Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?
— Rico in “Little Caesar”
It was my doctor, Joseph Cowgill, on the phone. He was talking to me about the results of my mammogram.
“There are clusters of calcification,” he said gravely. “Abnormal. It may mean a discrete tumor. The lab is adamant it should be biopsied.”
Four days earlier I had been in his office, asking him to examine a lump in my right breast that had concerned me for two or three weeks. It was probably fibrocystic, he told me then — nothing to worry about — though he did think a mammogram would be a good idea. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” he added, in the warm, almost courtly manner I’d found endearing over the ten years I’d been his patient.
Now, wanting him to rid himself of this new, threatening persona, to sound fatherly and reassuring again, I threw myself on his mercy: “I’m afraid, Dr. Cowgill.”
He seemed almost irritated. “Well, I did suggest a mammogram,” he said, as if I’d tried to deny it.
During the remainder of that afternoon and evening, as a friend led me, sleepwalking, through the interview with the surgeon my doctor had recommended, as I connected up with my husband, as I tried to make arrangements for my ten-year-old daughter, Anna, to be picked up from ballet, I became intimately acquainted with the physical manifestations of fear: the blocked feeling in your windpipe and throat that threatens to choke off your breath; the sudden weakness in the legs that causes you to stumble, walking up the steps. And there’s another feeling: that you’re lost somewhere in space, turning and turning in the black ether, while slowly — very slowly and starting from the heart — your entire body turns to ice.
The surgeon, John Day, was younger than Dr. Cowgill and awkwardly kind. He showed me a photo from my mammogram — a gray blur against a white wall — and said there was a better than sixty percent chance I had cancer. Somehow, through the next three days before the biopsy, I never really doubted that I did.
Meanwhile, the friend who’d helped me through that terrible first afternoon had talked about me with two other women who’d had breast cancer. Both of them called immediately, helpful, friendly, and reassuring. But both had gone to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center in Texas for their treatment, and both argued very persuasively that I should do the same.
“When I had my surgery eight years ago, I met ten breast cancer patients through the Reach for Life program,” said one. “They all had Boulder doctors, and they all loved their doctors. Every one of them is dead now.”
This added a whole new layer of concern: how would I know if I was getting the right treatment? Did I really have to go to a huge, impersonal, and terrifying facility in Texas if I was to survive? What was the state of the art in breast cancer treatment, anyway, and were Boulder doctors aware of it?
Feminists and newspaper pundits tell you to take control of your treatment when you’re ill, to quiz doctors, get second opinions, read widely, make your own decisions. I’d always assumed that was good advice. Now it rang hollow. If the lump in my breast was a cancerous tumor, I had a week or two to decide between having my breast cut off and having the lump excised, to figure out if and how to use chemotherapy and radiation. How could I possibly absorb enough knowledge in that time to evaluate my doctor’s pronouncements? And this was hardly like cramming for a test; what was at stake was my life. I began to think sourly that the medical profession’s relatively recent emphasis on patient involvement — an emphasis I’d previously applauded — was a cop-out. It was spurred, I began to suspect, by a desire to shift responsibility and by the profession’s inability to save most cancer patients. I began to long for the all-knowing doctor of movies and television — or the doctor I’d had as a child in England, who would arrive at our house during crises carrying a magical black bag, the contents of which could cure anything.
The next few weeks found me feverishly calling everyone who might know anything about cancer, collecting names and phone numbers on slips of paper, gathering articles and books. I alternately pushed these materials out of sight and studied them with utter absorption.
Through it all, one of my new friends, Doris Olsen, kept calling, and her pleasant, light voice on the phone always helped. Doris made a suggestion during one of our earliest conversations. At the height of her own confusion and terror, she told me, she had been to a psychiatrist. His name was Antonio Wood, and he’d helped her immeasurably. Perhaps he could help me too.
