Rocking the Pink

by Laura Roppé

  Darling Chloe is a ham. More than a ham, actually—so much more: She’s a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Chloe would do anything, anything at all, to get a laugh. It’s worrisome sometimes, but usually it’s just plain funny.

  When we were having dinner at a restaurant in Disneyland, Chloe politely excused herself from the table to use the restroom. A few minutes later, she returned and sat quietly back down in her chair.

  What a refined young lady! Such manners!

  And then Chloe leaned in and whispered to me, totally deadpan, “Winnie the Poop.”

  I knew I shouldn’t laugh. But I did. Bad Mommy! I snorted so loudly, I had to hide my face in my napkin so as not to make a rude commotion in the restaurant. More inappropriate encouragement for the ham-and-cheese-sandwich.

  When I picked up Chloe from school one day in second grade, I asked about her day.

  “Today was great,” she said. “Meditation class was fantastic.”

  I hadn’t been aware that the school offered meditation classes. “You’re taking a meditation class?” I asked.

  “No, Mom, I’m teaching a meditation class.”

  “Really?” I tried not to laugh. “What do you teach in the class?”

  “Oh, you know. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Think of a beautiful place.” She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Then she opened her eyes and shrugged her little shoulders. “Everyone thinks it’s really relaxing.”

  “Who’s everyone? How many kids are in this meditation class?”

  Her lips moved as she ticked off the names of her pupils to herself. “Eight.”

  Eight second-graders stood around at recess and followed Guru Chloe in meditation exercises? Whatever happened to hopscotch and tetherball?

  I got some dynamite, got a little stick of dynamite

  And she gonna go high into the sky

  She doesn’t walk

  She’s always dancing down the street

  She don’t know what’s on her balance sheet

  She don’t care if she’s the only one

  Doesn’t want an entourage, just wants to have some fun

  During my weeks and weeks of chemotherapy, as I was forced to spend much of my time in quiet pursuits at home, my girls and I discovered how much we enjoyed each other’s company. Sometimes we mulled over a jigsaw puzzle together, chatting the whole time. Other times, they taught me the latest card games they’d learned from their cousins. And sometimes—my favorite times—I’d lift up the corner of my bedspread and say, “Come on in.” And the girls and I would nestle in close in my warm bed and watch all six hours of my beloved Pride and Prejudice. At the closing credits, Sophie, who’d clearly inherited the period-drama-junkie gene, would beg, “Oh, Mommy! Let’s watch it again.”

  That’s my girl!

  My Dearest Jane,

  What about when Darcy first meets Elizabeth at that ball, and Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy say she is not handsome enough to tempt him to dance, and then she brazenly walks past him and gives him the best “F U” look while still smiling. OMG, I love that part.

  XO Laura

  Good Morning Laura,

  What about when Darcy is tortured by his love/lust for Elizabeth and he says “I shall conquer this, I shall!” and, even though Elizabeth is not aware of it, you just think, “For goodness’ sake, woman, grab him and have him!”

  Love, Jane xx

  Chapter 41

  A few days before my eighth and final chemo infusion, I took Buster to the dog park. I sat on the park bench wearing my head scarf, feeling depleted but happy to be alive under the warm California sun. As I jotted song lyrics in my journal, a man of about fifty entered the gated park with his chocolate Labrador retriever. Buster started jumping for joy at the sight of this other dog, and, once the Lab was unleashed, they galloped off together to play.

  The man introduced himself to me as Sal and asked me about Buster. What breed? How old? “He’s very handsome,” he commented. And then he looked me in the eyes and asked pointedly, “How are you feeling, if you don’t mind my asking?” He inquired with such warmth, such genuine caring, that I felt a prickle of a tear forming in my eye.

  “Actually, this is my first day out of the house in a full week,” I told him honestly. “But I’m feeling okay today.”

  He didn’t ask me if I was a cancer patient; he already knew.

  “I’ve had cancer three times,” Sal said gently. “And I had chemo all three times.”

  He’s gone through this three times?!

