Breasts Unsquished, Fingers Uncrossed

I got a call Thursday morning from the radiology center where I was all set to do my annual, fear-inducing mammogram on Friday. They've had some kind of flood (we are rather far from Iowa so I don't quite get it) and the mammogram equipment is soggy, so the woman on the phone was calling to reschedule me. For some time in August.

"Nope," I snapped, "not gonna work. I had breast cancer and I'm not going to wait that long for my check up."

It's moments like that, when you hear your voice sounding like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist, that make a gal realize just how tense we get around mammo time.

I got a new appointment on the first of July.

Lots of book doings and more coming up. Here's a link to an interview I did with my old friends at GMA.

TALKING HEAD HERE

Breasts Squished, Fingers Crossed

Once upon a time (four years ago to be exact) I was absolutely fearless about getting a mammogram. True, it’s no fun to have your breasts squashed into a device seemingly invented by the same people who invented the panini maker, but I was never worried about getting a mammogram.

Because, you see, I knew I was never going to get breast cancer. Nobody in my family had had it, I didn’t know anybody who did, and in my naïve opinion at the time, it just wasn’t going to be “my” cancer.

But sometime between hearing a doctor say, “hmmm, I don’t like the looks of that,” a biopsy, and a phone call reporting back the lab results, I learned how wrong I was.

Luckily, it was an early catch, as they described it. Very small, no lymph nodes involved. Lumpectomy, chemo, radiation, done. Since then, so far, so good.

But Friday is Mammogram Day, and that means this week there’s a kind of white noise in my head that will get louder and louder until, Lord willing, I get the all clear signal. The noise is like a million tiny voices endlessly saying "what if what if what if what if?"

By Friday I will have to answer back, "Stop it. It's going to be fine."

Most of the time, I don’t worry about breast cancer coming back. But there is that Moment of Truth when you’re standing with your breast flattened between cold plates of glass, your heart pounding, as you try to read the expression on the face of the technician running the machine. And you realize how close you are to being terrified.

Not that I wait for the annual Squishorama to check myself out. I’m pretty much like a fifteen year old boy when it comes to feeling myself up. But I never felt the first tumor, even when I knew it was in there, somewhere, and when, the next year, I had what turned out to be a benign tumor in the other breast, I didn’t feel that either, so my frequent self-exams are not much comfort.

I’m not exactly dreading the mammogram, and I’m not looking forward to being reassured that all is fine, either. I guess I just resent that ever since having breast cancer, there is this thing that looms over my head.

In my book, I write about how difficult it is to find yourself forced out of your warm and happy home in Healthyville, exiled to Breastcancerworld. And even if you’re just there for a short stay, you don’t quite get back to your old neighborhood in Healthyville. You’re kind of camping out on the wrong side of the tracks, with the other breast cancer hobos who just want to get back to their real homes.

That annual mammogram is just another reminder that once you’ve had breast cancer, you can’t exactly go home again.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, ok?

Ratso and Me

So I’ve been doing interviews to promote the book. Brian Lehrer, Rachel Maddow at Air America, a really fun one this week at The Bryant Park Project on NPR, which, if you don’t know, is a kind of groovy morning show and website.

The trouble was, I’ve had a really horrific cough for a week. Last week in fact I had to postpone some interviews because my voice was so croaky. And then this cough thing started and would erupt at any moment, completely out of the blue. It would go on and on.

I felt like Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, except for not peeing myself or dying on a Greyhound bus. At least not yet.

The thing is, by Day Four, I really was starting to think What If. What if this is something serious? What if I have

Tuberculosis
The Plague
Whooping Cough (my husband’s contribution)
Or…wait for it…
Lung Cancer

This is what happens to people once they’ve had a shocking case of the Big C. You get a little paranoid. Okay, a LOT paranoid. And even when you tell yourself, as I always do, that you can’t have cancer if your systems can be cured by over the counter drugs, you can’t help being hypochondriacal. (Tums is a great cure for my regular bouts of “stomach cancer”, by the way).


HERE is a link to my interview at The Bryant Park Project.


And HERE is a link to the interview I did with Brian Lehrer on WNYC. He is such a good interviewer. Plus we got to take phone calls from the audience, which I love.

Random Thoughts About This Blog

This blog, which is about how women and our society deal with breast cancer, with body image issues, and the larger questions of who and how and why we are the women we are, is an epiphany-free zone. The title, if you didn’t guess already, is a tip of the dynel wig to Lance Armstrong’s story of conquering testicular cancer, It’s Not About the Bike.

Unlike Lance, I did not find beauty and triumph and truth in cancer. It was not a gift.

There aren’t going to be any posts about how it was “worth it” because it made me a better person. When the dust (and my stomach) settled, I wasn’t a better person. I wasn’t a worse person. I was just me, minus a hunk of flesh.

Many vivid thoughts go through your head when you first learn you have breast cancer. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. You wonder if you’re going to lose your whole breast, (and maybe whether you should have it removed even if your doctor says all you need is a lumpectomy). You wonder whether you’ll need chemo, whether you’ll lose your hair, whether you might die. And if you’re like me, the Queen of Denial, you wonder if the doctor is absolutely positive there hasn’t been some kind of mix up with another woman’s mammogram.

What you don’t wonder, I’m pretty sure, is, what will I learn on my cancer journey? How will it transform me?

And yet, you hear that question so often from friends and loved ones. Cancer, and especially breast cancer, is somehow an opportunity for an extreme spiritual makeover.

Maybe you will have an epiphany about the meaning of life. Maybe the experience will change your outlook, your values, your spirituality.

But maybe it won’t. And maybe you don’t want it to. I didn’t. I was having a fine time when I got breast cancer—great family, exciting career, lots of friends. All I wanted was to get it over with and get the hell back to my life.

The only growth I experienced was the one my surgeon removed.

Our attitudes about breast cancer don’t exist in a separate universe apart from the rest of our lives. We bring our wisdom, and also our issues, to breast cancer treatment.

In my case, my concerns about the disease were no match for my lifelong issues about my weight. I was thrilled to lose ten pounds during chemo—sadly, when it was over, I developed a local recurrence of chubby thighs.

It’s how we view our bodies, before, during and after breast cancer, that I find really interesting.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the shallowest woman on the planet, and if so, whether there’s a reality show on Bravo in my future.