The biopsy was scheduled for 11 a.m. on Thursday. At 10 I found myself in Dr. Wood’s office, a spacious multi-windowed room that faced directly onto a brook. It was clear that someone had paid attention to every detail here — the placement of the furniture, the arrangement of dried flowers in a deep blue vase by the door. The room emanated a sense of order and calm.
Dr. Wood himself was a slight man, with dark hair, a droll, intelligent face, an easy, responsive way of laughing. I told him I didn’t want to go for the biopsy. I wanted to crawl under his desk and take shelter there. I wanted to curl up in his coat pocket and have him carry me away to wherever he was going next — anywhere but the Boulder Medical Center. How, I asked Dr. Wood, was I going to cover the distance from his office to the center without going mad with fear and anticipation?
I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it was that I should focus on all the sensory details I encountered on the journey: the slant of sunlight on the sidewalk, the fresh, pretty colors of the women’s summer dresses, the scent of the sprig of lilac I’d brought with me from my garden as a talisman.
This got me there. At the center, they had me put on a gown. A nurse took the lilac and placed it gently in a water glass, where I could see it. Then a doctor I hadn’t encountered before, J. Geary Grantham, began inserting a wire marker in my breast, to show the location of the lump. This didn’t hurt because they had numbed the area, though it did seem strange to look down and see my breast bleeding. I wanted to protect it. Until now, my strongest association with this breast was the memory of my newborn daughter’s lips on it, and the sweet, strong pull as she suckled.
Dr. Grantham was very kind. Nine times out of ten, he told me, the lumps excised during biopsies are not cancerous. I was probably going to be just fine. I didn’t mention Dr. Day’s estimate.
Just before the biopsy, I was injected with a drug that seemed to rush straight to my teeming brain and clear it. Every muscle relaxed. Suddenly I was cheerful, not anxious at all. “Couldn’t you keep me on this for a month or two?” I asked the nurse, and she laughed.
A green sheet prevented me from seeing what the doctor was doing. The nurse talked to me, held my hand, sometimes put her palms to the sides of my face. Though I could feel a fumbling and tugging at my breast, there was no pain.
But it was a cancer. I don’t remember if Dr. Day said this aloud, or if it was simply that his breathing changed or his kidding with the nurses suddenly stopped. I just knew. And at the time, under the influence of that wondrous drug, I didn’t much care.
Dr. Day was stitching me up and one of the nurses was urging him to repeat a joke he’d told her earlier. He demurred. I thought his reluctance was because of the cancer, and appreciated it — but he didn’t have to abstain from joke telling on my behalf. I wouldn’t mind. In fact, a joke suddenly seemed to me just the thing: normal, helpful. Finally he told it. It was something about a gorilla.
Two hours later, in Dr. Day’s office, the conversation was more serious. He’d excised a one-and-a-half-centimeter tumor. He wouldn’t know until he’d talked to the lab whether to recommend a mastectomy (and what kind of mastectomy) or to be content with the lumpectomy he’d just performed. In any event, there’d be further surgery. He needed to take the lymph nodes from under my arm to examine them. In a picture the nurse had shown me earlier, the lymph nodes looked like tiny grapes on a sprig. Dr. Day said he’d take as many as he could find, and for a fevered moment I imagined him hunting blindly through the bloody recesses of my arm. But then he explained that he would be removing a lemon-sized chunk of flesh (like scooping a brown spot from a pear, I thought) and the lab would extract the lymph nodes from that. For the moment, he wanted me to have a chest X-ray and a blood test. Numb, I went from place to place in the building, complying with his orders. As a young technician took my blood, I told her, “I have cancer,” testing the phrase. She looked distressed and sympathetic.
Later I ran into the avuncular Dr. Grantham. “It was cancer,” I told him; studying his face. Immediately I saw there the same concerned expression the technician had worn.
I realized it was definite then.
I did have cancer.
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod . . . it is too horrible. . . .
William Shakespeare,
“Measure for Measure”
Two days later, my husband called the doctor’s office — I was afraid to — and talked to the nurse. There was a margin of clear tissue around the tumor, she said. My lungs appeared to be uninvolved. There was no evidence of spread.
