I Bificus

by Bif Naked

  When I went for an MRI back in the nineties after having mini-strokes (it turned out I had a patent foramen ovale—essentially, a hole in my heart), I had to take out the rings. You can’t wear any jewellery in one of those machines. They use incredibly strong magnetic forces and there’s a risk that the jewellery will be quickly ripped clean out of your head, or nipples, or belly button. In reality, it’s more likely to overheat. But either way, I was happy to remove the nipple rings, and I didn’t put them back in. But two years later, I decided to wear nipple jewellery again, except this time I chose dainty little barbells, rather than rings. They never hurt, and I thought they looked much better.

  I was inspired to wear them in part because of a strange sequence of events. I was dating a guy who ended up being a fantastic boyfriend, except he had a secret. The secret was his other girlfriend. She looked like a cross between a porn star and Brigitte Nielsen, and she wore small diamond-tipped barbells in each of her chocolate-chip nipples. They were magnificent.

  How do I know about her barbells? I had made them both—my boyfriend and his girlfriend—a nice dinner in my apartment. He had been my boyfriend for a month or so; I’d met him at the gym, and we’d gone bowling on our first date.

  He was a bodybuilder, which was perfect for me because I was a gym rat and loved the gym culture. He had a platonic training partner, an incredible female bodybuilder, and they were inseparable. She was sweet and funny and kind. Shortly after he and I started dating, she suddenly moved to Los Angeles, for the training opportunities there, apparently. But the truth was that she was heartbroken that he was dating someone else. My boyfriend was secretly madly in love with her, so when he eventually confessed this to me, simply spilling the beans one night in bed after snuggling with me, I hugged him and insisted he go after her. I assured him it was the right thing to do. I probably had known it deep down all along anyway—she was almost all he ever talked about. He was relieved that I wasn’t upset, and he was so excited that he left that same night for California to go after his true love. They called me a couple of days later, and we promised to have dinner together upon their return.

  Being the perfect ex-girlfriend, happy to celebrate their true love, I offered to host the dinner. It turned out to be a relaxed, enjoyable evening. Until I almost dropped the plates I was clearing off the table.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. He had come out of the bathroom, naked.

  “I want to share her with you, and I want to share you with her,” he said quietly, in all his bodybuilder nakedness.

  “We just want to show you our appreciation for bringing us together,” she said.

  I felt like I was in a sitcom.

  I scurried away and began scraping the plates. “Oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh,” I said, then laughed politely. “It’s so not necessary, I totally understand. You are most welcome!” I turned on the tap to fill the sink with water. I wanted to die of embarrassment.

  He walked into the kitchen and touched my arm. “Beth, please, let us do this.”

  He was such a nice boy, how could I be rude? I shut off the tap. “Well, maybe for a minute . . .”

  After spending as much time with them as I felt would be courteous, I bid the happy lovers a good night and left them in my bedroom, going to sleep with my dogs in the guest room. I had bailed as fast as I could. Besides, nothing beats snuggling between two little fluffy dogs.

  Christmas was weird and everyone cried a lot. I tried to make them feel better, tried to reassure my family and friends that I wasn’t going to croak. I was good at this because of all my training as a performer and having a show-must-go-on mentality. It was easy to lie. I had been practising my whole life.

  Peter and I discussed things and we decided we should make a definitive “Bif Naked has breast cancer” statement. Already the word was out. A couple of national newspapers had called, asking Peter if it was true. I marvelled at how news spread.

  We had a saying we thought was funny: “Tits and tattoos are all you need to get media attention,” and once again it appeared to be the case. I found it interesting that breast cancer seemed to get more attention in the media than other types of cancer. More frightening for people, more dramatic, and more of a story. It was showbiz, and soon it became clear to me that both the world and the medical waiting rooms were a stage. I was actually quite embarrassed about the whole thing and felt that I had to hide this and instead put on a show. People love a good drama, and they really love a good comedy.

