Detour on the Way to Dinner

 

Ken, my fiancé, calls to make plans for drinks and an early dinner. I tell him I’ll meet him downtown at Maddison’s after my appointment. I go to the doctor I had found near my office¾my first visit to any doctor since moving to FlAorida. I go because of the pain in my neck, because hot flashes are interfering with everything, and because I need a new prescription for my antidepressant.

​

I leave my dignity on a chair next to my discarded clothes. In its place I wear a pale blue, crinkly paper gown barely large enough to cover my thighs and torso. You’d think, at age 54, I’d be brazenly immodest by now, but I feel vulnerable and ashamed of my pale softness. The doctor comes in and utters a quick introduction. He seems rushed and vaguely resentful. I imagine he’d rather be on the golf course on this unusually mild summer day in Sarasota.

 

After a cursory exam, he tells me I should quit smoking and start exercising. I contritely nod as he also chides me for putting off getting a mammogram for the last ten years. I tell him how my procrastination of things like that sometimes gets out of hand.

 

“Breast cancer is one thing I don’t have to worry about,” I boast. “There’s no history of it in my family, I had my first kid when I was very young, and I breastfed three babies.” Everyone says those factors mean you’re at low risk of developing breast cancer, but I agree to make an appointment at Choice Diagnostics, the radiology center that is conveniently located downstairs on my way out of the building.

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The day after my mammogram, there’s a new message on my home answering machine from Choice Diagnostics telling me to call for another appointment as soon as possible. There was a problem reading my test. I’m perturbed that I’ll need to suffer through that hassle again. The next day I get another call, and another the day after that. It can’t be good if they keep calling me. Oh, shit, I might have cancer.

Ken expresses concern¾for me, but mostly for himself. His wife died of cancer and he doesn’t want to through it again.

~

 

The eyes of the friendly technologist who ushered me through my first mammogram don’t meet mine this time. I must have cancer. I turn this way and that as she gently yet extra-thoroughly shoves, squeezes and smashes my breast into the plexiglass vise of the mammography machine. I wince and think I’m sure I have cancer. I don’t go back to work. I don’t go home to wait for Ken. I go to my mother’s house instead and tell her I have cancer. I don’t care if I’m selfishly and prematurely burdening her. I know deep in my bones it is true and I need my mother.

~

 

A few days later, a surgeon plunges a thick needle deep into my left breast as he performs a biopsy. My mom accompanies me to his office the next day. He hems and haws a bit before revealing the diagnosis. I am not at all surprised or upset like he expects me to be when he tells me I have cancer. I am not thinking oh, God, why me? I am thinking why not me. I’m not special.

 

A bestselling memoir I read in the seventies comes to mind. It might have been the first book for lay people that discussed breast cancer and mastectomy. Written by journalist Betty Rollin and titled First You Cry, it was sensational and groundbreaking. There was even a made-for-TV movie about it starring Mary Tyler Moore that I remember watching. Now, it’s my turn to cry, but I don’t feel the need to. I’ve experienced worse traumas. Breast cancer seems almost inconsequential, a mere nuisance I must deal with. My tumor is small--early stage--and I probably just need a lumpectomy. But still. What if that is not enough? Damn it. I don’t want to lose one of my breasts. My 36 double D’s have always been an asset.

~

 

I awake from anesthesia and I still have both boobs and my underarm intact. I am relieved to hear the doctor say only a lump of my breast was taken and the slides they viewed while I was on the table had clean margins, no metastasis.

​

The doctor, himself, calls me a few days later and says there’s a problem: further studies showed micro-metastasis and I need to have my lymph nodes dissected. I have more tests to prep me for what this time is being called major surgery and I am being treated with solemnity. I go under again and awake with part of my underarm missing.

~

 

It’s Friday, a few days after my second surgery, and I’m back at work and looking forward to the weekend. My doctor calls. Some big words were found on my pre-op chest X-ray and I need to have a CAT-scan. I google the big words and it is not good. There’s an anomaly at exactly the place where lung cancer that comes from a cancerous breast makes its first appearance.

 

A week goes by before the scan can be done. All the while, I’m thinking I have lung cancer and it’s what I deserve for smoking. I get the scan, then wait over the weekend before hearing from the doctor. He tells me my lungs are clear, no cancer. It was just a glitch on the X-ray. Grateful. Lucky. I am unworthy of such merciful leniency.