“I feel as if we’ve been in free fall all week,” Bill said. “I know we’re not completely in the clear yet, but it feels like our feet have finally touched the ground.”
In my mind, I saw a hiking boot, planted firmly on a narrow ledge. We laughed and cried together in pure relief.
When someone tells you you have cancer, you think about dying. I thought obsessively about my mother’s four-year struggle — from the tiny lump in her colon that the doctor hoped was a polyp, through the colostomy, the endless recurrences, the spread, the tortuous dying. That experience was etched in my brain. And, on some level, I believed it was the inevitable way of the disease. I knew there were women who survived breast cancer by five, ten, twenty, even forty years. I knew there were women who died within a year of diagnosis. Which was I?
When breast cancer spreads, or metastasizes, it most commonly affects the liver, the lungs, the bones, or the brain.
Lying awake in the gray hours of the morning, I heard a hissing little voice, insinuating, familiar, from the depths of my own being. What it was saying, over and over again, was simply, “Metastasis. Metastasisss.”
It returned periodically, until the day I confronted it. “You’re nothing,” I told this sinister, deathly presence. “Nothing at all. That’s only a word.”
Every morning I woke to the momentary hope that I’d been having a nightmare. Every morning I realized again that I did have cancer. And every morning I cried. Sometimes — when my husband and daughter were safely out of the house — I wailed and howled and cursed aloud. When the spasms were over, the cancer still remained.
Something odd, though. I had thought that a diagnosis of cancer would change one irrevocably, that if it ever happened to me, I’d transform instantly into someone morose and homebound and fragile. What I discovered was that, at the end of two or three weeks of shock and terror, you remain essentially yourself. It was much harder to get out of bed in the morning. Taking a bath — seeing the biopsy scar — was a grim and immediate reminder of my mortality, so much closer now than it had ever seemed before. And getting ready to go to work was like starting a run after several weeks of inaction: the first steps were lead-heavy. But as the day wore on, I found I could still become utterly engrossed in a project, still laugh, still concern myself with international events. At home at night, I still played with our two big-footed, comical Airedales, rolling them over and over on the carpet, burying my face in their warm, hairy tummies.
Sometimes when I picked up a kitchen knife to slice bread, a thought intruded, quick and sudden as a lizard’s tongue: “Cut it off. Cut off your breast.” It was a primitive urge, perhaps akin to that which causes a trapped animal to chew off the leg that threatens the integrity of the entire body. I think it was also a bid to prevent someone else from cutting into me by doing it, however crudely, myself.
Intermittently, I thought about suicide. I believe most cancer patients do. Many healthy people, too, who have watched someone die of cancer, have vowed, “I’ll never go through this. I’ll kill myself first.”
I wasn’t thinking about suicide in a sustained, reasonable way. The images came in flashes. I’d be driving down the street and would think about crossing the center line into the path of an oncoming truck. Only it seemed unfair to involve someone else. More responsible simply to drive my car off a cliff. But I have a daughter. How could she possibly understand such an action?
At any rate, I wasn’t very serious. I was waiting to see how things turned out. I figured there must be a trick to an effective suicide. You don’t want to do it too soon, to lose a day of infinitely desirable life. And you don’t want to wait until you’re an object, the still center of a web of tubing, and couldn’t take your own life if you wanted to.
Dr. Day called me at work to say that he believed a mastectomy was unnecessary. The lumpectomy would be sufficient in my case.
This thou perceivest, that makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave e’er long.
William Shakespeare
Dr. Wood has seen people die. He told me that when a patient is near death, the mind disassociates from the body. If the dying process is grievous or panicky, it is because of the images that the patient has conjured up.
We discussed an Aldous Huxley novel I’d read, in which one of the protagonists finds himself after death, floating. He’s desperate to become one with the eternal, the great light. But he can’t give up the world: he’s holding on to a fragment of a Mozart concerto, playing it over and over in his mind. And these few bars of music tie him to the material, prevent his apotheosis.
