Assaulted at the Global Festival: Things Not to Say to a Cancer Patient

Posted on by
7

I am feeling good.  Looking good.  I have on make-up AND my new Missoni headscarf in a colourful chevron stripe — did you know that turbans and headscarves are en vogue right now?  Lucky me.

My mom is in town visiting and it is a Sunday.  We go to the girls’ school for the biannual Global Festival.  The gymnasium is chock full of delicacies from around the world.  And it is a good day so I am on my second plate of food.  I graze, zigzag and chit chat.  Run into people I know, watch the performances on stage including an astounding Crouching Tiger-esque routine with two little kids and a couple of long hard sticks.  These kids look invincible.  I like it.

I am normal.  I am just hanging out.

Until… “Oh, dear are you having chemo?”  A matronly English woman holding a plate of scones is addressing me.

You are fucking kidding me, lady.  “Uh, yes.”  I say.  Other responses pop into my mind.  “No I am just chic and wearing a headscarf.  I am a spring pirate.  I have alopecia.  I am muslim.”

The woman is still standing there.  Looking concerned.

The woman proceeds to ask about my treatment, my cancer, inform me that she had chemo for breast cancer as well a few years ago, ask if my oncologist is Prof So-And-So, blah blah blah.  Then the clincher:  “Well don’t be surprised if you feel depressed after it is all over.  And you won’t feel at all normal for at least a year, maybe even eighteen months to two years after.”

Gee, that is helpful.  Now I feel better.  I look at the scones.  I consider sneezing on them.  The interaction seems to drag on for another five minutes and then is blissfully over.

Mom is pissed.  I tell her not to worry.  I have nothing to do with her, Mom.  She ain’t me.  And that is just her story.  And you see that’s when it hit me.  Her story ain’t my story.  Nobody’s story is my story.  And vice versa.

I have met enough people who have been through this to know that everyone’s story is different with some similarities along the way.  Learning about someone else’s personal experience may provide guidance or comfort.  But it should never be flung in one’s face unsolicited — to what end?  Especially if the message is negative.

“You will feel like shit.  Shittier than you think.”  That’s the takeaway?  I’ll pass, thank you.  On the advice and the scones.

I asked myself why this woman approached me.  Did she see me and think “that woman is going through what I went through.”   Maybe.  She certainly wanted me to know that I was going to have a really hard time.  Just in case I didn’t know.

But I was just hanging out being me, eating some weird Iranian thing that I grabbed from the Iranian table without asking what it was.  And I didn’t ASK her.

So here’s some advice:  Don’t ask don’t tell.  That’s right, if I don’t ask then don’t tell me.

Don’t tell me I will have a harder time than I think, that I will get x, y and z side effects, that my energy level will suck for over a year.  Of course if I want to know I will ask you and then all bets are off.  Fire away.  Tell me everything.

One day I’ll tell you all the other dumb shit people, most of whom have never had cancer themselves, have said to me.  By then I know the list will be longer.

Meanwhile I plan to kill it, recover and move on.  However long it takes ME to do so.  But I’m planning on a speedy recovery just to prove the scone lady wrong.

 

Halfway Through Chemo… How Did I Get Here?

Posted on by
5

I am lying awake again.  Damn steroids.  I refuse to check the time — will just make it harder to get back to sleep if I know.  I block out as many senses as possible with earplugs and a blinder.  But I cannot turn off my brain.  Or the steroid-induced rapid beating of my heart.  So I think about this, my first blog post.

It took me this long to get here.  I am halfway through chemotherapy for breast cancer but this journey started in November of 2011 when I discovered a hard, pea-sized lump in my right breast.  I was in the shower.  The classic scenario.  I remember thinking:  what the FUCK is that?  That was not there before.  Could it be something sinister?  Is it as hard as I imagined a tumour would be?  Oh by the way you Americans will have to embrace my UK spelling — if tumour with a “u” or authorise with an “s” bugs you then you might as well stop reading now.  Or shall I say, sod off?