  Sal continued. “Twice, I was given less than a ten percent chance to live. But I never gave up. Ever. When it was hard, I let myself feel that. But I never stayed down for long. I always looked ahead to everything being better. And it always, always got better. It will for you, too.”

  I was deeply moved. I told him that so much of the time, strangers either ignored me or uttered one of about ten stock platitudes. It had been a long time since I’d struck up a comfortable conversation with a stranger.

  Sal laughed and nodded his head. He knew exactly what I was talking about. “Tell me the platitudes.”

  I rattled them off, counting them on my fingers. “God has a plan. God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. Everything happens for a reason. Stay positive.” (Mind you, I don’t actually disagree with any of these statements, and I understand completely that some people don’t know what to say. Still, when you’ve heard the same exact sentiments, however sincerely meant, from fifty people, it’s hard to refrain from checking off a mental box when they’re shared.)

  It was fun to talk shop with a fellow warrior. It felt sort of . . . taboo to say these things out loud. Liberating. I was on a roll. “The one that actually made me mad,” I told Sal, “was ‘I know you wouldn’t let anything happen to you. You’d never leave your girls.’ That one implies that if I were to succumb to cancer, then I didn’t care enough about my girls or try hard enough to live. Like, if I were to die, then I was just a bad mother.”

  Sal chuckled. He understood completely.

  I felt unburdened. I couldn’t say these horrible, ungrateful things to anyone else, because no one else would understand. And if I said any of this to “civilians,” they’d surely second-guess themselves in every future encounter with me. I didn’t want to cause any more discomfort around me than I already did.

  I asked Sal about his family. He had three living children, he said, but two of his kids had died.

  I couldn’t believe it. My heart ached with empathetic grief. The deaths of two children and cancer three times? What was God’s plan in that?

  Of course I told Sal how sorry I was. And that he was a shining beacon of hope for me. If he could survive all that life had thrown at him and remain so full of obvious love and warmth, then I could do it, too. Sal was my lifeline that day.

  We then settled into talking about our dogs, our loyal and faithful dogs. How they had helped us both get through our treatments. How love transcends language and analysis—it just is.

  Just as I was telling Sal that Buster had not left my side for five days and nights after every chemo infusion, an older man of about seventy came into the dog park. He released his dog to play with ours and inched over toward our conversation. Since I was wearing my head scarf and talking about chemo, I figured him to be a cancer survivor who wanted to share his story, or maybe offer some encouragement. At any rate, his body language made it clear he wanted to say something to us.

  Sal and I greeted him.

  “Can I tell you something?” the man said, without preamble.

  “Of course,” we replied.

  “This is the first day I’ve been able to leave my house for a full week.” He held back tears. “My son committed suicide a week ago.” His voice was breaking, along with his heart. “I don’t know how to survive this.”

  I touched his shoulder, at a loss for words.

  My mind was spinning. Here were three strangers sitting at a dog park one weekday morning in San D
iego: a thirtysomething-year-old cancer patient coming down the home stretch of grueling treatment, a seventysomething-year-old man grieving the loss of his child mere days before, and a fiftysomething-year-old man who had survived each of the hardships we were suffering—cancer three times and the death of a child twice. What were the odds?

  Sal offered the man heartfelt words of compassion and understanding, gleaned from his unimaginable similar losses. I saw the man’s broken heart soak up Sal’s words like a sponge, just as my fragile little heart had soaked up Sal’s encouraging comments to me moments before. Sal was this man’s lifeline that day, just as he had been mine.

  Where was God’s plan in that? Right in front of my face.

  The day before my eighth and final chemo infusion, just for kicks, I tried putting eyebrow pencil on my bare brow bone (try saying that three times fast). There were about four eyebrow hairs still hanging on to guide my pencil, and I applied the most subtle, color-matching job I could muster. I even used delicate feather strokes, as I’d learned several months earlier at a cancer-themed beauty seminar.