If Huxley’s vision is correct, there’s not much hope for me, I thought. I have been so passionately in love with the things of this Earth: daffodils, apple trees, food, drink, sex, the smell of my daughter’s skin and hair. It was unthinkable to lose them.
And when the mind unravels, I wondered, what happens to all the silly jokes we know, the places and faces we’ve memorized, the snatches of song, the precious little store of knowledge, even wisdom, all of which we’ve so painstakingly accumulated?
Dr. Wood and I discussed the accounts given by people who’ve survived a near-death experience: the tunnel, the helping figure, the light. Everything about these accounts rang intuitively true to me, but there was no way of judging if they represented a genuine experience of the afterlife, or some final spasm of the consciousness as it flickers out.
After death, would I be able to stay by my daughter, to watch over her as she entered the perilous years of puberty? In my mind, I promised that I would always be with her, no matter what — but then I wondered if that was true. Or rather, since I was sure it must be, in what sense it was true.
And just in case no vestige of individual consciousness does survive death, I thought, what could I leave to protect and comfort her? A journal, a videotape, a joke on my tombstone?
My mind beat against the finality of death like a trapped bird hurling itself against a window.
My father died when he was younger than I am now, at the age of forty-three. He had cancer of the liver, but it didn’t kill him. What killed him was an unexpected postoperative hemorrhage at 6 in the morning, a hemorrhage that an overworked hospital staff in war-ravaged London didn’t discover in time. Now I understood with the force of revelation how much he must have wanted to live, how passionately unwilling he must have been to leave a wife and four-year-old daughter to face the savagery of the Blitz without him.
Slowly, I realized something new. I didn’t know if I’d live six more months or forty more years, but then I hadn’t known that before — and neither did anyone else. I felt as if I, like most of us, had been sleepwalking all this time: repeating meaningless routines, spooning food into our unblinking faces, watching television, completely unaware of the abyss yawning beneath our feet.
The newspapers are routinely full of unexpected deaths: two women set out in a perky little yellow car and are crushed against the side of a mountain by a runaway truck; a father and daughter are swept away at sea during a summer vacation; a group of passengers, laughing and chatting, boards an airplane that harbors a bomb.
When — at last — you fully believe in your own mortality, you regain the sense of wonder, the ability to lose yourself completely in the moment that you had as a child. Each day the sky seems more extraordinarily vivid, the tracery of branches against it more beautiful, the people you love dearer.
I remembered a tiny old lady I’d seen once on the Downtown Mall. She was standing in the middle of the pavement, in a lacy white dress and a broad-brimmed hat, as prim and pretty as a little girl about to take communion. And she was gazing around wide-eyed, astonished, storing everything up.
As I watched her I knew — somehow — that she was dying. She must have been housebound for a while, I reasoned, and this morning her caretakers had helped her up and dressed her and she’d asked to go out alone for one last foray into the world. So there she was in the middle of the pavement. Motionless. Drinking in every movement of the wind, the people strolling by absorbed in their own concerns, the scent of the summer air, the grass and flowers, the whole infinitely precious world.
“Congratulations,” said Dr. Wood. “I see you’re finally awake.”
The day before the node dissection surgery, I went to talk to the anesthesiologist. Elizabeth Lou Lombard has the warm, comforting, take-charge manner I associate with Jewish mothers. Would it be all right, I asked her, if I took a Valium in the morning? Just a little something to help me get from my house to the medical center?
“Honey,” she said, “don’t mess with Valium. I’ve got much better stuff for you here.”
A friend sent a flower arrangement with a quotation: “The flowers, too, are blessed.” I was profoundly sentimental during this period. Kindness made me weep. I thought of every card and flower and good wish as a breath, a feather’s weight for life on the great scale where it is weighed against death. I picked a peach-colored rosebud to take with me to the medical center.