I informed my husband of my discovery.  Killed the mood.  Maybe it’s a cyst.  I’ll give it a couple weeks and if it doesn’t go away I will get everything checked out in the US over Christmas holiday.   We had relocated here from the suburbs of Boston in late July.  Not my first foray into expat life, but my first since I am no longer single.  We arrive across the pond with our two daughters, Isabel and Charlotte, aged 7 and then 4, ready to plunge into a new life, a new adventure.  Little did we know.

But London is good to me, to us.  The girls settle into their new school.  They get scooters.  I make them wear helmets.  Bill begins to settle into a new law office.  I make preparations to continue my interior decoration studies, having left the world of corporate law (mergers & acquisitions) — at least as a practitioner — in New York when we discovered I was pregnant with Isabel and also moving to Boston in 2004.

We are both lawyers.  But I discovered that despite my left-brain dominance, which I sheepishly try to squelch every time I take one of those tests that is supposed to indicate brain dominance, there is indeed a right brain in there (well about 30%) dying to get out.  After falling asleep so many times pondering the absence of good design in children’s spaces  I decide to take some classes at the Boston Architectural College.  This goes very well so I plan to pursue my certificate in London and upon arrival get busy vetting the top schools.  There will be some duplication — they do an all or nothing approach here rather than the uber mom-friendly one class at a time option I was doing in Boston.  I decide on an intensive part-time program that will be complete in one academic year.  For some reason I take out tuition reimbursement insurance just in case, I figure, some relative gets sick or something bizarre happens.  Something bizarre.

The lump does not go away.  I spend much of my Christmas break undergoing tests, first a physical exam which doesn’t raise too many eyebrows but then a mammogram and ultrasound which do.  Finally core needle biopsies of the suspicious areas.  I tell the radiologist performing the biopsies to level with me.  I am a big girl.  She doesn’t pull any punches.  She is “reasonably concerned” there is cancer.  Shit.  I cry a little bit.  I have to pee about four times.  Nerves.  I start to process.  But it always always helps me to get information and begin to process it.  I need to know; want to know.  I will have my answer but not until two days after we fly back to London on New Year’s Day.   I kind of knew though.

On the flight back to London we are four across in business class with the little girls side by side facing backwards and Bill and me flanking them facing forward.  I watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  It is a poor choice for my mood.  I cannot stop looking at the girls’ joyful faces, their bursts of laughter during Winnie The Pooh, their innocence.  How can I inflict myself on them?  I who am their protector.

Bill and I suffer our worst night that night.  At bedtime, I peruse the internet on breast cancer.  Stupid.  I know better.  In the esteemed words of Professor Taub in The Sure Thing, “as the dog who returneth to his own vomit so doth the fool to his folly.”  I emerge from my “research” and wake my sleeping husband.  We fall apart for a few hours.  That and the jet lag make the next days exhausting.  Oh and the questions.  Can we treat this in London?  My initial instinct:  I want to.  We have moved into a charming and cozy house in northwest London and the girls are settled into their school.  We have sold our home in the Boston area.  We have started to gather names of oncologists and hospitals just in case.

We get the call.  It is cancer.  Multifocal in the right breast.  Days of hardcore research on and calls to breast and reconstruction surgeons ensue.  I thank my lucky stars my best childhood friend, Beth, is a plastic surgeon who educated us over the holiday about breast cancer and reconstruction issues even before we had the diagnosis.  I feel I am entering this fight with some background, with some power.  I am already thinking mastectomy.  Maybe even bilateral.  Never want to do this again.  Ever. Ever. Ever.  Just want to KILL IT.

Because that is what I do when I set my mind to something.

Stay tuned for the next instalment, dear reader.

Oh and for those of you waiting for that filthy humour that you have come to expect from me, don’t be discouraged.  I just have to take you there the way I got there.