by Robert Coles
LUCIA CORDELL GETSI has published four collections of poetry, and her poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in several literary magazines. Intensive Care, a collection of her poems about her daughter’s battle with Guillain-Barré syndrome, won the 1990 Capricorn Poetry Prize.
Mostly bandaged, Joe looks like the Elephant Man
or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, in white.
Without blinking, he says he wished he’d died
in the fire his twelve-year strength failed
to pull his mother from. He still smells her flesh,
like a cinder in his nose, or what is left
of nose. It’s too hard, he says, alone, and like this.
La Toya is quiet in her bed or rolling cart,
seems to be observant. Her small body, amoeba-like,
responds to voice probes: Sit up, La Toya, raise
your arm. No one can tell if she understands
her mother was killed by the train that smacked
the speech out of her mouth. One dropped eye
tracks my arms that pivot Manonc to the chair.
Danny tried to beat the express-lane traffic
on foot. He wears seamed legs and crushed hips,
a patchwork body pieced by surgeons who speak of him
as a masterwork. He pops wheelies in his motorized
chair, bothers the girls as though he’ll have one.
When he goes home, Frankenstein with cane, his mother
clicks her high heels quickly away, as far ahead
of him as she can get. He jerks along behind.
“G.” got shot in the back like the other Black
and Chicago boys here, wears his colon in a pouch.
He walks. The only one who can. These boys call
each other Mutha, slap hands in greeting, manage
a tired strut in their wheelchairs. In art therapy
G. paints a light like a jack-o’-lantern grinning
in a shadow, a richochet of motherlessness
that writhes like an orange ghost trapped in paper.
Arnold “fell” from three storeys, lay on concrete
one whole morning. His mother never visits.
Little cuddler, the nurses vie to tuck him
in. Earphones on his ears, he snaps his fingers and
jives, baby hips rocking to music that sings
him finally to sleep. At 3 A.M. he howls
and whimpers like a puppy lost from the litter.
Jimmy dived and struck the bottom he thought was
deeper. He’ll never pull water over his head
again, or a blanket when he’s cold, or feel
below his broken neck. Bone thin, his body
is flat, enormous eyes grab like hands.
His trache gurgles when he whispers he is scared.
I could tell about Lily, the university student
who woke in a tremor of electric shock up one side
of her body and down the other. After months
of paralysis she can sit well enough to withstand
the long flight home to Japan, strapped
in her seat. Or Aileen, the six-year-old
ballerina who struggles to speak again
after her fourth stroke.
In this place of broken children
I don’t know who you are—you are different
in the way I was different before
I arrived and thought I would be the same,
in the way Manon tries to find an adolescence, falling
in love with a snazzy wheelchair, a funny
story, someone else’s need. No,
there is nothing to be done about difference.
It leaves a mark.
Audre Lorde
BREAST CANCER: POWER VS. PROSTHESIS from The Cancer Journals
Recovery from breast cancer brings with it a transformed life and concerns. In this excerpt from her landmark work The Cancer Journals , poet Audre Lorde writes about one of the most powerful issues arising for women in the aftermath of a mastectomy: whether or not to wear a prosthesis.
This essay begins as Lourde goes to the doctor’s office for a checkup after her surgery and the nurse asks why she isn’t wearing a prosthesis. The nurse’s question provides Lourde an opportunity to discuss women with breast cancer as “warriors” and to highlight the importance of seeing therapeutic options in the context of their larger, societal implications.
AUDRE LORDE published more than a dozen collections of poems and six books of prose. She began writing her journal entries six months after having a radical mastectomy. The Cancer Journals was first published in 1980. Audre Lorde succumbed to breast cancer in 1992.
On Labor Day, 1978, during my regular monthly self-examination, I discovered a lump in my right breast which later proved to be malignant. During my following hospitalization, my mastectomy and its aftermath, I passed through many stages of pain, despair, fury, sadness, and growth. I moved through these stages, sometimes feeling as if I had no choice, other times recognizing that I could choose oblivion—or a passivity that is very close to oblivion—but did not want to. As I slowly began to feel more equal to processing and examining the different parts of this experience, I also began to feel that in the process of losing a breast I had become a more whole person.