My husband and I went to Rudi’s restaurant the evening before the surgery. With its muted, tasteful furnishings, meditative Buddhas, and soft guitar music, it’s a place I have always found soothing. But now I was so jittery that I had to get up and leave. I paced the parking lot while Bill had our just-ordered dinners packed up to go. (For several months I had trouble being in confined spaces. I would fidget desperately through any movie, play, or meeting I didn’t find altogether absorbing. I did best in the company of friends, and also with the constant distractions posed by work.)
The next morning we drove my daughter to school. There was a game the kids were playing around that time: when they saw a Volkswagen beetle they’d punch whoever was nearest on the arm and yell, “Slug bug yellow,” or “Slug bug blue.” Anna and I played loudly all the way from our house to her school. After we dropped her off, Bill and I lapsed into silence.
At the medical center I changed into a gown and some strange white surgical stockings. Then I lay down on the gurney and waited. The nurse told me that they’d just finished operating on a two-year-old, and I shouldn’t get upset if I heard crying. I was afraid to ask what was wrong with the two-year-old. I was afraid to hear a child’s crying. It seemed that a cry would be all it took to send me flying off into a million tiny fragments.
Dr. Day came in, seized the newspaper, searched out my horoscope: “It says here that you’re going to have an adventure today.”
I grabbed back the newspaper. Sure enough, there it was.
But then he and the nurse left and I was lying on the gurney, undistracted, staring at a huge, round clock on the wall. Bill sat by me, reading. My teeth started to chatter. I could actually hear them clicking. Dr. Day returned with a small tape recorder and earphones. When he put them on me, I heard a rather prissy male voice telling me to relax, to be joyous, that the people around me had come to help. Oddly enough, it was reassuring.
Finally, they wheeled me to the operating room. The relaxation tape was still going — they played it continually throughout the surgery, as it turned out. I saw Dr. Lombard hovering above me, her comfortable smile — and then sweet oblivion.
I drifted to consciousness and saw Bill’s face, red-bearded, welcoming, vital. The nurse was busily adjusting the intravenous drip. I was alive and nothing seemed to hurt. I moved in and out of awareness for what seemed a couple of hours.
In addition to taking out the lymph nodes, Dr. Day had excised more tissue from the lumpectomy site. Now Dr. Lombard and the nurse were adjusting the dressing over my breast. “Will you look at that,” said Dr. Lombard admiringly. “Will you look at that man’s stitching.”
So Dr. Day was an artist of sorts. How sad, I thought, that the recipients of his handiwork should appreciate it so little. At the beginning, at any rate.
Finally, they said I could go home and helped me into a wheelchair. As the orderly trundled the chair down the corridor, Dr. Lombard came running to catch up. She hugged me. “I hope you’ll be fine,” she said. “I hope everything’s great. You’re too damn healthy to be sick.”
At home that afternoon I was euphoric. A colleague came over with a gift from my office mates: a huge box of delicacies from Alfalfa’s Market — pasta salad with shrimp, apple-raspberry juice, imported almond cookies.
I learned something later about surgery. Mine was relatively minor, but people are often cheerful, talkative, and comfortable soon after even major surgeries. It generally takes a day or two before the body fully realizes the depth of the insult it has sustained. Then depression sets in. Body and mind shrink from touch.
The drain under my arm troubled me. I’d expected something small and decorous, about the size of a cocktail straw. Instead, a tube the width of a pencil descended to my hip, looping up again to be secured with a safety pin to the sash of my robe, or the belt loop of my pants. At the end was a rubber bulb, in which transparent lymph fluid, just tinged with pink, collected. We were to empty this bulb and measure the contents several times a day. When liquid ceased accumulating, the drain could be removed.
I drained steadily for something like nine days, and while the tubing didn’t hurt, it chafed constantly, and — combined with my inability to raise my right arm — made tasks like taking a bath or driving, which I attempted after about a week, very difficult.
Once, the drain became clogged. I woke to find my side drenched, and I felt a spurt of fear: “My God, I’m spilling.”