~

 

I work day and night to plan and prepare for the international symposium my employers are hosting. My oncologist gave me permission to put off chemotherapy until the conference is underway. I’m disappointed I’m not going to Istanbul with the other staff, but rather glad I have an excuse not to. If I have to have one more conversation with my weepy, rampaging, rapid-cycling bipolar boss right now, I might go insane. I am still smarting over the one we had when I told him I would need to rest and work from home for a while after each chemo treatment and he whined about my poor timing and how much he depended on me and said he hoped I wouldn’t “take advantage of the situation.”

~

 

My treatment plan calls for ten chemo therapy infusions administered every other Thursday from October through February.

The first week after each treatment is brutal, but today, in the second week after my second treatment, I’m no longer knocking on death’s door. I have more strength and the deep, pervasive body pain is less relenting than the week before. My biggest complaint now is the anti-nausea drugs have left me with profound constipation. Add that to the things no one talks about when it comes to cancer.

​

Energized by feeling better and by this exceptionally warm and windy Tuesday in November, I ask Mom to meet me for lunch at Whole Foods, where we can pick out healthy salads. As I walk through the fresh food section, I notice strands of my hair are falling. I look around to see who has noticed, then at the hair on the polished concrete floor. How disgusting. I hurriedly hand Mom my salad and tell her to ring up and meet me outside at the outdoor tables. I look for a table out of the wind and the sun, but there is none. I settle for a clean one. I sit down and try to adjust my chair’s position so the wind doesn’t hit me head-on. I’m a Mid-Atlantic girl who is still unused to living in subtropical southwest Florida. I marvel at a warm breeze in early winter.

​

Small clumps of my fine hair begin swirling around me. Some simply hang suspended in air. I bid them farewell as they pick up speed and float away going who-knows where.

​

Back at my office, the blond hair accumulating on the dark gray carpet embarrasses me. Sweeping it up with my hands is futile. I call Mom and tell her we need to go wig shopping as soon as work is over. When I get home that night, I remove my expensive new wig from its bag and try to make friends with her. I make a mess of shaving my head with Ken’s razor. I’m curious and impatient to see if the scar on the back of my head that I got from a collision with a diving board when I was a kid is still there. It is, only barely and much smaller than I had imagined. I’m fascinated by my image in the mirror. The patchiness and angry red nicks against my white naked skull make me look like an actor in a Holocaust film. It’s so weird meeting this stranger.

~

 

At my next chemo appointment, I go into the treatment room, grab a cookie, magazine and cup of coffee, settle myself into a lounge chair, and bare my arm to accept the poison. I do it quickly and efficiently because I have become familiar with the routine. I’m almost blasé. While looking around the room, I try not to be jealous of patients who have companions or chemo buddies with them. I try not to think about the horrible week that is coming. I try to think about two weeks from now, during the sweet spot, when there will be a whole week during which I will feel better. I’ll still have to close my office door at least once a day, take off my hot scratchy wig and lie down on the floor and nap for an hour, but it will be better. Still tired, but better. I try to visualize a time when all this will be over.

​

I go to get my follow-up shot the next day to boost my T-cells and again I do it with efficiency and experience. I leave so tired I can barely walk down the stairs. Who’s the genius who thought putting a cancer treatment center on the second floor above a grand circular staircase and an inconvenient elevator was a good idea?

 

Crossing the parking lot and starting my car engine caps my exhaustion. I had planned to stop by Target on the way home to pick up something, but what it is that I need, my chemo brain is too mushy to tell me. I notice the pet shop two doors down from Target and go in there instead. I’m feeling sorry for myself and hope to be cheered by the kittens and puppies.

​

I fall in love with a tiny bichon-poo because she is so cute and has black-tipped ears and a black fringe circling her round face. They are such unusual markings. I don’t care if I know it is wrong to buy from a pet shop¾she looks lonely and I can’t leave her here. And I don’t care if she is too much money or Ken has told me, until I am well, we cannot have a puppy to replace Bubba, my beloved bichon-poo who died last summer. I will name her Ivy because it sounds like the I.V.s I must endure to cure me.

