The core biopsy procedure took a few minutes. It involved an extremely long needle and was only slightly painful, since he injected anesthesia into the area. I was eager to pull the gown back up. After I did, I dared to ask.
“In your experience, do you think this is cancer?” I was trying to sound nonchalant, as if it was just a small question, one he could answer off the cuff. I was a journalist after all; I was never one who could wait patiently for a test result or the answer to any question. I could take it, I needed to know.
“Yes, it is likely it is cancer,” he said crisply.
The words hit like a fireball. In the same instant, both of his arms were outstretched, a father’s instinct, and he hugged me briefly.
“I thought it was better to tell you than to have you wait,” he said. “I thought you would want to know.”
He told me what would happen next. I tried to take it all in but couldn’t remember where I laid down my purse.
I did not feel the anger of Why me? Rather I felt, Why not me? I had seen a number of friends go through worse, from the death of a spouse to the death of a child. Years earlier when my brother Paul called to tell me his wife, Bernie, died in her sleep in their house in Florida, he sounded as if he was on helium.
“Bernie died,” he said.
“What?”
And I had made him say it again.
Bernie had an undiagnosed brain tumor, and her death in 2003 left Paul and their three children steamrolled by grief. The next year, my sister Maureen’s ex-husband died of a heart attack in his car. My friend, Norma, lost her only son, Ian, when he had a seizure at his high school, hours after she dropped him off with his backpack and a kiss. Both of my parents were dead. My brother Bill’s wife, Madonna, was struggling with ovarian cancer.
People died. People who are not supposed to die, died. Just like that, driving to dinner, sleeping in bed, walking down the hall. Everyone died, but sometimes you had no warning and it made no sense. Not everyone was old. Not everyone expected it right then. Not everyone was prepared.
I have cancer.
“You get cancer from wearing deodorant,” someone told me.
“I am glad for every sweaty day in the last thirty-five years that I wore deodorant,” I told her.
You didn’t know why you got cancer. Unless you were chain-smoking in an asbestos-battered building, eating chips of lead paint, and wearing moth balls around your neck, your guess was as good as anybody’s. It was a complicated formula of genetics plus environment plus stress plus fate plus who knows what, maybe the perfume my mother wore when she was pregnant or the weed killer my father spread on the backyard lawn. It was the diet soda I drank. The milk I didn’t. It wasn’t the blueberries I ate or the red peppers I loved.
Cancer was everywhere. Everybody walked around with those pink ribbons on their lapels and the magnetized rubber versions on their cars. The good news was most of the time you got the breast cancer removed and you were fine. You couldn’t start micromanaging and dissecting your history to single out every bit of everything you ingested or didn’t ingest, because the figuring out would make you crazy. At first I couldn’t even read the cancer websites. There were too many unhappy endings. Too many stories. Too much grief. Too many hypotheses. Too many women died.
Get it out of your body expeditiously, do what they say, have the treatments, take the drugs, and you’ll be fine. You don’t have to die. I couldn’t die. The boys would have no one. I couldn’t die now.
I went home and tried to act like nothing was wrong, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I’m not proud of the way I told the boys the next day. The best explanation was that I was so exhausted from worrying that I cracked wide open like a barrel of red paintballs thrown against a white garage.
Halloween morning about 7:30 AM, I was taking Brendan and Weldon to their high school before going into work. I had known for sure for one day that I had cancer; it had been more than a week since it was suspected. I had said nothing to the boys about the diagnosis, acting as hard as I could as if nothing was the matter while inside I was a volcano of fear.
Brendan couldn’t find his backpack and was throwing a fit.
“Mo-oo-om! Where did you put my backpack? I need my backpack! Mom!”
“Look in your room. Look under your bed. Look in the trunk of the car.” I tried to breathe.
He kept shouting, swearing. It was several minutes before he found it. We got in the car and before I pulled out of the driveway, with Brendan still shouting, I did the unthinkable.
“Stop it! I have cancer!” I screamed.
“What did you say?” Weldon asked.
Then I started crying. And jabbering. “I found out yesterday, but I knew it could be a possibility,” I wept. “You were right, something was wrong,” I told Weldon.
As if by telling him I was validating his instincts and everything would be OK, he would be sympathetic now. As if I had not just scared the hell out of him.
The boys were quiet. I pulled out of the driveway and kept driving. I didn’t have time to explain what was happening properly, and I am sure I would have if Brendan hadn’t been so upset and if I’d had more sleep. I broke in a million pieces before their eyes. I told my friend Susy later that morning on the phone; she was my touchstone. Not only did Susy have two teenage boys, but she also had been the editor of a parenting magazine. Susy always had good advice on everything from sons to work to salads.
After a long pause, she said, “OK, so it’s a Bad Mommy Moment. You get a few a lifetime.”
What she didn’t say was, optimally, you never had any.
“So then what? Did you drop them off and say, ‘Have a nice day?’”