We visited the emergency room, where the tubing was cleared. There, a sympathetic nurse told me she knew just how I felt. “I have a lump in my breast,” she said. “The doctor wants to observe it for four months.” She was one of many women who, in the weeks following my diagnosis, showed me just how widespread the terror was: I heard innumerable stories of unclear mammograms; relief at fears that turned out unfounded; lumps judged benign that were later found to be malignant.
Two days after the surgery, I visited Dr. Day to find out if the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes. If it hadn’t, my chances of a normal life span were excellent.
They had removed thirty-two lymph nodes, Dr. Day said. Of these, one was cancerous. That could mean that the cancer had spread to another part of my body or it could mean that my immune system had dealt with it, and I was clear. I saw again the boot touching down on the ledge. But this time the ledge was slippery with mud. The boot shifted and began to slide.
Chemotherapy was next on the agenda, and radiation would come after that. Bill came with me for my visit to John Fleagle, the oncologist, as he had for all the doctor visits so far. We’d found this useful: at home at night, Bill could clarify a conversation that I’d been too upset or afraid to understand fully while it was going on.
Dr. Fleagle talked to us patiently for a long time. I listened carefully, mindful of the warnings I’d received that local doctors might be out of touch. But he seemed well up on the latest research. He examined me, and I observed again how, under a good doctor’s touch, one grows still and almost peaceful, though wary, the way I’ve seen our dogs quiet when the vet places his hands on them. We set a date two weeks ahead for my first chemotherapy session.
I walked with Bill down by a stream, the tube dangling from my arm. The trees around us seemed so solid, so strong, that I wanted to press my body against them. The sunlight shimmered on the water.
I thought of the metaphor Dr. Wood had used once, of the mind as a powerful horse that we had to not exactly control, but somehow work with. I’d liked that image — the warm flanks, the gentle breathing. But as Bill and I walked, the horse became a huge stallion, its flanks wet, its nostrils wide with terror and rage. I felt that it would bolt at any moment, throw me to the ground, crush me under blindly thrashing hooves.
Once home, I called Dr. Wood. He told me to create a schedule and stick to it, to do whatever work I had to do meticulously and with dedication. “Routine,” he said patiently, “is the tether for your stallion.”
Through all of this, Anna had seemed calm, hopeful, and self-possessed, insisting only that we tell her everything we knew, everything the doctors said to us, word for word. At one point, some friends, Lynn and Gunner, took her on a camping trip with their daughter, Dana, and showed her a bat cave, a huge hole in the ground.
Later she had a nightmare. She dreamed, she told Lynn, that the family’s little dog, Abby, had fallen into the cave. Dana, holding Abby’s leash, was pulled in, too. So — trying to catch Dana — were Lynn and Gunner. “I had to save everybody,” said Anna, “and then” — with deadly seriousness — “I had to go through the rest of my life with my arms out like this.” And she held her little arms out stiff and rigid in front of her.
“Children that age tend to feel they’re responsible, that bad things happen because they haven’t been good enough,” Lynn, a therapist, told me on the phone. “Or that they can make them go away by behaving superhumanly well.”
So Anna and I talked. We talked about different kinds of helping. When she was in the dark at a sleep-over and afraid, she told me, it helped to know that Dana was in the room, even if they didn’t talk. I said it was exactly the same for me — that her and her father’s very existence was consoling, even healing; but that she couldn’t deal directly with my illness any more than I could make her migraine headaches go away, no matter how much I worried about them or empathized with her.
We had another conversation a couple of months later, coming home from a ballet lesson. I told her I knew this had been a rough time for her, and asked if she wanted to talk about it. “No,” she said, in a flat, uncaring little voice. Would she like to talk to Lynn, or one of the other parents, or even Dr. Wood? “No.” We pulled into the driveway and then she said suddenly that she was angry with me for getting cancer, angry with Daddy for not preventing it, angry with herself. She said God must be angry, too, because she’d prayed for all of us every night, and He’d still let this happen. Then she left the car. When I came into the house, I found her sitting in Bill’s lap, sobbing.