After a mastectomy, for many women including myself, there is a feeling of wanting to go back, of not wanting to persevere through this experience to whatever enlightenment might be at the core of it. And it is this feeling, this nostalgia, which is encouraged by most of the post-surgical counseling for women with breast cancer. This regressive tie to the past is emphasized by the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense. The American Cancer Society’s Reach For Recovery Program, while doing a valuable service in contacting women immediately after surgery and letting them know they are not alone, nonetheless encourages this false and dangerous nostalgia in the mistaken belief that women are too weak to deal directly and courageously with the realities of our lives.
The woman from Reach For Recovery who came to see me in the hospital, while quite admirable and even impressive in her own right, certainly did not speak to my experience nor my concerns. As a 44-year-old Black Lesbian Feminist, I knew there were very few role models around for me in this situation, but my primary concerns two days after mastectomy were hardly about what man I could capture in the future, whether or not my old boyfriend would still find me attractive enough, and even less about whether my two children would be embarrassed by me around their friends.
My concerns were about my chances for survival, the effects of a possibly shortened life upon my work and my priorities. Could this cancer have been prevented, and what could I do in the future to prevent its recurrence? Would I be able to maintain the control over my life that I had always taken for granted? A lifetime of loving women had taught me that when women love each other, physical change does not alter that love. It did not occur to me that anyone who really loved me would love me any less because I had one breast instead of two, although it did occur to me to wonder if they would be able to love and deal with the new me. So my concerns were quite different from those spoken to by the Reach For Recovery volunteer, but one bit less crucial nor less poignant.
Yet every attempt I made to examine or question the possibility of a real integration of this experience into the totality of my life and my loving and my work was ignored by this woman, or uneasily glossed over by her as not looking on “the bright side of things.” I felt outraged and insulted, and weak as I was, this left me feeling even more isolated than before.
In the critical and vulnerable period following surgery, self-examination and self-evaluation are positive steps. To imply to a woman that yes, she can be the ‘same’ as before surgery, with the skillful application of a little puff of lambswool, and/or silicone gel, is to place an emphasis upon prosthesis which encourages her not to deal wit
h herself as physically and emotionally real, even though altered and traumatized. This emphasis upon the cosmetic after surgery reinforces this society’s stereotype of women, that we are only what we look or appear, so this is the only aspect of our existence we need to address. Any woman who has had a breast removed because of cancer knows she does not feel the same. But we are allowed no psychic time or space to examine what our true feelings are, to make them our own. With quick cosmetic reassurance, we are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of self.
I did not have to look down at the bandages on my chest to know that I did not feel the same as before surgery. But I still felt like myself, like Audre, and that encompassed so much more than simply the way my chest appeared.
The emphasis upon physical pretense at this crucial point in a woman’s reclaiming of her self and her body-image has two negative effects:
1. It encourages women to dwell in the past rather than a future. This prevents a woman from assessing herself in the present, and from coming to terms with the changed planes of her own body. Since these then remain alien to her, buried under prosthetic devices, she must mourn the loss of her breast in secret, as if it were the result of some crime of which she were guilty.
2. It encourages a woman to focus her energies upon the mastectomy as a cosmetic occurrence, to the exclusion of other factors in a constellation that could include her own death. It removes her from what that constellation means in terms of her living, and from developing priorities of usage for whatever time she has before her. It encourages her to ignore the necessity for nutritional vigilance and psychic armament that can help prevent recurrence.
I am talking here about the need for every woman to live a considered life. The necessity for that consideration grows and deepens as one faces directly one’s own mortality and death. Self-scrutiny and an evaluation of our lives, while painful, can be rewarding and strengthening journeys toward a deeper self. For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities. Any short-circuiting of this quest for self-definition and power, however well-meaning and under whatever guise, must be seen as damaging, for it keeps the post-mastectomy women in a position of perpetual and secret insufficiency, infantilized and dependent for her identity upon an external definition by appearance. In this way women are kept from expressing the power of our knowledge and experience, and through that expression, developing strengths that challenge those structures within our lives that support the Cancer Establishment. For instance, why hasn’t the American Cancer Society publicized the connections between animal fat and breast cancer for our daughters the way it has publicized the connection between cigarette smoke and lung cancer? These links between animal fat, hormone production and breast cancer are not secret.
