It’s been nine months since I was diagnosed. Which seems fitting in light of Susan Sontag’s having termed cancer “a demonic pregnancy.”
[She references St. Jerome: Alius tumenti aqualiculo mortem parturit.]
Though all pregnancy seems pretty demonic to me.
I once tried to explain that I had cancer the way other people had babies
or blue eyes.
What I mean is,
it’s just another thing that happened.
Filed under: journal extracts | Tags: age, anxiety, breast cancer, chemotherapy, fear, hospital, mammograms, statistics, survival
I thought I’d be calmer for the second chemo treatment, which was obviously a gross miscalculation of my character. Upon arrival I was handed a sheet with a mammogram request on it; notes dated 26 March stated: ’suspicious lesions on L. side.’ None of the nurses or reception staff were able to inform me what this document was and why I’d not been told about it. The first nurse directed me to Radiology rather than Breast Screening. Once at Breast Screening, the reception staff (the school-leaver and the imposing woman with painted eyebrows) tried to tell me I would not be allowed to have the test because I am under 34 — ie, “too young for mammograms.”
I’m too young for cancer. What do you think of that?
New staff every time. More waiting this time, and a new chemo nurse too, who–surpirse!–informed me that from now on, there would be no bed–and no guests. So I sat in the row of old women while she repeatedly failed to find a vein, eventually breaking into tears when the thing slipped began painfully swelling up my whole arm–then the nurse said “Oh shit” and left without explanation. K. was not at all surprised to fine me curtained off in the corner upon his return.
“They had to move me,” I told him groggily, by then under the influence of the anti-anxiety medication. “I made a scene.”
Despite the trauma of the Charing Cross East Bloc Hospital experience, I feel better this time in the aftermath. Not having vomited was even a bit of a disappointment. They gave me anti-emetics this time, and I’m sure my new living environment–green space, a bathtub, a bed I don’t need to climb into with a utility ladder–contributes.
I’m scared more and more. Reading the pamphets and the websites and the statistics terrifies me. “Younger Women and Breast Cancer”: cancer is more aggressive and tends to be less responsive to treatment. There is no “treating” this disease, this wrongness in my body. Even if and while I live, I will always be living with it. Somewhere. This terrifying thing, genetic hatefulness.
Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: surgery, anxiety, dreams, hair, Tamoxifen, hospital, cancer, depression, cancer & the media, work, quotations, reality, kylie minogue, repression, denial
A confession:
I really love this movie.
I used to so adore and identify with Lelaina (Winona Ryder) and her angsty smart girl Big Gulp post-college existence. But now it’s Vickie (Janeane Garofolo) with whom I identify, or this part of her character anyway:
“It’s like I’m on Melrose Place and I’m the AIDS character and I teach everyone it’s all right to talk to me or touch me and then I die and everyone goes to my funeral wearing halter-tops and chokers.”
Substitute something vaguely 21st century for the mid-90s cultural references and cancer for AIDS and this is so apt. It’s what I feel I’ve become to most everyone I know: the “cancer character.” People who had no interest or investment in me suddenly came out of the woodwork when they heard I had cancer–even my “best” friends, whom I’d emailed a week previously with good news about my Ph.D; I heard nothing from them until the C-word. Part of it is genuine concern, but, however cynical it seems, I believe there is the thrill of the exotic in it: being able to say ‘My Friend Who Has Cancer.’
Kind of like My Gay Friend, but harder to come by.
And I’m tired of playing the cancer character, even though the whole project of this blog is doing precisely that it’s ok to talk to me, it’s ok to touch me kind of thing. Trying to de-mystify and synthesize the experience of having this disease.
But it’s all a sham, or most of it is anyway. Because what I feel a lot of the time is sheer panic and terror and a loss of the will to live, and you can’t de-mystify or synthesize any of it in handy blog posts for people you don’t even know to peep in on.
So,
A confession, pt. 2:
No matter how much I tell anyone I’m okay, I am not okay.
None of this is okay.
And I know I’ve been in denial about my level of okay because of the way things have been breaking to the psychological surface.
Like the other day, after coming across this–Kylie Minogue: Still Looks Like Cancer–I just lost it, and hacked off all the hair I’d regrown in the past several months with a pair of blunt scissors, leaving a sinkful of coarse curls and the remainder a shorn, uneven crop peppered with bald patches.
And it wasn’t that some jackass who writes a stupid celebrity hairstyle blog had really gotten to me, but that I needed a catalyst to act out something irreparably psychologically fucked-up in myself (like cutting your wrists, but with ugliness instead of endorphins), something I have to spend every day repressing and ignoring and pushing away so that I can get out of bed, go to my stupid hateful mindless job, and exist.
Merely exist.
And then the other night I dreamt of the surgery–of the whole thing repeated, for the left side, with a smattering of cruel and unhelpful hospital staff, and awoke so traumatized–not from the dream, but from the reminder that these things had actually happened to me, and I haven’t processed or made peace with them.