The chemotherapy Dr. Fleagle recommended was not the most devastating available, and in the beginning it disrupted my life relatively little. I’d go to his office two Wednesdays in a row and Patti Kealiher, the nurse, would take blood. She’d test it to make sure my white blood count was high enough for me to withstand chemotherapy safely. Then I’d go into the chemotherapy room with its magazines and comfortable armchairs. Sometimes other patients were present, and then there’d be a certain weary camaraderie there, and a fair amount of joking. Two of the medicines, along with a drug that caused relaxation and drowsiness, were injected into a vein on the back of my hand. The third chemical Dr. Fleagle had prescribed was to be taken by mouth over a fourteen-day period that encompassed the two Wednesdays.
When I got home, I’d sleep for hours and waken to a sick taste in the back of my throat and — thanks to the pills I had to swallow daily — an ongoing nausea.
Then I’d have two weeks off. For six months I alternated between sickness and euphoria, the way you walk through light and shadow along a walkway flanked by pillars.
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone. They were waiting for me when I knew that I couldn’t go on. And they gave me their comfort, and later, they gave me their song. I hope you run into them, you who’ve been traveling so long. . . .
Leonard Cohen
Dr. Fleagle had warned me that my hair might fall out, and I really hadn’t thought that would trouble me very greatly. But when I first put my hand to the back of my head and brought it away criss-crossed with hairs, I panicked. I saw the skull-like head of my mother during her last grim weeks of life. I saw the hairless, emaciated victims of the concentration camps.
“Please,” I sobbed in my husband’s arms, “please don’t let me die.”
The next day I made an appointment to visit a wig store in Denver, a store that nurse Patti Kealiher had recommended. It was located in a little, half-deserted shopping center, and identified in large black letters on a strip of cardboard: “Linda’s Boutique.” Inside there was a hodgepodge of clothes, dusty knickknacks, and figurines — I noted a china goose wearing a blue china jacket — and a lone, improbably golden wig standing in a corner. My first impulse was to bolt. But the assistant, Mary Franks, had seen me and come forward to help.
She seated me before a mirror, ran a hand through my thinning hair, and instantly — as on Dr. Fleagle’s examining table — I was at peace. There was no doubting this woman’s expertise.
She tried on wig after wig, combing, tousling, arranging. I told her I was willing to spend as much money as necessary to achieve a completely natural look. She responded that it wasn’t necessary to overspend. She told me that my insurance would probably pick up the cost of the wig; that I shouldn’t think of trying to change my hair color; that I should consider what I would wear to go jogging or swimming — questions that, in my fear and confusion, I hadn’t thought to ask. And all the while, she tried on wigs.
Mary Franks has been working with cancer patients for twenty years. There isn’t much she doesn’t know. She told me about women who’d had mastectomies and then found themselves deserted by their husbands. She described how, in her experience, the age range for women afflicted with breast cancer has changed. In the early years, she said, she saw only women in their fifties and sixties. Then she started seeing more and more women in their forties. In the six weeks before my visit, she’d prepared wigs for twenty-five breast cancer patients who were under thirty-five years old. The youngest was twenty-four.
Suddenly I saw my face framed in a wicked tumble of curls. The look wasn’t me at all. It was careless, a little wild — and I loved it. Amazingly, after all the hysteria of the night before, I was having fun.
“Can I get away with this?” I asked her. She took it from me and sent me out to get a cup of tea. Then she carried the wig into a back room and spent an hour shaping and thinning it. When I returned, she put it on my head.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll buy it. So what happens now? Do you put it in a box for me?”
“No,” she said. “I do not. You put this wig on your head and you wear it back to the office and get used to it. You don’t want to wait until most of your hair falls out — which it can do all at once — and you’re standing, bald, in front of the mirror, crying, and hating everything, especially the wig. Put it on now and enjoy it. Then when you have to wear it, you’ll be ready.”
