I wrote this as a note on my facebook page almost two years ago, when I was skating on the very thin ice of maybe being cured of cancer. I’m reposting it here, to show how much has changed in that time, and how much has not changed.
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December 20, 2008
“I am so sorry. What can I do?” is the near-universal reaction of my friends upon learning that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer — and not just cancer, but unusually advanced and aggressive cancer that is resistant to the new modern treatments that make breast cancer, in most cases, not so scary.
The truth is, there is not much anyone can do except pray, and wait, and try be as normal as possible. A lot of people sent great stuff in the mail. T-shirts and, for some reason, a box of 1,000 hot pink peeps which I am still trying to figure out what to do with. I think I will flotilla them down the White Rock Creek dam on New Years Day, the first anniversary of my being declared “cancer-free.” Books galore. Hats. A Badger Kachina Doll. My friends in Dallas brought over Holy Ravioli by the caseload, and picked my kids up for play dates which were OH so welcome. A couple of home-cooked meals really stand out as well.
All these gifts and acts of kindness were beacons that lit the path of my ordeal and made it endurable, and I thank you. But so many friends have expressed frustration with the reality that these acts were all “one off,” and yet, here I am, living with an ongoing prognosis that is too frightening to do more than allude to.
Besides, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. And here’s the kicker. If I were to get hit by that apocryphal bus, the only silver lining is that I would be spared the horror of a lingering death by cancer. You see, I’m not eligible to be an organ donor.
But you are.
It won’t make my prognosis any less bleak. It won’t make my future of scans and tests every few weeks for the rest of my life any less unpleasant. But if you were to sign the paperwork to become an organ donor, and inform your relatives, because I asked you to, it would ease the weight of the burden I bear. Do it for me, because I cannot.
“Well, you won’t be the only woman in Dallas with scars all over her breasts.” That’s what my excellent friend Jeanne said right after my diagnosis, when I was lamenting the forthcoming loss of my beautiful, natural, breasts. At that time, we both thought breast reconstruction would be relatively straightforward, similar to the breast augmentation surgery that so many of our friends have had. In retrospect, our I-can-do-anything attitude only showed what monsters lurk in the unlighted depths of the “Don’t know what you don’t know” square of the knowledge quadrant.
“You’re such a natural beauty,” said another friend, one who I think has been on the D Magazine list of Dallas’ most beautiful women at least once. Her compliment, a lovely one, and very well-timed, was, I suspect, Dallas-speak for “You might want to fix your hair and wear more makeup,” but, because my friend is awesome, and tactful in a way I can never dream of becoming, it was all sugar and no barb.
“Holy shit, your hair came back the exact same color it was in college,” said my friend Jennifer, a born and bred New Yorker. In one way, Jennifer is right. My new hair looks exactly like my hair would have looked in high school and college if only I had known how to style it. For this, I have to thank my awesome hairdresser, Art, who has been able to make my hair look as good as possible during the whole horrible growing out after cancer phase. I’m not sure what the “real” current natural color of my hair is, since I have not seen it in about eight years, but, from what I can tell, I have a lot of grey along my part. Art, if you are reading this, please how awesome you really are.
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This past weekend, while cleaning out my closet, I unearthed a couple of pairs of retro-retro size six Calvin Klein Jeans I picked up in 1997 during a brief resurgence of that style. Hmmm. I hear the eighties are back again. Do they fit? YES THEY DO!
For most women in their early forties who have had two children, this would be unthinkable. Not me. Anyone who has had as much plastic surgery as I have had — a lot — really, a lot — a whole heck of a lot — in fact, too much plastic surgery — had better look good in those pre-pregnancy jeans, as well as the fitted turtleneck sweater to go with them.
So yeah, this fall, I shall be sporting some extra-vintage Calvins. The ones where the waist comes up so high that it won’t show my whale tail, assuming anything comes between me and them. For someone who throws out everything I can, I’m glad I kept them all these years.
Cancer makes people do some wild and irrational things, which is, I think, one reason that I heard of a rumor that some parent somewhere made a pack with the devil resulting in the ongoing popularity of that adorable cat and her set of adorable accessories.