  Peter had arranged for me to speak about my breast cancer on George Stroumboulopoulos’s radio show, about three weeks before I was to start chemotherapy. It was to be the one and only time I would speak about it. I had first spoken on the radio with George many years earlier. George is a good guy and well respected. If there was only one interview where I would come out about the cancer, George would be it. The national papers ran the story. I was quoted as saying how happy I was that it was me and not my mom or one of my sisters who had the cancer. Peter was quoted as saying, “She has shown a lot of strength and courage. When she is feeling sick, she won’t be doing much. And when she’s not sick, she’ll be working.” And that was the truth. I was deeply grateful for my having breast cancer instead of anyone else in my family having it, and I did work a lot, right through chemo. In fact, I never stopped working.

  I was to go to nuclear medicine, where I’d be injected with a radioactive fluid in the armpit for lymphatic mapping. The doctors wanted to find the lymph node the cancer would sneak off to first—this node is known as the sentinel node.

  “Sentinel?” I chirped.

  “Yes, sentinel. The first one. The one the cancer is most likely to spread to first,” the doctor doing the procedure said.

  “Just like the Judas Priest song!” I announced enthusiastically. To my disappointment, no one in the room thought I was all that funny. But I remained undaunted. I started singing my best rendition of the Judas Priest song “The Ripper,” in the highest voice imaginable. I thought this was an incredibly funny offering, and I was laughing like a hyena. Nothing. No reaction. The medical team became even more serious. I settled down, trying to compose myself and feeling suddenly shy. Did they assume this was nervous laughter, like little kids get? They had never met me before, so how would they know that I can bust out a metal song and whip my hair in a grocery aisle too?

  The injection seemed like it would be simple enough, no problem. After all, how bad could it be?

  I think I let out the loudest “Ow!” I have ever said in my life. It hurt so much, I could not believe it. The tears shot straight out of my eyes and into the doctor’s face. I was quiet the rest of the day, including throughout the scanning procedure that followed the injection.

  Soon afterward, my surgery day came (I was having a partial mastectomy, often called a lumpectomy), and so did my girlfriends, Denise, Kari, Mindy, and Nina—my home girls, my posse. The only ones missing were Lola, who was in school; Gail, who was in Rhode Island; and Louisa, who was in Spain. These girls were my people. We had history together and had shared practically everything together over the years, the way girlfriends do. We were family. They all wanted to come inside to the surgical area and wait with me in recovery. But they were not allowed beyond the double doors.

  I always felt a tremendous responsibility to be positive and entertaining, no matter what—I always had my game face on. You’re not supposed to wear makeup or jewellery during surgery, but I always wore a little makeup, and this day was no different. I mean, I had plucked out every last eyebrow hair that first day I had met with the surgeon. I had no eyebrows whatsoever, and if I didn’t wear some makeup, I would look like a fat Marilyn Manson, a Goth wannabe, and not a hot Goth either, just a frumpy one with no eyebrows. None of the staff at the hospital seemed to notice I had drawn my eyebrows on, and they didn’t seem to make one bit of difference to anything.

  I was out of it, recovering from surgery, groggily watching the doctors and nurses interact with one an
other and with the other patients. I couldn’t talk—I was still half asleep from the general anesthesia. I felt numb yet shivered violently. A nurse covered me with warm blankets, replacing them one after another as they cooled. “We vegans are always cold,” I said quietly to the nurse. She just smiled. I asked if she knew what I meant, and she laughed and told me that I hadn’t actually said anything—I had imagined I had spoken to her.

  Based on the pathology tests done on the tissue removed during my surgery, the doctors staged the cancer and determined whether it had spread to the lymph nodes, and also assessed the tumour’s hormone sensitivity. They found invasive ductal carcinoma of the left breast. I was estrogen receptor–positive, progesterone receptor–positive, HER-2/neu–positive. In other words, not cool; the cancer was fast-growing and aggressive. But I was very lucky that the sentinel node was clear, and that none of the nodes was positive for malignancy. Once the doctors had figured this all out and staged the cancer (putting me at stage two), they could determine what chemo cocktail I needed, and whether I would also need radiation, which I did. They could pretty much know whether or not I’d survive a couple of years, they said. They were all hoping for the best.

