love it! confidence booster? I was wearing a Lacroix skirt and leather jacket with motorcycle boots, and had nearly convinced myself I looked cute. What speaks the loudest with Elaine, though, is what she doesn’t say, and clearly she wasn’t thrilled by what she saw. Uh-oh. I wanna go home! What would be the worst thing that would happen if I was a no-show?
Lemme go back home, get all undressed, and back into bed where I’m happy.
But the P.R. person called Kathryn’s cell phone, alerting us to come now to the theater, and I begrudgingly waddled my fat ass back into the limo. As we pulled up to the theater, I was amazed by the turnout. For an old movie, the publicity machine had managed to create a lot of hype.
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The band members from Spinal Tap were halfway down the press line as I, too, began the red-carpet walk. As I passed the pa-parazzi, they all shouted at me.
“Fran, look over here.”
“How ya feelin’, Fran?”
“What’s coming up next for you, Fran?”
And there I was, smiling, posing, and pretending to want to be there. Am I holding my stomach in? Do I have lipstick on my teeth?
Can I go home now? And all the while I’m pumping, answering questions, and getting more and more exhausted with each interview. I really needed to sit down. Thank God, I hadn’t worn heels!
Inside, there were people everywhere. Is that free popcorn? We finally settled down in our seats and began watching the film.
Amazingly, it had held up well with the passing of time. I myself was surprised how cool and relevant it remained.
John and I split from the theater ahead of the crowds and dodged the reporters who were waiting for postscreening comments. We headed to the House of Blues, one of my favorite music venues in L.A. Spinal Tap was going to play. I really wished I felt better, though. Once in the limo I was really frazzled. My lipstick was off, my stomach was sore, my feet hurt. It was obvious I wasn’t ready to be out in public like this yet. It was all too much for me.
At the House of Blues I worried that my friends would have a problem getting in, worried that not everyone had gotten their tickets, and worried that there wouldn’t be enough table seating.
What can I say? It’s a thing with me, wanting everything to go smoothly for my guests. John can’t believe me sometimes. As it turned out, some guests had trouble getting in, some didn’t have their tickets, and there definitely wasn’t enough table seating.
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for those. At the House of Blues they’re especially good! Guests began to crowd around the table, shmoozing, drinking, and gabbing as the food kept coming. I’d taken a pain pill to get me through it all, but my stomach felt empty and I needed to eat. I must have scarfed down a dozen fingers in just a couple of minutes and began to watch the concert.
I remember a P.R. person, Marty, came over to my table and asked if I’d go downstairs and
do an interview for a magazine show.
Was he kidding? Did he realize my kishkas felt like they were about to drop out of me? Come on already, when is enough enough? So I said I was recovering from major surgery, and I really couldn’t go downstairs. The P.R. person simply couldn’t compute my response and seemed unable to hide his disappointment. He looked like he was going to cry as he disappeared into the crowd. Nu? Just what I needed, an emotional P.R. man to make me feel guilty.
I really was beginning to feel sick now: dizzy, sweaty, flushed, nauseous. Aren’t I a fun date? I leaned over to John, told him he should stay here with all our guests but that I must get into the limo and go home. He walked me to the car that was waiting outside and put me in, instructing me to get to bed as soon as possible. No problem there; I don’t know what I’d do without my bed.
I love my bed. My bed was calling me. Fran, darling, come nestle in me with the pillow and the blankie. . . .
As I settled into the back of the limo, the driver told me there were some fans waiting for me to autograph photos. He wondered if I wanted him to pass them into the car so I could sign them. No can do! I rarely reject people, but this time I told him I really didn’t feel well and needed to get home at once. With that, he snapped to it, cleared everyone away, and sped off. A man on a mission.
And it’s a good thing, too, because only moments later I found myself suddenly getting green around the gills. Thank 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 173
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God there was a bag of popcorn left on the seat from the movie, because just as I grabbed it, like Mount Vesuvius, I erupted. I puked so bad I can’t even tell you how gross it was. Vomiting all by myself in the back of the limo. Oy. Sometimes there’s just no glamour in being a star.
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On Pins and Needles
O c t o b e r 2 0 0 0
it was a woman sunning herself by my mother’s pool in Florida who said, “Tell your daughter, don’t expect to be back to normal for at least six months to a year.” And she was right.
Mom said she was a very pretty woman with a great body who was on vacation visiting her own mom. They started chatting, and this gal revealed that she’d had the same surgery as me. In ten minutes my mom can find out anyone’s life story. This woman told Mom,
“There will be good days and bad days for a very long time, but then one day she’ll wake up and the pain will be gone for good.
Tell her to be patient.”
It was reassuring to hear this from someone who’d actually been through it herself, because the surgeon kept telling me in six weeks I’d be good as new, which turned out to be a gross exaggeration. She’d told me I’d be able to go on an African safari two months after my surgery. The reality was that it had been nearly four months, and I could barely sit in a luxury car without being in pain! So I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. Why was I taking so long to recover? Every time I’d make plans to do something, I’d end up canceling, until finally I gave up making plans at all.
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As the months dragged on, John and I fell into a rut where my recovery seemed unending. We both felt stuck, afraid this was going to be the way things stayed. I, who once was so active, planning and doing all the time (we used to joke that John couldn’t keep up with me), had settled into this convalescing lump. By this point I think John was just about at the end of his rope. Trapped is probably a more succinct way of putting just how he was feeling.