I’m getting to feel like Elwood P. Dowd, and my health is like Harvey. I’ve wrestled with reality for twenty-five years, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally won out over it.
I haven’t won yet, but when I sense reality getting ready to rear its ugly head I have to slam it in some drawer or another. Sometimes literally; I found I can’t wear the pajamas I wore when I was in the hospital. Even seeing them, I start to panic. So they’re stuffed to the back of a bottom drawer. I can’t toss them out any more than I can toss out the cancer.
After all, I “still look like cancer.”
But I can’t deal with it.
Because doing so would probably involve turning my life, for whoknowshowlong, into a vortex wherein I would not be able to function–to get up, get dressed, take my Tamoxifen, spend all day moving Microsoft’s data from one place to another, and come home to no one.
So maybe–what’s the point of functioning at all, if that’s what you do?
I think: what would happen if I died now? And the answer is: some of Microsoft’s files would be delayed getting down to archives, and the temp agency would send someone else immediately.
–
This summer, someone asked me, How are you coping? How are you getting up, walking around?
I admitted it was with a generous dose of denial–but then I had England; then I had K.
Now the only answer I can supply besides denial is
I don’t know what else to do
or–I know what else I can do, and am scared to.
English countryside, a concordance of daffodils. I don’t know where the days go. It’s shocking every time I see a clock and am aware of the passage of time. The floors and pillowcases are littered with my hair, which was shaved into a butch, military crop–which doesn’t matter until I catch sight of myself in the mirror, or more importantly when I imagine myself as K. sees me. It is comfortable here apart from constantly wondering what he’s thinking: his distance, the paranoia over resentment.
Progressing swim by swim, feeling tired but healthy. And standing the shower in the Wantage Leisure Centre with the hair cascading in clumps from my head and swarming toward the drain, wondering how this has actually come to be a scene from my own life. How many beautiful things I had imagined for myself at twenty-five. They did not include becoming bald and breastless, remaining childless and unemployed.
…
My hair’s falling apart in patches and it’s just as I’d feared: I’ve become repulsive to myself. It’s not that I hadn’t expected this to happen, but not so quickly.
I’m getting back into Hélène Berr’s Journal. What a striking change in her writing between 1942 & 1943. I hope for such a monumental change in maturity–I long for evenness and insight. Not that I dare compare, or mean to compare, my cancer with the occupation of Paris. Disgusting, really–the Holocaust as a comfort. How trivial my bald head becomes.
She says: “What a muddle of joys and miseries life has become! I say ‘has become’ because I think that the birth of awareness at any age consists exclusively of discovering the indissolvable unity of joy and sadness.”
A kind of reconciliation with loneliness, as in realizing that I am not alone entirely, and am ok with the places that I am.
The weekend was head-clear, a complete relief. Films and pizza and chocolate, laughter and closeness.
A catalogue of blessings. Swimming. Official deferral from Michigan. Finding Ritter Sport Knusperkeks in a convenience store on the corner. Strange, this swing. Feeling calm and happy–after those bad days. I’d call it a fair enough trade could I be sure it would be the same with each cycle.
The continuing farce of my existence: K.’s mother may have chicken pox. I’m due to move in with them in five days, but may have to keep my distance for “a couple of weeks.” I dreamt up taking temporary residence in a holiday let by the seaside– On Margate Sands, burning burning etc.–but bookings don’t allow for spontaneous decisions, it seems. Nothing agrees with the things I dream.
To R, I wrote an overly hopeful, endorphin-induced email defending too vehemently my position, which is for the moment nothing but stasis. My Cancer Vacation. My beautiful delusion, half-homeless and waiting for the sun to come. Too many projects partially planned, as is the case with every stretch of time I’m ever allotted.
I clarified my hurt at his having told me, “I don’t want to come. You don’t have any business being there.” How I don’t know where this leaves our relationship. But where was it in the first place? Trying to communicate virtually. To believe that you can keep people that way. That you can keep people at all.
R. trying to force me into the role of “cancer patient,” whatever he thinks that is. Lovely young women dying smiling. I still remember the “Race for Life” those years ago, and the poem I never wrote–my embarrassment at these one-breasted women circling the high school track in pink t-shirts. Calling themselves “survivors” as if their lives were their own achievements and cancer had a thwarted vendetta. A moustached villain, tying you to the railroad tracks. Foiled again.
Pink bracelets. Marie Curie’s daffodil. That trashy paperback I read over and over when I was eight years old: a brave young woman dying of cancer. O, I thought, the brilliant tragedy of life!–which it seemed would always only happen to me in my imagination.
I can barely fathom sentences these days. They require too much commitment, too much foresight. Subject and predicate, connected. Things only occur in fragments and images. Yet my dreams have become elaborate, bizarre narratives with startling geographies–the expanse of the US from PA to Austin, Texas (all vivid and fantastic like the Lisa Frank covers of my elementary school folders), some realm that brings together Erie, Oxford, London and West-Hendred. And the people who have surfaced in my subconscious. My life flashing before my eyes every night with various surreal backdrops. I am dying in some way or another I suppose. And each time I wake up I feel like I’ve fought my way back from death–aching like I’ve been drugged or am emerging from some heavy hibernation or cracking open a coma.
Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: NHS, BRCA, chemotherapy, anxiety, england, breast cancer awareness month, breast cancer, cancer, mammograms, cancer screening, television, jade goody, cervical cancer, cancer & the media, quotations, fear, HPV, pap smears, germaine greer, hamlet, oprah, kant, shakespeare
Jade Goody–the Big Brother reality television “star”-cum-cancer martyr–died the day before I started my own chemotherapy. I remember standing on the platform at the Royal Oak train station, waiting to go to the hospital for my first chemo treatment, looking at everybody’s greedily-grabbed copies of the Metro and the London Lite; even in the “real” papers, Jade Goody was the front-page news (alongside findings of a recently-published study, coincidence or no, about the non-improvement of cancer survival rates in the UK).
I don’t know how large the storm surrounding this woman was in the American media, but in England she was as ubiquitous as Big Brother himself: first for the car-crash entertainment value of her all-around ignorance and repugnance, with the cherry-on-top of racist allegations–and then for the car-crash entertainment value of her stage 4 cervical cancer, and society’s ensuing Schadenfreude at observing her decline, glued to the television with eyes wide.
She made a mint out of that damn cancer, and, maybe even more sickeningly, seemingly won everybody’s sympathy from the media exploitation of her sickness –from her showstoppin’ Cancer Special, to her eight-weeks-to-live “fairy-tale” white(trash) wedding, to which she sold the rights to Ok! magazine for £700,000. (A few months after Goody’s death, her previously-incarcerated Prince Charming was arrested yet again for an alleged sexual assault on a teenager. This may want to be excluded from the Disney version of the Jade Goody Story).
The debate raged as to whether Jade, being dumb as pig shit, was the victim of the media’s agressive manipulation of her, or whether Jade, being an unscrupulous media whore, was in fact the one doing the manipulating of her audiences. But whoever was pulling the strings, the result was the same–as her Guardian obituary put it:
The pig who deserved burning had become our sacrificial lamb, garnished with sentiment. Britain had turned 180 degrees to embrace a woman it had earlier scorned. Symbolically, at least, it was the right time for Goody to die.
–what someone on the BBC referred to, as I listened to Radio 4 while waiting for my chemo, as “the mythology of redemption.” (more…)
It’s my head more than anything, that and the feeling of being so overwhelmingly alone with more than I can bear to think of. My head–tired tightness, pinching in from the scalp. It’s a bleak fog I can’t step outside of. Not myself. Everything is a struggle–can’t sleep, can’t get from one place to another without carefully planning and imagining the movement from A to B. And then the solitude, after two days…
I acted reprehensibly to everyone at the hospital during the whole six hour process of getting the first chemo treatment–without K. I’d have been an utter disaster. (Yet without K. I’d have been at home). Now he’s gone, and I don’t know which of us is being unreasonable–I for expecting his undivided attention, or he for leaving me. I can’t rely on myself in this poisoned box of an existence I feel myself shut in–with everything from the outside creeping sinister. Ignoring phone calls, texts, emails–Expedia reneging on their promise to refund my flight to Detroit, U. of Michigan prodding me along to make arrangements for the upcoming academic year I will not spend there, the landlord arranging viewings of my flat, the three schools wanting plans for my continued employment, within them fifteen students to assist individually with coursework, with plans for the continuation of the term–always this when the phone rings or the email loads.
The night of the chemo I vomited into a green bin at the foot of my mattress, and so far that is as much definition or achievement I’ve gained from the whole experience.
Filed under: uncategorized | Tags: biopsy, mammograms, cancer screening, tests, MRI, ultrasound, humor
This morning I had a mammogram.
I thought — the last time I did this, I had two breasts.
I had an ultrasound as well, which resulted in a pseudo-PTSD flashback of the first time I had to have a breast ultrasound, shortly before the needle biopsy left me bruised and and bleeding and crying, riding home alone on the Tube, shocked and dazed and terrified.
Today, the doctor opens with, “I don’t want to scare you, but…”
and ends with, “I’m sorry. You’re too young for this.”
The recommended course of action, apparently, is a screening every six months, alternating mammograms with MRIs. These tests are so panic-inducing, I’m not really sure I’m down with that.
Remember that old Saturday Night Live Land Shark sketch? The Jaws spoof with the shark knocking on the door: “Candygram.”
That’s what I feel like whenever I hear the m-word. That something sinister is lurking on the other side of the door.
Knock knock. Mammogram.
I’d had nightmares about the chemo over the weekend–IVs filled with burning acid, driven mad by it afterward. K’s fed up with my panic & hysteria & rudeness. Anti-anxiety medication quelled that. We left in the pouring rain and I sit here now with my mind clouded, not recognizing myself, in an anticlimax.
So many drug names and all their sicknesses and side effects. This helplessness, this fragility. My face in the mirror looks no different–though my body wants me dead.
