In this anthology, eighteen women writers – novelists, poets, journalist, editors, and scholars – address their personal experiences with breast cancer. Insights sharpened and narrative powers intensified, they offer us hope, understanding, and the spirit of kinship that only good literature can impart.
Excerpt
Scan- vt.1. To scrutinize carefully. 1987
Walking in the woods today, I came to a channel running between two lakes. I paused, accustoming my eyes to see details; reeds in the water; pine trees, mossy boulders strewn among them. The glacier, I thought, has been active here. Then I said aloud, “Please let me stay alive.”
Last year at this time I was undergoing a final chemotherapy treatment. Ahead were more days of violent nausea. I had lost most of my hair and was wearing a wig. I was still weak from the operation six months before, when I had lost a breast. I was working full time in New York City’s stifling summer heat, traveling a long distance to my job on subways which, when they disgorged me, left me standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, unsure whether I could climb to the street.
Why didn’t I take a break during those months of chemo? One reason was that I needed a weekly paycheck. Another was Gloria. Our friendship had left me unwilling to exempt myself from demands that had been made on her. Gloria was part of an extended Puerto Rican family that my former husband came to know when he volunteered at a South Bronx settlement house. She wasn’t one of the original family of four brothers whom we helped make if from childhood to young manhood. She was my age, a single mother living in the projects, sharp and smart about most things but unable to read or write, which shamed her most deeply when her bright young son needed help with his homework.
From the first time we met, we got along; we got a kick out of one another. When she discovered a lump in her breast, it seemed natural to me, in an almost sisterly way, to find a good doctor and see her through the stages of her illness. In retrospect, though, I was obtuse. I remember going to a pharmacy with her with her after her chemotherapy treatment so that she could fill a prescription for anti-nausea medication. At the subway entrance, we gave each other a high five and sang a bar of that summer’s hit song, “I Will Survive.” Unaware of how soon the chemicals would reach her, I let her make the long trek home by herself.
She eventually had to stop working in the handbag factory, although before she left she gave me several zippered cases with French-sounding labels that belied their South Bronx origin. She relied on welfare, Medicaid, my help and her guts. I praised her courage, which she shrugged off. Every once in a while she went on a drinking binge. She complained only toward the very end, phoning me three or four times an hour from the hospital, begging me to ask the doctors to give her stronger pain medicine even though by then she was getting doses as high as they thought a person could tolerate.
I was a little crazy after her death. My index finger swelled and throbbed so badly that I thought I’d been bitten by something venomous. The swelling went down after several days but it still reappears at times of distress. Each time, I’m struck again by what it must have been like for her to have gone through her illness alone, with the most minimal resources.
Immediately upon recovering from my final treatment, I set about having my apartment repainted, its floors sanded and stained. Although I found the process difficult, I wanted a visible symbol of recovery and a fresh start with the man in my life. When I first told Steve that the doctor had found a suspicious lump, he responded by coming to stay with me until I got through the biopsy. He never left. Each morning I woke to his warmth and our laughter. Now that he was about to give up his beloved Village apartment and move his belongings in with mine, I said goodbye to my favorite paint scheme and schooled myself to accommodate Steve’s tastes. I wanted to do what I could to keep him there beside me, anticipating a loving and companionable life together.
In the woods today, as I looked at that scene of long-ago upheaval, I asked myself questions that have haunted me since the diagnosis. If cancer were to spread beyond where I would consider living worthwhile, how would I end my life? Or would I hold onto life no matter what?
Sometimes under the grind of everyday difficulties–and, more acutely, under a fear of losing what I love –I stop valuing life. An old pre-cancer despair takes over, and it seems to me that it would be no large loss to have a curtain clang down (I could not, at that point in the sentence, type the word “die”). At other times, I’m surprised by an almost impersonal commitment to life as when, during a screening of a war movie, I kept uttering “stupid…stupid…” at each incident that showed we actually choose to send people to their deaths.
In their intensity, my emotions remind me of how I felt as an adolescent. One worry I don’t need to have is whether my emotions will dull in my middle years. I’d be a fool to take my life for granted.
Scan 6. To look at searchingly. 1998
Chicken. Goose. Calf. Me. I don’t even know where the liver is. Near the stomach, perhaps?
Phone call #1, four days ago. “Your blood test showed elevated liver levels, still within normal range, it’s probably just the test itself, it happens all the time, the doctor wants to make sure, so can you come in for another blood test?”
Phone call #2, two days ago. “Actually it’s um, more elevated, out of the normal range, it could be the result of medication you’re taking, that’s very common with liver elevations, can you come in as soon as possible for an ultrasound test?”
The technician, her shiny black hair curving like parentheses around her face, wants to know why Im’ inquiring about the liver’s whereabouts, as though she has pledged to keep even the most basic facts from the patient. For twelve years, I’ve been lucky; technicians have obliged. I think they find my interest flattering. The people who deal with big machines must be solitary types, a little like writers, willing to exchange sociability for quiet darkness, for dials and screens and computers and cold rooms and turning lights on as they go into a control booth.