Time and again since the cancer diagnosis, someone has stepped in to help when I’ve been most desperate. Friends and family have offered consistent, mind-steadying support. And then there have been the strangers — like Patti Kealiher, Antonio Wood, Mary Franks, Doris Olsen — who simply appeared when I needed them most.
I’ve always had a fairly cynical view of human nature. Most of my relatives perished in the Holocaust, and my mind is often filled with images of cruelty — from the Salvadoran death squads to the cynicism of big companies that put profits ahead of human and environmental health. Yet now I was overwhelmed by the ubiquity and immensity of simple human kindness: the co-worker who spent hours on the phone with her cousin, a doctor, ferreting out every morsel of information that she thought might help me, from the latest research on breast cancer to the names of the best Boulder doctors; the friend who took my arm in the movies when she realized I was crying silently, and kept it in a strong, protective grip through the entire film; another friend, from Carbondale, whose sorrowful memories of her own father’s long struggle with cancer did not prevent her from driving me to chemotherapy sessions when I visited Aspen in the middle of my six months of treatment, or from holding my hand throughout the procedure.
There were Doris’s kindly phone calls. There was the fellow writer who shepherded me through the first afternoon, and dropped everything again to come with me to Linda’s Boutique.
Then there was a woman whom I had met when I worked for the state arts council some years ago. She was the wife of a prominent Republican, active on a number of boards and committees. I remembered her as a thoughtful, competent, pretty woman whom I liked well enough, although we hardly frequented the same circles. Now she called out of the blue to tell me about her own experiences with breast cancer, and to offer advice for getting through the chemotherapy.
“You’ll find you have vaginal dryness,” she informed me briskly. “Don’t get worried when it happens.” And she proceeded to recommend ointments.
I was astonished and delighted by her candor — “I was discussing vaginal dryness with a Republican,” I told my husband that evening — and I later discovered it was not unusual. Any useful piece of information the doctor may have neglected to pass on, I eventually heard from another breast cancer patient. Doris told me that, before her surgery, she’d been fretting about what a mastectomy actually looked like. When she mentioned this to a visiting friend, who’d also had breast cancer, the friend simply pulled down the window shade and opened her blouse: “It looks like this.”
Who is the third that walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman — But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S. Eliot,
“The Waste Land”
Before the cancer diagnosis, I had had trouble dealing with middle age. Like many women in their forties, I’d mourned the vanishing of my youthful looks; grieved over wrinkles and thickenings and softenings; tried to maintain good health and energy; found comfort in my continuing fertility. Now the chemotherapy was rapidly accelerating the aging process. It had thrown me into menopause and, month by poisonous month, was wearing me out.
One morning I looked into the mirror at my yellowish skin, tired face, patches of chicken-down hair. I felt old and dried-up and immeasurably ugly. As I walked into the kitchen, Bill stopped me. He hugged me, then ran his hands lovingly over my head. “Mmmmnnn,” he said. “This is wonderful. I’ve never felt your skull so clearly before — all the bumps and hollows of it.”
. . . I can pass to you generations of roses in this wrinkled berry. There: now you hold in your hand a race Of summer gardens, it lies under centuries Of petals. What is not, you have in your palm. Rest in the riddle, rest.
Christopher Fry,
“The Lady’s Not for Burning”
It’s fall. I’m turning over the soil in the vegetable garden, thinking about the blind worms pushing through the clods and fallen leaves, the decaying vegetation that will crumble eventually into rich, black, life-sustaining earth. Along with odd, intermittent flashes of euphoria, the fear of death has been a constant presence over the last few months, waiting for me every night when I take off my clothes, lurking in every freckle, pimple, cough, and headache. But at this moment, spade in hand, the fading warmth of summer on my wispy head, I am alive. Alive. Can anyone, anywhere, with any assurance, say more?
Juliet Wittman’s moving account of her struggle with cancer was originally published in the Boulder Daily Camera, where she works as features editor. We’re thankful for permission to reprint it.
Juliet’s “Bobby D and the Boys,” a short story, appeared in Issue 150 of The Sun.
— Ed.