  After all this effort, I stood back and looked at myself in the mirror—and then I laughed out loud. I looked ridiculous. Like Carrot Top, the comedian. I got a washcloth and wiped off the eyebrow makeup—only to realize that I had just rubbed off all four of my remaining eyebrow hairs. As I stood in the bathroom all alone, looking at my four eyebrows on this washcloth, I started to belly-laugh. I sat down on the side of the bathtub, laughing and holding my sides. This is frickin’ nuts.

  And just like that, a switch flipped inside me. I’m done with this. Of course, I had one final chemo infusion left, and radiation thereafter, but you know what? I wasn’t going to let those facts define me. Hell no.

  I was done deferring to every creak and pain in my body. I was done marking days on a calendar. I was done waiting to reach “the end” of treatment. Life simply could not be solely about getting through something—even if that something was chemo or cancer. It had to be about living. Life must be lived. Nothing changes that, I realized. Nothing.

  It was a glorious spring day—a perfect day for a hike. Brad and I packed the girls into the car for a three-mile hike up a local mountain. With Brad as our fearless leader, the girls and I climbed and climbed, our legs pumping as hard as they would go. It took us over an hour to reach the top, but we were rewarded for our efforts: We could see all the way for miles, into downtown, out to the ocean, and all the way to Mexico. The girls “oohed” and “ahhed” at the view—particularly impressed they could see a whole other country from up there.

  From our peak on top of the world, Brad leaned in to me and whispered, “I still love my life; I wouldn’t trade it.”

  He had taken the words right out of my mouth.

  I’m not too clever, I’m downright trite

  Used to be dark, but now I’m light

  Happy to be alive with you,

  With you, with you, sweet you

  There is no place I’d rather be

  Than with you here right now

  No place I’d rather be

  Nurse Julie unhooked the chemo tube from my port for the eighth and final time, just as two other nurses handed me flowers and tossed confetti over my head. No more chemo smells. No more Barcaloungers. No more nausea. No more . . . feeling poisoned. No more.

  Brad grabbed my arm, and we marched out of the chemo lounge in triumph. We both knew the hell I’d experience for the next week or so, once the chemo drugs began wreaking havoc on my body. But we also knew another thing: This would be the very last time.

  Chapter 42

  My next and final stop on the cancer-treatment train (and Jane’s, too): about six weeks of radiation therapy. Radiation is designed to kill any remaining rogue cells that may have survived surgery or chemotherapy. Unlike chemotherapy, which is a systemic treatment (i.e., medicine is introduced into the patient’s blood), radiation is localized, meaning that only the specific areas where cancer has been found are treated.

  Before radiation actually began, doctors plotted the parameters of my radiation field precisely. As I lay naked from the waist up on a big metal table, a huge machine out of a sci-fi movie hummed around me, measuring to within fractions of a millimeter. Precise measurements were critical to ensure proper treatment: Radiating my breast, chest wall, and armpit? Good. Radiating my heart and lungs? Bad.

  While the machine measured, I lay perfectly still for forty-five minutes, with my arms above my head. After about twenty minutes, my arms went numb. And then I felt an itch on my face I desperately wanted to scratch. And then . . . I started to . . . smell something. What was that smell? Oh, it’s me.

  Apparently, my body was aggressively sweating out the remainder of the chemotherapy drugs. (And, unfortunately, wearing deodorant in radiation was prohibited because it somehow interfered with the machines.) It wasn’t pretty.

  The radiation technician came into the room and sat beside me.

  “Please continue to lie very still,” he instructed. And then he marked three dots on my body with a Sharpie pen—one dot on my sternum, another one under my breast, and another one under my armpit—the three coordinates of my radiation field.

  As the doctor sat next to my armpit, leaning in to do whatever was necessary with that Sharpie pen, I felt self-conscious about my body odor. I figured it was better to acknowledge the elephant in the room than pretend it didn’t exist.

  “I’m sorry for my stink,” I blurted.

  The technician smiled at me. “You’re fine.” And when I didn’t say anything, he added, “Remember, we treat other areas of the body here, too.” He winked.