As she bends intently toward the shifting pixillating gray scale screen, I debate telling her that when I learned I had cancer, I became a kind of researcher. Each time I took a test, I asked question after question: “Can I look?” “Is that my collar bone?” “What’s the difference between an MRI and a CT scan?” For years, I’ve kept a file labeled Scanning; a report on the latest brain scan that reveals where fake memories show themselves, a skin scanner used for detecting hidden objects. I also keep a collection of pamphlets in glossy colors, green, pink, lilac: How Does Nuclear Medicine Work? and A Patient’s Guide to Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The whole culture’s scanning, skimming, disclosing, and here the technician, profile close to the screen, swings the other half of her parenthesis to face me: “Why do you want to know?” She has spread colorless jelly over my diaphragm and now she’s probing my ribs. “Because,” I answer her, “I’m alive, so I’m interested.”
It turns out that the liver is under my ribs, which are sensitive to her joystick’s sliding and poking. “Turn a quarter turn to your left, please, I’m trying to get a better view of your kidney. It’s clouded; did you drink milk last night?” Well, yes, not knowing it would turn to gas. She’s not good at telling me when to hold my breath and when to exhale; “Breathe” is her command for everything.
We work it out. I like to show off: How chipper I am, how I make her work easier by my intelligent compliance. I hope she’ll say as others have, “You’re a pleasure to work on. I only wish my other patients did as well.” I’m just distracting myself with this bid for admiration, but I forgive myself, it’s understandable, and she too seems to have arrived at easing up. “The liver is divided into three sections…now I’m looking at the left one, and I’m also getting the aorta.”
She leaves the room to develop the images, first giving me a towel to wipe off the jelly. I like to do this. It makes me feel like I’m a little girl being dried off after a bath, and also like the adult who is doing the drying off.
It will take about ten minutes before I find anything out. Since my second bout with cancer, I’ve become acutely aware of time. I once stood in the kitchen warming something in a microwave oven and watching the timer count down from 00:30. As END blinked, I knew that those seconds will not ever be returned to me. Today as I wait through another countdown, I know once and for all: I want this life, whatever the seconds bring.
The doctor comes in. “How are you?”, I ask him. “Better,” he replies. He is long faced, bearded, a familiar Jew. “Were you sick?” “No, but everyone has bad days.” He bends over the dials, looking, stopping, reading, scrolling, this scholar of my own faith and my own doubts. “It’s okay. I don’t see a thing. You’re fine.” I can feel my face light up, a lovely sensation that begins in my eyes. Then his face lights up too.
Liver, liver, I’m alive. You stay there, doing your job flushing out toxins, keeping me metabolized, helping uncertainty dissolve or better yet, nourish me.
I run to the bank of pay phones to call Steve, that wonderful “good news” call. As I leave the examining room, I take one last look back; my name is on the screen above a cone swirling in shades of gray. A screensaver, perhaps, or a new technique for making a flat image appear round? Questions for another time.
Press/Reviews:
The book is superbly written and well worth reading by anyone who provides care to women with breast cancer (or anyone who has it).
-Journal of the American Medical Association
The stories in this book help one make sense of an overwhelming and alien experience. These writers use their cancer as creative fuel, bringing alive the fullness of an unknown and sometimes frightening world…. Equally fine is the book’s irreverent humor: Amy Ling choosing a wig, Carol Dine comparing herself and Marilyn Monroe….All make for delightful bad girl chat that reinforces the kinship that so many women with breast cancer feel for one another….Breast cancer has a notoriously broad spectrum of clinical outcomes, but we tend to think of it as a monolithic villain with one treatment and outcome for everyone. We’d do better to appreciate the range of its effects on both body and soul and to extend that same view to the patients themselves. Happily, this book does both.
– Anne Dimock, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Imagine finding a support group where all the other members eloquently and artfully express your own private thoughts, and you don’t have to say a word. Edited by poet Raz (Divine Honors), this collection features accomplished authors who have encountered breast cancer in their lives. As with any compilation, the styles and quality of the pieces vary. Those by Alicia Ostriker, Carol Dine, Janet Sternburg, and Elaine Green are riveting and compelling. Yet the interview with Dr. Susan Love seems out of place among the first-person treatises, and Marilyn Hacker’s “Journal Entries” seems interminable. Other contributors include Maxine Kumin, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, Annette Williams Jaffee, and Amy Ling. People familiar with these authors might want to read their takes on this all-consuming event. Women seeking narrative “support” will find here a renewed sense of purpose. As Greene notes, quoting Anatole Broyard: “It seems to me that every seriously ill person needs to develop a style for his illness…. Sometimes your vanity is the only thing that’s keeping you alive.” Recommended.
-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal
A literary anthology of breast cancer with a distinguished list of contributors . . . . beautifully written, full of imagery that cracks open the experience of breast cancer, each situated within the unique context of one woman’s life . . . . and well worth reading by anyone who provides care to women with breast cancer–or to anyone who has it.
-Delese Wear, Ph.D., Journal of the American Medical Association
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