Pretty much.
On the bright side, this was not how I told Colin later that day. For him, I was saner. In the best of worlds, I wouldn’t have screamed the news at the older two boys on the way to school. Like a lunatic, I made real all their fears about having no parents. I told Colin in a calm voice. You could say I was upbeat. Colin took the news well and I reassured him that I would be fine.
“My mom has cancer,” Colin told Anne, Mike’s mom, like he was saying I had brown eyes or a new pair of boots. Colin had gone to Mike’s house in the next block to trick or treat. Anne called me as soon as the boys left.
“It’s true,” I told her.
“He seems OK with it,” she said.
I hoped the other two would forgive me.
The surgery to remove the cancer in a simple lumpectomy was scheduled for the next week. All three of my sisters came at 6 AM to pick me up.
“I’ll be fine,” I said to the boys. “Go to school. You can call my cell at lunch. I’ll be home when you come home from practice.” The sitter would be there to make sure everything went on schedule.
I knew they would be watching me, and no matter what I felt like, I had to be positive, like this wasn’t scary. Like I was not terrified that I was going to die and leave them alone.
Mothers die. Good mothers die.
A few minutes after I awoke in the recovery room following the surgery, Dr. Dowlat appeared. “You don’t have cancer anymore. It’s gone.”
I liked that about him. Pragmatic, straightforward. I did not want to live my life counting down the days before it came back. Defining myself as a survivor one year out, two years out, three years out, every anniversary feeling terrified. I didn’t want to think about cancer every time someone called to ask how I was. I told myself it was like having a flat tire. I got the tire fixed and was driving on, hitting the highway, moving ahead. I was done with having cancer. It was gone. I’d had a one-millimeter cancerous mass in my left breast, clean margins, no nodes involved. But it was the bad kind of cancer—as if there was a good kind—invasive.
“Let’s plan something,” I said to my sisters. My chest ached. I was so thirsty.
“Want to plan out a new kitchen?” Madeleine asked.
“That will make me depressed. I couldn’t afford it.”
9
Balloon
* * *
November 2006
There it was, the perfect almond shape, like a ruby eye glistening wet and liquid, a glossy color you would paint a child’s playroom. I stared at the shape in my left breast in the reflection of his wire-rimmed glasses, oddly unafraid, buoyed by a trusting detachment, as if it wasn’t me I was watching, my body I was seeing. I was listening to the breath in my ears bouncing inside my head as if it was a favorite song on my iPod. It was a week later and this was the second step.
In the operating room Dr. Dowlat worked with nimble gloved fingers, red with my blood, his calm voice punctuating the silence with periodic reassurances. I was not asleep, I was not under, but I was dwelling in a suspended fiction, not quite sure how I could watch the image of my own operation without emotion. I was fascinated by the insertion of the brachytherapy tube, the new device that would deliver the radiation for my breast cancer treatment, the turkey baster that would save my life. I would have none of the skin problems or exhaustion associated with six weeks of traditional radiation. I would not get the tattoo. Every other external radiation patient I knew had a tattoo on her breast to mark the exact spot where radiation should be concentrated.
Dr. Dowlat described every motion aloud, into a tableside tape recorder to be transcribed for the surgeon’s report, the one that would cost me twenty-seven dollars for a copy, the one I left unopened on my desk for weeks. I put it in the manila file folder marked C, next to the gas, electric, and Verizon wireless bills for four phones, one for me and three for the boys who didn’t answer it when you needed them to. Maybe the folder would get lost and it would not be true anymore. I wouldn’t have cancer. I dared not write out the full word on the folder for fear that labeling it would make it indelible, permanent.
The boys would find it cleaning out my desk after I was gone and they would cry. Here was the cancer file. Oh no. This was the beginning of the end. Mothers die.
Draped in a hospital gown with a floral print, my left breast exposed, seated upright at a seventy-degree angle, slightly reclined, I imagined that I looked like an old man watching the Super Bowl in a La-Z-Boy chair. I was not nervous, feeling only numbed pressure, no specific target points, even as the instruments went in deeper, inches inside my chest. It felt as dangerous as someone pressing against me on a crowded bus or the dentist working diligently on my novacained mouth. Dr. Dowlat quickly maneuvered the brachytherapy tube, implanting it in my chest, deep inside the hieroglyphic eye of blood, filling the attached balloon with saline. I took a breath and shut my eyes. But the image was still there.
He closed the single wound across the front of my breast. He had made a nick, a hole on the side of my body, like a bullet wound where they inserted the device. A catheter stuck out of my body about four inches, like a Bic pen. The nurse taped it down and bandaged the rest. The catheter would be where they inserted the radioactive pellet, and it would travel to the balloon that filled the cavity from the lumpectomy. My breast and side were sore. If this is what it took for implants, no thanks. I had briefly entertained the thought of having implants if I needed a mastectomy.
Maybe I would get stripper breasts.
