pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BREASTS AND EYES AND PARTS ... I have scribbled lyrics and guitar chords into a fat blue spiral-bound notebook for years—had the thing back when I lived with my parents and was running away all the time, so at least since the mid-seventies. If I had bothered to write all the music from all of my songbooks in there, then I would have filled the notebook up long ago, but most of the songs in there are ones that I either tried to figure out on my own or ones that I wrote down as someone was teaching them to me. Anyway, I turned forty-two a couple of weeks ago and, durn it, can no longer read my tiny handwritten chords. Nope. Can't tell if I am looking at a G or a C or an F or an E anymore. (pout) But I don't want to get bifocals, dagnabit! Hmm, so maybe what I'll do is buy some contact lenses for my nearsightedness instead, and then just put on reading glasses when I need them. Yeah! Because then I can pretend I am not getting old at all. Right? And while we're on the topic ... I had my second mammogram a few weeks ago and received the dreaded letter saying that my films revealed tissue overlap and multiple new lesions bilaterally since my 2003 mammogram. Didn't know exactly what this meant, but knew it didn't sound good, so I scheduled a more-extensive mammogram screening and an ultrasound pronto and waited, trying not to fret. Breast cancer and I go back a ways. My friends Liz and Shakespeare were diagnosed with it five years ago within one week of each other. Shakespeare is one of my dearest friends and refers to me as her daughter, so when her partner called to tell me the bad news, I drove down to South Carolina immediately, told a nurse that I am Shakespeare's daughter, and was sleeping in a chair in her room when she awoke from her mastectomy. We met in 1981 when I started college. Shakespeare was my academic advisor and became my friend and mentor. My eighteen-year-old self showed up in her office one day with a chip on my shoulder and a burning desire to go to college despite the fact that I was a runaway with no savings who knew that I had no choice but to work full-time while attending classes. I didn't know how to manage it, but knew I wanted to. (The answer: lots of good advice, determination, and student loans.) I had mostly lived on my own for three years by then and worked full-time for minimum wage in a hospital kitchen (which meant that I would never starve—an important consideration when you make minimum wage). The tough little me who managed to finish high school with honors while scraping together enough money to (mostly) not return home knew how to survive, but lacked confidence and believed that I had no right to actually be in college . . . and each time I ran out of money and had to crawl back to my parents' house leeched away a little more of my confidence, especially if my father was violent enough to knock me unconscious or my mother was paranoid and delusional. Shakespeare swears that she could barely hear me speak when we first met—a fact few people who know me now would believe. In addition to giving me good advice and encouragement, inviting me over regularly for home-cooked meals, convincing me to stay in school when I was so exhausted that I was on the verge of giving up, and, eventually, convincing me that I was one of her best students who really had to continue my studies at the graduate level, Shakespeare lined up odd jobs for me to do on the side. You don't even want to know how many faculty members' houses I painted in the seven years it took me to earn my undergraduate degree! I insisted that Shakespeare come stay with me for her breast cancer treatment because there are two top-tier cancer centers nearby and I have good connections at them both. She agreed, and so began our year of surgeries and chemo and hair loss and radiation and leg pains and wigs and bra inserts and hope and fear and reconnection. I switched to freelance work, which allowed me to take her to her treatments, and it was a trying year, but she finally came out on the other side of cancer and has nearly completed her reconstructive surgeries at this point. She returns every three months for scans now, but has had no recurrences, thank goodness. Liz, another of my favorite professors and one with whom I became close, completed her treatments locally and also seemed to be doing well. Her hair grew back in and she returned to teaching a full load. Then, while traveling to a conference in New Orleans, she collapsed on the airport tarmac and died there. Her cancer had returned silently and spread rapidly, killing her before she even knew (maybe) that she was sick again. Then, in 2003, my seemingly healthy, exceedingly wise, gentle and kind, fifty-eight-year-old, vegetarian, new-age, crystal-squeezing mother-out-law—a woman who moved through the world with such vibrancy and got dropped by helicopter into the Canadian borderlands for two-week canoe expeditions and took off on a whim to explore Peruvian ruins—was diagnosed with inoperable, late-stage breast