  Well, I hadn’t considered that.

  The next step was to permanently tattoo the radiation-field dots to ensure that over the course of the next six weeks, the exact same field on my body would be radiated every time.

  Jane had received her radiation tattoos the prior day, and she had emailed to warn me. “Brace yourself, Laura. It hurts terribly.”

  As the technician raised the tattoo needle in his hand, I steeled myself for the pain. But as the needle pierced my flesh, I didn’t even flinch.

  “Wow,” the technician said. “Most people say that really hurts.”

  I guess most people aren’t She-Ra, Princess of Power. “Oh, that’s nothing,” I scoffed. “Pfft.” During the second and third tattoos, I could have fallen asleep.

  Nothing to it!

  Just like that, I was now the tattooed lady. Granted, the tattoos were eensy-weensy, barely visible, but I knew they were there. (And, by the way, the moment I got home from the hospital, I emailed Jane to tell her that she was a “complete and total wuss.”) And the coolest thing? My radiation tattoos had “broken the seal,” so to speak. I would never go back to my tattooless self.

  Well, I thought, I might as well get a real one now. Let the permanent badassery begin!

  Over the next six weeks, I went in for radiation treatments five times per week. Every day I lay down on the big metal table and R2-D2 buzzed around me, radiating the three areas designated by my radiation tattoos. Zap. Zap. Zap. Getting undressed and into my hospital gown took longer than the actual radiation session.

  Radiation reminded me of something Sharon said right after her triplets were born. Her husband had taken their older daughter out for an entire afternoon of entertainment, leaving Sharon at home alone with their three infants, and Sharon gushed to me, in sincere relief, “Gosh, it’s so much easier to care for three kids than four.”

  For me, radiation was like caring for twins (pun intended) after having served a long tour of duty with quintuplets. A virtual vacation.

  True, there were side effects as the long weeks of daily treatments took their toll on my body. The biggest was what the doctors called “fatigue.” And it was certainly true that I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow every night. Occasionally I napped, too. But you know what? Fatigue shmatigue.

  True, my radiated skin became bliste
red and pained. And toward the end, it tightened like leather. But, at least for me, this problem did not compare to months of chemotherapy. The superficial pain from radiation was isolated within my breast, chest, and armpit; it did not touch my heart, mind, and soul. My spirit remained untethered from my circumstances.

  It wasn’t long before downy-soft hairs started sprouting on my scalp. I was reborn. Brad couldn’t keep his hands off my newborn head. He constantly rubbed it and called my little hairlings “beautiful.”

  Unfortunately, the hair follicles in my scalp were not the only ones becoming active again. In addition to the beautiful hair on my head, I was developing noticeable peach fuzz all over my entire face.

  “You’ve got muttonchops,” Brad teased, and I promptly beelined to the bathroom to shave my cheeks with his electric razor. (Thankfully, the peach fuzz subsided after a few weeks.)

  I started going to weekly Pilates classes, where my classmates took great interest in tracking the progress of my hair growth from week to week. I took daily walks with Buster. I started, very slowly, to see my friends again.

  And then, toward the end of my radiation treatments, I sang with Cool Band Luke at a fundraising gala for lung cancer. My hair was at the G.I. Jane stage, so I wore a red flapper wig throughout the performance. I shook my booty all night long, and no one ever suspected I was in the midst of cancer treatments. I was just the girl in the band. It felt like coming home.

  At the end of the night, after the lights had come on and the band was packing up our gear, I took off the wig, which had become hot and itchy. A lingering partygoer gasped when I removed it and exclaimed, “You look better without the wig! Ditch the wig!”

  Thanks to that kind (or drunk) stranger, I donated the wig and all my head scarves to a cancer charity the very next day and never covered up again.

  A few weeks later, my head was sprouting a curly mop. And though I was grateful to have hair at all, this Q-tip look wasn’t particularly attractive. “I look like Vinny Barbarino from Welcome Back, Kotter,” I whined to Brad.