​

I take her home to our apartment and introduce her to Ken. He’s not happy. I beseech him to acknowledge how adorable she is. “Don’t be angry with me for jumping the gun and bringing someone else home you have to take care of.” I stop myself from rolling my eyes over my own words. So far, Ken has done very little to help me, though I’ve greatly appreciated all the take-out food (a habit we had even before this). That’s been pretty much his only involvement.

​

I know that Ken, like most of us, needs to feel important, so I have gone out of my way to make him feel indispensable. But Ken has another driver. He needs people to feel sorry for him. No doubt it stems from his mother dying when he was just three. He grew up as poor little motherless Ken within his extended family. Now, he likes to tell people he, once again, has a sick significant other he must take care of and thrives on any sympathy he receives. It’s as if his love language is pity. I’m starting to resent it and I am starting to question whether his tale of woe he cites about taking care of his late wife is accurate. I am also starting to resent that I am the strongest one in this relationship. If that’s not enough, I also resent that I’m going through the motion of pretending I need his permission to keep the puppy. We both know it’s not up to him.

​

I show him the tiny puppy pampers I bought for her. I put her in his arms and promise to housetrain her during my weeks recuperating at home. I readily agree to name her his choice, Coco Chanel, a better name because she appears so utterly French and her black markings accessorize her champagne-colored fur to perfection. We compete in coming up with possible nicknames for her: Coco. Coco Puff. Coco Pie. Coco Beach. Coconut. Coco Loco. I love her so much even though she’s as dumb and useless as a pencil with two erasers. Making me feel better seems to be her only purpose in life, but I think she does it so well she deserves, in return, to be spoiled. I spoil her rotten.

~

 

I’m given weeks to recover from chemo, then embark on the final leg of my three-part treatment plan. First surgery, then chemo, and now six weeks of daily radiation. 

​

Two weeks in, I make lame jokes as two strange men¾there are new radiation techs again this time¾take turns handling my naked breast as I lie in a large, custom-made, white plastic mold that will keep me still while receiving radiation. As they maneuver the massive machine until a beam of red light exactly aligns with the tiny mark tattooed on me, I say, “We have to stop meeting like this,” in the same way thousands, if not millions, of women have said it before. I also tell the men they have “copped more feels of my breast than my fiancé has in all the time he has known me.”

​

I lie under that noisy machine for a few minutes every business day for four more weeks as its lethal targeted rays penetrate me.

~

 

Ken takes me out for an early dinner at a nice restaurant to celebrate my final radiation treatment and the end of nearly a year of dealing with cancer. I am too exhausted to feign excitement or even to care what’s on the half-price early-bird menu. I use my napkin to dab at the sweat seeping out from under my wig. I’m not quite ready to bare my quarter-inch pixie. I surreptitiously adjust the cursed bra that’s aggravating my left breast. It is tender and still red and hot from radiation.

​

I look around the room. It’s just another restaurant on the Suncoast of Florida at five p.m. There are small groups of women with all shades of gray or white hair having their weekly cocktails. There are gravely silent couples with walkers placed by the side of either a shrunken woman or hunched-over bald man with food stuck to his chin. These couples barely acknowledge one another. I think they are pitiful. Yet today, it seems I am older and more pathetic than any one of them.

​

There is a family seated in the corner with parents who are trying to control their three chirping children. I think I wouldn’t want that kind of youth again. I wouldn’t have the patience to be a parent of young ones and certainly not the energy.

​

A very old, yet impeccably primped couple enter the restaurant. She wears a stylish dress, makeup, and bold earrings and necklace. He is in a jacket and tie. Their proud bearing impresses me. I’m reminded of “That Couple” Ken has more than once talked about. He would like us to be That Couple¾the couple who turns heads and makes others wish they were us.

​

I am touched the couple who turned my head is arm-in-arm and leaning on each other to help walk as erect as they are physically able. They sit down at a nearby table for two and begin to fuss over the menu and each other. I can hear them offer suggestions with certainty on what the other one might enjoy and what would be good for them.

​

I watch as they close their menus, then push their hands across the table toward each other until their hands meet, then clasp, and one of them strains forward and whispers. I can’t hear what was said, but I can hear them both chuckle and it makes the sound of a lifetime of laughter.

I think that is what I want, that is what I want for dinner.