  I wanted all the details tattooed on my chest, or at least my patient number, or something. I liked being able to name the cancer. I liked knowing that stuff and, once I was home from the hospital, began studying like crazy—finally, I was putting my MCAT guides, medical dictionaries, and medical textbooks to use. I was also concerned that somewhere, somehow, animals had been used in the testing and had died for me, and I was distraught about that. My parents suggested I do whatever it took to survive cancer and follow the doctors’ advice, and also pray a lot. I always felt guilty, but the love for my parents was bigger than my guilt, and I wanted them to be hopeful. From the day of my diagnosis, I decided to offer myself for any and all experiments so that maybe some animals could be spared. Even if I was deluding myself, somehow I had to put it out there that I wanted to be available for experiments. It is not that simple to become involved in clinical trials, but I knew I was contributing to making a difference if I signed up for them, so I did. The one I was accepted into was on exercising during chemotherapy and was headed up by the doctor who would come to be my own oncologist.

  The week following the surgery, I was scheduled to have a surgical port inserted, as the doctors were anticipating I’d have seventeen infusions, one every three weeks over the next year or so: six cycles of chemotherapy followed by eleven cycles of antibodies/immunotherapy. Radiation, twenty-eight treatments in all, was to start after the first six chemo treatments. The chemotherapy could damage the veins and heart, and the surgically implanted port would help protect against this.

  “Oooh, I loved my port!” my friend Nina exclaimed when I told her. “That’s a good thing, Beth, you’re gonna love it.” Nina, sixteen years older than me, had had breast cancer four years earlier. She had stage-three inoperable cancer and had been given eight rounds of chemotherapy before eventually having a double mastectomy. She also had twenty-eight rounds of radiation, and wigs, chemo sickness, the works. Nina knew everything there was to know about breast cancer, it seemed. She told me things like “If you smoke a cigarette during your breast radiation, the skin on your breast will turn black.” That’s what a chemo nurse told her and Nina never questioned it. She was my cancer coach, and my mentor.

  “Great,” I said, “can’t wait!” I was always trying my best to stay positive in front of anyone. Little did I know that the port would prove to be worse than the partial mastectomy.

  It was day-surgery. I was directed to the basement of the hospital. It looked like the geriatric ward—full of men with pacemakers and wispy hair, balm on their heels, coughing and humming Benny Goodman songs. The predominant scent was pine, or maybe it was Old Spice. I liked it, and I felt safe around them. I was just hoping I wouldn’t puke in front of anyone and that my gown wouldn’t fly open and that I wouldn’t simply have a stroke and die, embarrassing myself.

  I horsed around, of course, and had a great afternoon in my favourite Slayer sneakers and the hospital gown labelled “Property of VGH,” which I threatened to steal. I had already had my hair cut short, and I felt pretty great by then. I mean, they had already cut the tumour out.

  In fact, I felt fucking fantastic! That’s the thing with cancer: often you don’t even feel that sick. But I assure you, I felt so good in comparison to how I had felt, even just a few days after they cut out the tumour. I marvelled at the idea that I could have just not found it and left it growing and growing.

  I maintain that everything happens for a reason. This theory drove my dad crazy—he believed it was just a way to frame stuff and justify it. He said I am a “great justifier” and a “shameless predestinist,” and that holding this theory enabled me to find a reason for anything. But I still believe it, even if the truth may be that I simply enjoy believing this. I had breast cancer for a reason. Cancer shows a person who they really are, and it also shows a person who their spouse is and who their friends are, and who the grocery store cashier, the bus driver, and bandmates are. Cancer, I believe, is the great revealer. Meanwhile, I had to soldier on and get through it.