It was now fifteen weeks since my surgery and we were both miserable. There was one day when I had to cancel out on yet another activity we’d planned together, and he just exploded.
“You never want to do anything!” he shouted.
“I like to do things,” I said, defending myself.
“I need to get out of this house and have some fun, live my life, be with my friends, but you never want to,” he accused. Poor guy had tried for so long to be patient and understanding, but in that moment he was like a champagne bottle blowing its cork.
I felt like an albatross. A monkey on his back. A ball and chain on his ankle. You name it, if it weighed ya down, I was it. I guess I wasn’t as much fun as before, and I sure didn’t have as much energy. The fight spiraled to a point where we wondered how we’d become so sad, so incompatible, so wrong for each other. I said meekly, “But I don’t think I was like this before I had cancer.” And then it struck us like a lightning bolt. For the first time, we could see it all clearly.
“Sweetie, you’re right, this is all because you had cancer,” said John. We loved each other, and there we were, fighting and blam-ing one another, venting our anguish and frustration, when it hit both of us that the real enemy was the cancer itself. All our current problems were because of that, not because of genuine differences. This wasn’t permanent. We weren’t stuck, and someday in the future things would return to the way they used to be.
We’d both felt misled about how long “getting back to nor-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 177
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mal” was going to take. John had believed the doctor’s estimates and blamed me for being a bad patient. If only someone had come to my hospital room after the surgery to give me a blow-by-blow description of what to expect and what I should do throughout my recovery. A woman who’d been through it herself, like the one by my mother’s pool. A person who truly knew what it felt like both emotionally and physically to have had cancer and a hysterectomy all at the same time. It’s a double whammy for any gal.
The hysterectomy helps take care of the cancer problem but creates a whole new set of hormonal and reproductive issues that are permanent and irreversible. Maybe I should have considered joining a support group, but first I’d need to accept what happened and not try to deny it. Regardless, somehow the voices of women who’d been through it before managed to enter my life with some sage advice anyway. Rachel’s mom, for one, turned me on to what I now consider a must-read for us all: the Harvard Women’s Health Watch newsletter.
Curiously, the name of one acupuncturist kept coming up as someone worth going to. He was a medical doctor who practiced acupuncture, herb therapy, and nutrition. I swear, there must have been five different people with no connection to each other who referred me to this man.
My friend Juliette, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, told me this acupuncturist, Doctor #11, saved her during her pregnancy. It was his partner and brother who helped her get pregnant in the first place. Kathryn’s boyfriend, Ray, came home with a note from a coworker who’d read about my illness. She wrote to me, explaining that she’d had the same surgery as mine and hadn’t begun to feel well internally until she went through her treatment with Doctor #11. Well, I don’t need to get hit over the head with a hammer to wake up, so I called his 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 178
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office in Santa Monica and made an appointment in the hope he’d be able to speed up my recovery. I was ready to start enjoying life again.
I drove myself over, and believe me, driving still wasn’t easy.
The seat belt hurt my incision, and the bumps rattled my insides.
As I entered Doctor #11’s waiting area, there was beautiful Asian-sounding music playing on the sound system. Several people of varying ages sat and waited for their appointments. One wall was covered with books on nutrition, Taoism, and Buddhism, as well as gift boxes of Doctor #11’s special tea blends and herbs.
The nurse brought me into Doctor #11’s office, where I sat and waited. I enjoyed looking at the photos and knickknacks displayed on the shelf unit and desk. Small traces of the doctor’s private world painted a picture of him. There were framed photos of a beautiful-looking
family I assumed to be his. Diplomas and serene Asian art hung on the wall. The furnishings were sparse and simple in their design.
When he entered his office, he was younger than I thought he’d be, and extremely soft-spoken. Everything about him was calming. He shook my hand as he introduced himself and seemed extremely compassionate as I talked about my cancer and the surgery. He nodded his head as he listened. I studied his kind face, the shirt he wore, his white coat, and his wedding ring. Is he this tranquil at home?
He told me to stop eating nightshade vegetables. I’d never heard of nightshade vegetables, but they sounded awful, and I was sure I’d never eaten anything like that. Well, it turns out they’re tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplants, all of which I managed to eat plenty of. I love Italian food, need I say more? “These vegetables do most of their growing at night, hence the name night-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 179
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shade vegetables,” he explained. “And they’re considered inflam-matories. If you have arthritis or any kind of inflammation, be it post-operative or a simple sprain, you should avoid these foods.”
Who knew?
He also took me off starches like pasta and white rice and suggested I eat brown rice instead. “No pasta?” I exclaimed. “But I love pasta. I eat it almost every day!”
“Too hard to digest. No dairy, no sugar, nothing raw like salads, and very little animal protein,” he rattled off. This guy is nuts.
“How ’bout fruits?” I asked, hopefully.
“No fruit. Except for apples,” was his reply. Oy. How is this man going to make me feel any better when I’m starving to death? “And here’s a special tea that you have to brew and drink after every meal,” he said, handing me a bag of twigs and bark that looked like it came from his driveway. Am I supposed to drink this stuff or use it as fertilizer?