cancer. We were told she may never emerge from the coma that first brought her to the hospital and shocked us all, and absorbed this news soberly, hoping against hope that she would at least regain consciousness. She did and we took this woman who seemed so vibrant just weeks earlier home in a wheelchair, grateful for any amount of time we had left with her. The Ginger and her family and I walked around in shock for most of the next year, driving back and forth to the hospital as each new crisis threatened Mom's life and doing what we could to care for her body and soul as her body ceased functioning. The Ginger and I accepted an offer on our house just days before Mom collapsed and wound up postponing our house-searching plans so that we could spend as much time as possible caring for Mom. Instead, we rented the world's crummiest townhouse—one in the same complex where her married D&D-playing friend Dickboy lives—for a year and decided to search for a house when the lease ran out. We lived near her parents, loved them very much, and spent a great deal of time with them before and after Mom's diagnosis, and I had known Mom for over ten years at that point. She felt like the mother I never really had growing up and her kindness, over the years, softened many of my hard edges. My massage and craniosacral-therapy sessions with her—although emotionally difficult—made me realize just how much pain and past violence I kept stored in my body. These sessions helped me identify and eventually heal from a lot of pain I carried around and we talked at a deep level about life and healing and grace and inevitable death. Mom was not afraid of death, but was also not ready to let go when she died this past April 15th. While Mom and Shakespeare and Liz and my dear pal Musicgrrl's mom endured chemo, our chorus board started planning a large-scale breast-cancer fundraiser. I think I have mentioned that I grew up stuttering —not to mention getting knocked unconscious when I said what I thought—and so often kept myself safe as a child by being as silent as possible and just living in my interior—which translates into my being an adult who does not like to do anything that might cause me to be in the spotlight. Nevertheless, I was determined to walk to the microphone and to say the names Liz, Shakespeare, and Mom in front of an audience of 1,700 and to do so without stuttering. The chorus raised over $10,000 for a local breast-cancer resource group with this performance, and I managed to overcome my fear and add my loved ones' names to the many that our chorus and audience shared that night. • And now yes, I will finally wind my narrative back around to my follow-up mammography appointment. So. The day of my tests finally arrived and I made my way to the cancer center, followed the nurse into a waiting room with changing stalls along one wall, took off my clothes, placed them in a plastic bag, donned a scratchy blue hospital gown, and sat in the waiting room with all the other women who had either received similar letters or who were already being treated for breast cancer. A steady stream of other women continued to enter the room, then step out of the changing stalls transformed by thin blue cotton into patients whose lives were suddenly brought into sharp focus by Fear of Cancer. (There were at least three such waiting rooms in our wing and each was filling up fast. ) A nurse called us into the testing area one by one and we endured our second-tier mammograms. Now a first-tier mammogram is really not all that painful if you plan it around your period—Buzzcut refers to the pressure of the plates as kind of pleasant, actually, and says that she likes the attention—but the second-tier test hurts so much that it takes your breath away. The technician screws much smaller plates onto the questionable area of your breast so tightly that, if you didn't hurt so much, you would laugh when she says "Now don't breathe." The test is over with quickly though, and then you return to the busy waiting room and you wait. My second tests were also inconclusive, so I waited some more (for an ultrasound) and watched the room as the nurse entered again and again and said "Ms. X, the doctor will review your results with you now." This made us all look up just as Ms. X's fluttering hands dropped the magazine that she was pretending to read down onto a table. We looked back down quickly though—I guess to give her some privacy—and turned our attention back to the magazines we were pretending to read. My ultrasound confirmed that I am walking around with five fluid-filled cysts—probably from all that Turkish coffee I drank like water during grad school—and that I should become a permanent decaf drinker.
This was my second cancer scare since November, so I felt like doing something drastic—kissing the sky or something. I usually just go to the beach at such moments though and write my name in the sand and then watch it wash away. 11:50 a.m. - 2005-03-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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