I like Hello Kitty as much as the next person. Unless the next person happens to be a 20-something Japanese woman, in which case I bow in acknowledgment that I have barely scratched the surface of Hello Kitty fandom. Nevertheless, when I am faced with the choice between an array of similar everyday items, such as pencils or notebooks, I will often choose the one with Hello Kitty on it, and I do, at age 41, wear the occasional Hello Kitty t-shirt with pride, although the pride may have more to do with the excellent work of my plastic surgeon.
My wonderful daughter also likes Hello Kitty. We lived in Tokyo, Japan when she was a baby and moved to Dallas, Texas when she was 19 months old. Hello Kitty was the only point of commonality between the two cities in the world view of a young toddler, and her love affair with Hello Kitty dates from that point.
What’s to like about the cat with the bow and the mysterious expression? She’s cute. She has an aesthetic simplicity. She’s surrounded by happy things, and yet her lack of a smile allows us to attribute to her whatever we may be feeling at any given time. She’s the perfect listener who takes in all we have to say, and never interrupts. She’s not part of a larger context or message, like the Teletubbies, Barbie, or My Little Pony. She just is. Cute.
Nevertheless I found this cake absolutely laugh-out-loud hilarious.
My son, the Boy, is five and a half, he weighs about 45 lbs. soaking wet, and he’s used to being bossed around because, well, we all do it. Our new dog — we named her Stella, so that Chris can stand outside in his undershirt calling her “Stella! STELLA!” — weighs about 65 lbs. dry, and I’m not thinking about her soaking wet if I can help it, but that reminds me to pick up a bottle of Retsina.
The Boy needs to learn to display dominance over the dog. This does not come naturally to him. His usual response to a conflict of wills is to lie on his bed and cry in frustration. Things came to a head with the dog early on — he was running, and she was excited, and snapped at his ankles.
She is a shepherd, so ankle snapping is part of her genetically-motivated behavior. However, we can’t have her snapping at the kids. Period.
The Boy, of course, burst into tears. “Mommy, why is she biting me?”
“Well, she is a shepherd, That means she was bred to herd sheep, and she is treating you like a sheep.”
“Why does she want to hurt the sheep.”
“Not hurt, h-u-r-t, but herd, h-e-r-d. You know, like in Babe when the dogs make the sheep all move together in a group by biting at their ankles. She is a shepherd — a sheep herder.”
“Why is she sheeping me?”
I kept a straight face. “She thinks she is in charge of you. It’s what she does. You HAVE to be in charge of her instead.”
The Boy looked at the dog in terror. During our family dog discussions, he’s always expressed a preference for a “small running around dog” like a Bichon Frise, a Havanese, or a Toy Poodle.
“How do I do that.”
“You stand up straight and look her in the face and you tell her who is in charge, and then you hug her hard around her shoulders.
It’s working. When he feels scared, or she gets too rowdy, he stands at attention and says “I’m a man and you’re a dog!” and dominance is established.
I wish all of our fears could be confronted and vanquished in such a straightforward manner. I also wish I could get the dog to herd the kids into the car at 7:50 every morning.
I’ve been trying to keep up with current events. I am reminded of my high school social studies teachers’ urgings, “just watch the evening news with your parents.” This was before cable TV and the all-news-but-no-news-all the time scourge, so watching the news was a reasonable request. My parents get three newspapers: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald; however, they did not watch the evening news. I didn’t read the newspaper except for the funnies and Ann Landers, and I failed current events.
Recently, I asked my mother about this. “It was the eighties in Miami, and the evening news was always full of drug related murders and we did not want you growing up thinking that was normal.” Meanwhile, the kids down the street from us were being raised by grandparents because their mother and father were both in prison for drug-related crimes. It was a very nice house; this was before The Man began confiscating bank accounts, houses, cars etc. that were suspected of being tainted with drug money. I like to say that Miami is the one place in the country that really is exactly like the movies make it out to be.