Ten days after having my breast removed, I went to my doctor’s office to have the stitches taken out. This was my first journey out since coming home from the hospital, and I was truly looking forward to it. A friend had washed my hair for me and it was black and shining, with my new grey hairs glistening in the sun. Color was starting to come back into my face and around my eyes. I wore the most opalescent of my moonstones, and a single floating bird dangling from my right ear in the name of grand assymmetry. With an African kente-cloth tunic and new leather boots, I knew I looked fine, with that brave new-born security of a beautiful woman having come through a very hard time and being very glad to be alive.
I felt really good, within the limits of that grey mush that still persisted in my brain from the effects of the anesthesia.
When I walked into the doctor’s office, I was really rather pleased with myself, all things considered, pleased with the way I felt, with my own flair, with my own style. The doctor’s nurse, a charmingly bright and steady woman of about my own age who had always given me a feeling of quiet no-nonsense support on my other visits, called me into the examining room. On the way, she asked me how I was feeling.
“Pretty good,” I said, half-expecting her to make some comment about how good I looked.
“You’re not wearing a prosthesis,” she said, a little anxiously, and not at all like a question.
“No,” I said, thrown off my guard for a minute. “It really doesn’t feel right,” referring to the lambswool puff given to me by the Reach For Recovery volunteer in the hospital.
Usually supportive and understanding, the nurse now looked at me urgently and disapprovingly as she told me that even if it didn’t look exactly right, it was “better than nothing,” and that as soon as my stitches were out I could be fitted for a “real form.”
“You will feel so much better with it on,” she said. “And besides, we really like you to wear something, at least when you come in. Otherwise it’s bad for the morale of the office.”
I could hardly believe my ears! I was too outraged to speak then, but this was to be only the first such assault on my right to define and to claim my own body.
Here we were, in the offices of one of the top breast cancer surgeons in New York City. Every woman there either had a breast removed, might have to have a breast removed, or was afraid of having to have a breast removed. And every woman there could have used a reminder that having one breast did not mean her life was over, not that she was less a woman, nor that she was condemned to the use of a placebo in order to feel good about herself and the way she looked.
Yet a woman who has one breast and refuses to hide that fact behind a pathetic puff of lambswool which has no relationship nor likeness to her own breasts, a woman who is attempting to come to terms with her changed landscape and changed timetable of life and with her own body and pain and beauty and strength, that woman is seen as a threat to the “morale” of a breast surgeon’s office!
Yet when Moshe Dayan, the prime minister of Israel, stands up in front of parliament or on TV with an eyepatch over his empty eye socket, nobody tells him to go get a glass eye, or that he is bad for the morale of the office. The world sees him as a warrior with an honorable wound, and a loss of a piece of himself which he has marked, and mourned, and moved beyond. And if you have trouble dealing with Moshe Dayan’s empty eye socket, everyone recognizes that it is your problem to solve, not his.
Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.
Raymond Carver
A SMALL, GOOD THING
The agony of parents awaiting word of their child’s condition forms the heart of this piece by master storyteller Raymond Carver, one that poignantly illustrates the effect of a doctor’s well-intended optimism as it belies the medical crisis at hand.
Shortly after Ann Weiss has ordered a birthday cake for her son Scotty’s birthday party, Scotty is hit by a car and taken to the hospital. Life becomes a nightmare of waiting and dwindling hope, as the doctor’s initial diagnosis proves itself inaccurate. Carver’s story offers a complex examination of parents living the unimaginable, the inability of the hospital to assuage their suffering, and a surprisingly redemptive, unexpected conclusion: the “small, good thing” of the story’s title.
Born in Clatskanie, Oregon
, in 1938, RAYMOND CARVER’ S first collection of short stories was titled Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977, followed by collections titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984—and Where I’m Calling From, published in 1988. Carver was inducted that same year into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died of cancer in August 1988, after completing a collection of poems titled A New Path to the Waterfall. Carver’s poem “What the Doctor Said” also appears in this anthology.
Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry.
She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for the child’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age—a man old enough to be her father—must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her—not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end; and beside the table a metal container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was playing country-western music.