I didn’t need implants after all; they removed only the cancer in a neat slice and a tidy incision. I was a B cup before, so perhaps now I was a B–. And I didn’t really want stripper breasts; I imagined they would bounce when I ran.
I tried to keep straight in my head the list of appointments, follow-ups, treatments, procedures, heartbreaks, terrors, details of what they all said, the what’s nexts, the todays, the tomorrows. As if the mere chronicling of details would make it less terrifying, less like a bad dream.
The wound would need fresh dressing. I was to come back in two days to begin twice-daily radiation, Dr. Dowlat explained once we were back in his office.
“That’s a lot of parking,” I said.
“No one has ever remarked about the parking before,” Dr. Dowlat said.
“Think about it, at least fifteen minutes of driving up the ramp to find a space and then you have to walk to radiation and then you have to pay at least five or ten dollars to park—twice a day. That would take so much time. It would cost so much. A week of that?”
Fay at the front desk explained I would get a parking pass to place on my windshield, park right in front of the building in the circular drive, and walk only a few feet to radiation.
I can park in front. I won’t die.
The pink pamphlet I received with my diagnosis, “Breast Cancer Survivor Guide,” had a self-described “patient-friendly” tone and stated: “Your diagnosis has probably put your emotions into a tailspin and your mind into overdrive. You’re thinking: How will this illness disrupt my life? How will it impact my family? Above all, what are my chances of a cure?”
No, no chances, I had to be cured. I had sons. I had students to teach. I had a book coming out. This must be my cure. I had to be cured.
The pamphlet listed side effects. I half expected each paragraph to be punctuated with a smiley face. After diarrhea and constipation was listed “fuzzy thinking,” defined as “symptoms dubbed ‘chemo brain’ include an inability to concentrate. You may also feel a bit ‘down.’” Great, now I’ll be dense and depressed; I’ll forget what I am supposed to teach and I’ll stand on stage in front of students for an hour and a half and whistle. Following the diagnosis of fuzzy thinking was the bold-faced solution in red. “Try to keep your perspective and sense of humor. If depression develops, talk with your doctor.”
If it helped, I would laugh. I would heal by Seinfeld. I owned every season of the show on DVD. I loved the characters George and Elaine; Cosmo Kramer in smaller doses. The actress who played Elaine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was a few years behind me in college. She had been a star at Northwestern as well, in the campus productions, the comedies, the musicals. Her boyfriend, and later her husband, Brad Hall, lived across the hall from a man I dated in junior year. The sitcom dialogue made me laugh. I watched the DVDs for an hour or more a day.
Two weeks into my Seinfeld therapy, Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer, made an explosively racist remark at a Los Angeles comedy club. The cringing scene was on YouTube and every news broadcast in the country. I couldn’t watch anymore; suddenly Seinfeld episodes didn’t seem so funny.
“Try The Office,” a friend suggested.
I went online and bought seasons one and two of The Office, and at night I watched Michael and Dwight and Pam and Jim and laughed. I would get into bed and put a DVD in the player in my bedroom; the boys would come in and lie down near me on the bed or sit on the settee against the wall and we would all laugh. Sometimes I laughed so hard I would not think about cancer. And I could fall asleep. Colin would take off my glasses, place them on the side table, and turn off the television. And I would dream about Pam and Jim falling in love.
10
Class
* * *
November 2006
I wanted a new bag of ice to call my own.
At home we always had a few plastic food storage bags bulging with ice cubes shoved onto freezer shelves ready to be called into healing service. The boys used and reused the homemade ice packs for muscle injuries fro
m practice, weight lifting, or a match. Lodged between Costco-sized sacks of pot stickers, or packages of ground turkey or boneless chicken breasts, they were on hand to soothe an athlete’s aching body parts. I stopped endorsing the boys’ practice of placing bags of frozen peas on sore muscles. Once I cooked a bag of frozen peas not realizing how many incarnations it had spent on Brendan’s neck, Colin’s shoulder, or Weldon’s knee. Brendan recognized them right away.
“Those peas have been all over,” he said when he saw them on his dinner plate.
“Rude, those are the ice pack peas,” Colin announced.
“Did you use the edamame too?” I asked. Repulsed, I reached for a bag of salad to serve for dinner.
It was the day after the surgery to implant the brachytherapy tube, and I needed to attend a curriculum meeting on campus. I didn’t feel so bad, I could go, I wanted to go. The journalism school was launching an ambitious multimedia initiative beginning with the freshmen with me as the lead instructor, overseeing a dozen instructors and two hundred students. The cancer just complicated everything, took time away from what I needed to do.
I was tired of thinking about myself. I wanted it all over and done. I wanted to get on with work, life, what the boys needed, and everything else. The work helped.
“How are you?” some people I knew not so well would ask, sometimes while standing in the deli line at Jewel, the local grocery store, their voice half-dipped in what felt like pity. Word got around fast in the suburb where we lived.
Escape Points Page 9