My obsession with current events began after college, starting with the horrific events in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Shortly thereafter, I moved inside the Beltway where the shenanigans on Capital Hill are as surreal and fascinating as seeing your neighbors led out of their house in handcuffs and overhearing your parents discussing it when they think you can’t hear. It was with the same watching-a-train-wreck feeling that I watched in Washington as Newt Gingrich and his cohorts in the 104th Congress shut down the government for a few days to prove a point — the point being, as far as I could tell, that you can shut down the government for a few days without much effect but lots of sound and fury.
Fast forward fifteen years. Maureen Dowd’s column in this morning’s NY Times brought back those good ‘ol days of my early adulthood, reading the op-ed page of the paper with a schadenfreude not found elsewhere.
Last weekend, some friends of whom we are extremely fond came over for pizza. We were discussing politics — it’s not rude to do that here, it seems. In Texas, everyone assumes that everyone else has the same right-wing beliefs and opinions, so here, a discussion of politics is more like a chorus of an alternative-universe Kumbaya around the campfire, where Kumbaya translates to “if poor people worked harder, they would not be poor.”
My friend, who knows me well, said, “I’m surprised you call yourself a liberal. You seem very thoughtful and rational about your opinions. I’d call you a moderate conservative.”
Chris, my husband said, “Whenever I hear that Sarah Palin has opinion that I share, I revisit my opinion to see where I went wrong,” and my friend’s husband said “I feel the same way whenever I agree with anything I read in The New York Times.”
I was reminded of a study I read a year ago, falling in the category of “Well, d’uh” that newspapers will focus their editorial slant to agree with the majority of their subscribers in order to maximize circulation, because most people enjoy reading a newspaper more when they agree with the editors.
It’s easy to go along with the status quo. To assume that everything is fine, that bad things are not going to happen to you, but not to question your beliefs, and not to seek out new opinions for fear that you might not like the answer. To assume the lump in your breast is a normal part of breastfeeding. To not seek out a second opinion, but to believe your doctor when she tells you your cancer is easily cured.
I’m lucky I’m not that kind of person. If I were, I’d be dead.
I’m not sure where or how to post this, but what’s not to like about a story about time travel and sub atomic particles.
There is a Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.” I used to think about that when I sat in the backyard of our old house, looking at our baby Mexican plum tree wondering if I would see it get big.
Today, I stopped by Calloway’s, which is a garden store on the way home from the kids’ school. Then, I stopped by Walton’s nursery which was on the way to some other errands I was running. I bought:
One Bur Oak
One Hearts of Gold Redbud
One American (Savannah) Holly
One Red Maple (the native kind)
Four Little Gem Magnolias
One 25-foot tall Ginkgo and I hope to goodness it is a male.
They are being delivered tomorrow and will be planted on Monday. I’ve already called to have the sewer and power lines marked. I’m excited.
We just painted our new dining room. It used to be a perfectly fine green — and I salute the Prior Occupants of our house, because it is hard to find a perfectly fine green. Nevertheless, a green dining room is not our style, and it clashed with our stuff, even when our stuff was safely in the kitchen cabinets out of sight of the green walls of the dining room. Now it is beige.
In general, I would say that we are not beige people. The dining room of our old house was a fantastic orange, a Benjamin Moore shade called “Rust” that is, unfortunately, exactly the team color of the University of Texas at Austin’s football team. We loved the orange living/dining room, nile green den, and harvest gold kitchen/breakfast room of our old house. We specifically chose those colors to make our our old unremodeled 1960’s Ranch house feel au courant and not old-peopley — and it worked. We painted it back to a neutral off-white in order to rent it, and *presto* it felt old fashioned again, and not like it had before — a refugee-house from the set of Mad Men.
I’m the type of person to put a lot of thought into choosing paint colors, so I covered large sections of the dining room wall with 1′ square patches of paint of various colors — shades of red and orange, a different green, even purple, and beige. We liked the beige. We both liked the beige. We each, separately, liked the beige.
“Who are you and what have you done with my husband,” I said to Chris.
“The red seems — I don’t know. Too much. Like we’re trying too hard to be interesting. And anyway, you hate beige. Why did you pick up this sample in the first place?”
“I thought I should look at some beiges before I ruled it out. It’s comfortable.”