  I could not have anticipated that the port, with its catheter that ran down my neck and into my jugular vein, would limit the mobility of my neck. I was in twilight during the portacath implantation, when the plastic tubing was threaded into a vein, but fuck! I could not turn my head for days. Even after that, I had a limited range of motion.

  Nor did I know that the port would bulge beneath my skin below my collarbone like a bottle cap trying to push its way out. This is common but was even more pronounced on me because of my lack of body fat—I was athletic but very underweight. I was incapacitated for a couple of days afterward, and shocked by how uncomfortable I was. My chemotherapy would start one week later, when they’d stick the needle and the cancer drugs and medicine in there.

  I had bought new shoes for the occasion and carefully laid my clothes out on the bed. I had made a big tub of hot-air popcorn to take with me, as I knew the treatment would be almost six hours this first time, as the drugs needed to be administered slowly in case I had a bad reaction. I had laughed when they told me this. “Bad reaction? To chemo?” I found this funny—did they mean to be ironic? But I put on a brave face and so much makeup I looked like a Kabuki dancer. I wasn’t a cancer patient, I was Bif Naked, whether I wanted to be or not.

  There were four chemo chairs, one in each corner of the tight room, with the IV stations beside them, waiting for each patient’s mix-in-a-bag, plus the glorious sodium chloride that patients get in order to stay hydrated. I hated the sodium chloride. It makes a girl puffy, and let’s not forget, I was rail thin and had every intention of keeping it that way.

  One of the chairs was unoccupied. The guy to my left was well dressed. He wore beautiful black loafers and a dress shirt under a plum sweater. He was already hooked up and underway, the IV in his hand. He smiled at me.

  “What are you in for, brother?” I said, doing my best Don Rickles impression.

  He smiled again. “Colon cancer. Second time.” We fell silent, as if waiting for organ music.

  Then I said, “Second time! Exciting!”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  The nurse was flushing my virgin port and hooking up the line. Snap. The needle pierced my skin over the weird bottle-cap implant like a knitting needle slamming through a taught snare drum. “Perfect,” she said, and busied herself with the machine settings. I remained fixated on my neighbour.

  “What’s your name? I’m Beth.”

  “Paolo.”

  “You got an ostomy bag?”

  Ten minutes of silence must have passed before Paolo laughed. “Yes,” he said.

  “Let’s see it!” I squealed.

  He was laughing at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “Come on! I’ve never seen an ostomy bag.” I was kicking my feet, which
were dangling in the La-Z-Boy-style chemo chair. I forgot all about my port and the drip. Not only did Paolo show me his ostomy bag but he shared stories about the perils of dating. Eventually, the woman across from us, Grace, bald and frail from lymphoma, joined in the laughter.

  I believed my experience that day set the bar for me, personally and spiritually, and I figured out that all I had to do was never ever shut my mouth. Not for a second, not ever, in order to get through cancer and for everyone else to get through theirs. People were always so fearful and shy and quiet in the chemo unit and the waiting rooms, and I just couldn’t stand it. I was on to something: as long as I kept talking, others would add to the conversation, answer the stupid questions I asked, or simply say something to be polite. I would kill them with kindness and force them to talk, even if it was just to make me shut up.

  When I finally met Dr. Gelmon, an oncologist who was recommended to me by a chemo nurse and whom I would end up seeing regularly, I was an instant devotee. She was my Dhanvantari, my goddess. She floated into the room with her fluttering beautiful eyes and easy smile. She wore a blazer, long skirt, and killer boots—knee-high with a heel. I was taken by her worldly demeanour. Karen Gelmon is a warm and supportive doctor, a researcher, an author, a scientist, and a compassionate woman. She is also a wife and a mother. She really seems to do it all. I was in awe of this woman.

  I enjoyed our meetings very much, always deferring to her expertise. She was encouraging and positive. When she said, “We are going to beat this, Beth. You are going to beat this,” I believed her with every cell of my being.