“Comfortable is what I say about your ugly shoes and jeans that are too baggy in the butt.” He is right, and I would know better than to wear those jeans out of the house, if only our new house had a full length mirror. I’m wearing them right now, in fact.
Nevertheless, I feel comfortable with our new beige dining room. It is okay not to be fabulous.
I put on mascara yesterday morning. This might not seem like a big deal, especially in Dallas where they don’t walk the dog without a full face of makeup, but to me, it is a big deal.
I haven’t had enough eyelashes to put mascara on since August 2007, when they fell out. They fell out while Chris and I were playing Warcraft on our laptops on tables in a large hallway next to one of the many snack bars at MD Anderson Cancer Center. They drifted down off my face to land on my keyboard like autumn leaves on a still day, or like cherry blossom petals during the Japanese Cherry Blossom festival. I’d had chemotherapy that morning, so was forcing fluids to keep it from building up in my bladder, and every time I got up to use the bathroom, the bare places on my eyelids were more noticable and then they were gone. I mentioned it to our Warcraft friends, and one of them, a cop and a combat army veteran, told me about the time he got shot in the face and they had to rebuild his eye socket . He told me about the time he was wearing his eye patch in New Orleans when a lady said “That’s just for show,” reached up, pulled it off, and immediately vomited. That story remains one of my top two epic cancer friend win moments. It’s why finding the right support group is widely touted as central to surviving cancer.
A few days later, new lashes grew in, tiny blond hairs like the lashes that some babies are born with, that look like no lashes but are not, in fact, no lashes. At the time, I called it an object lesson in the value of zero, because having teeny tiny baby lashes was infinitely better than no lashes, and that realization is what I clung to when my “real” eyelashes returned, thin and short and sparse. I tried to wear mascara, but it just emphasized the shortness and sparseness of my eyelashes. It was horrible, in fact worse by far than having no lashes at all. For three years, I have worn eyeliner and sunglasses, or both, and tried not to think about it.
Yesdarday morning, when I was smudging my eyeliner, I noticed that I had eyelashes. “Hmmmm,” I said to myself, so I pulled out my unused mascara and tried it on. It looked pretty good! So I put on another coat. Presto! Long spikey eyelashes that looked like the fringe around a venus fly trap! I spent the next five minutes messing with the eyelash comb and brush while Chris and the kids waited in the car for me to go to the paint store.
This morning, I woke up with smudged mascara all over my face. I look like a raccoon.
We have a dog. We’ve had her for three days now. I’ve wanted a dog for years, but whenever I have brought it up to Chris the conversation goes like this:
Me: “Can we get a dog?”
Chris “No.”
Me: “But I love dogs!”
Chris: “You are allergic to dogs. When you get around them your eyes and throat swell shut and you get hives. What on earth are you thinking?”
What I am thinking is this: I am not allergic to all dogs, just almost all dogs, and the reaction is binary — either my throat and eyes swell shut and my skin welts up, or I’m fine. Last week, a friend of mine suggested that I look at a dog her she was fostering. The dog was perfect. She is a quiet two-year-old German Shepherd mix. She is big and white and fluffy and smart and she smells good-doggy, not stinky-doggy, and I just love her. And I’m keeping her for a while to make sure I am not allergic to her.
My dog-rescuing friend is on pins and needles. “When will you know that you are not allergic to her? How long until it’s definite? When can I feel secure that you will be able to keep the dog?” Because my friend looooooves the dog and it is breaking her heart to give her to me, but she already has two dogs and just can’t take on another one. I can understand why she is looking for some definite closure.
The thing is, I can’t give my friend the definite answer she so desperately wants to her. So far, I have not been allergic to the dog, but tomorrow, or two years hence, I might have an allergic reaction to the dog. If that happens, I will take five Benedryl, put the dog outside, take a shower, and call my friend to come get her. I can’t promise that won’t happen. It probably won’t, but it might.
In the meantime, I’ll just wait, and teach the dog to sit, and stay, and fetch, I’ll take her for long walks and be happy with her, and not worry too much about what might happen.
I can do that.
Dance with the Reaper 