A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (10 page)

He convinced Doug to come on his own for a few more visits after the surgery. I liked macho man. Meanwhile, I arranged for my parents to come to California during my surgery to take care of the children, and Doug fired the nanny, just like that. We would search for another nanny while I was recovering. I assumed Doug would take care of me.

The six-plus-hour surgery went as expected. What I was not prepared for is what I woke up to. Oh my God—the pain, the multiple drains, the air stockings, the cycle of the pump, the tubes and oxygen. I had never experienced an extensive surgery. Cut in so many places, covered from neck to pubis in dressings, burning with pain. My bed was fully upright since my abdomen was so tight. I couldn’t figure out in the morphine haze how they’d flapped this muscle from my abdomen into my breast. Later I realized that they must have tunneled their arm up my abdomen under the skin.

Doug stayed with me at the hospital for the most part, and was very loving and caring, even pressing the button for the morphine pump when I couldn’t. I remember many bouquets of flowers, cards, and well wishes from the friends and family who knew what I was going through. I felt really loved and really lousy. I also remember Jacqui calling the hospital room all the time, at any hour, with questions about work. For many days my stomach muscles were so tight from the reconstruction that I was stuck in a cashew shape—I couldn’t straighten out.

When I could tolerate oral painkillers, I was discharged, though hardly ready to return to my world. And, since I was well enough to go home, naturally that meant Doug could go back to work. My mother would help me. I was instructed not to drive for six weeks, which didn’t matter since I could barely stand. The bandages and all the drains would be removed in a week. I could take a shower if I covered everything with plastic. I wouldn’t need any further treatments other than a follow-up mammogram of the left breast every six months. Case closed, and that’s that.

My parents did their best. My mother was very attentive. She would help me safety pin the drains onto a clothes hanger and cover me in plastic wrap so I could shower. With me in my wounded nakedness, she finally seemed maternally bonded. My parents were not only caring for me but doing the nanny’s job as well, for which I was as grateful as I could be. Between the pain and the blur of Vicodin, I didn’t care about anything very much.

In a few days, my drains were removed, and so were my dressings. Things looked pretty ugly at first. The muscle that was flapped over into my reconstructed breast created a large lemon-sized lump where I used to have cleavage. Everything was still swollen. They had created a new nipple on my reconstructed breast using skin from my belly. Did they have to use the hairy part? I thought. They said I could have electrolysis and have the whole thing tattooed to look more natural. For whom? I wondered again. By the way, they’d also needed to use a small implant for the reconstructed breast since I didn’t have enough abdominal fat. I felt slightly vindicated—imagine that! Doug seemed positive about how I looked and did nothing to make me feel bad or worse in any way.

After my parents left, my sister Alane, who was a business owner and recently divorced, left her son in the care of friends and came to help me. With her visiting, I would finally have someone to really talk with. Being with Alane was wonderful, as usual. When she wasn’t doing everything to care for my family and me—we spent the time trying to understand how I could have gotten cancer. We even laughed, while splinting my abdomen of course. Then, unfortunately, she had to go home.

After a month, I still wasn’t able to stand up straight and was disheartened when my friend and neighbor Lyn told me of a friend of hers who’d had the same surgery and was shopping at the mall two weeks later. Meanwhile, Jacqui was always calling for her daily pound of flesh. And by the way, when was I coming back?

Then Lyn was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was horrified for her. I tried to forget about myself for a while to be there for her. We could walk this journey together, I thought.

There were some differences in our walk, however. She needed chemotherapy and radiation. She didn’t work. She told everyone about her condition and as a result was showered with care. In contrast, I, true to form, didn’t “need” help. Most people still didn’t know about my cancer or surgery—or at least they didn’t admit to me they knew.

I returned to work in March. I’d lost the opportunity at the broker-dealer; my boss gave it to someone else. But she had another opportunity for me. I got the job of the person who was given my broker-dealer post. Well, I thought, what are you going to do? As promised when I was hired, I was officially promoted to vice president (not as big a deal in banking as you might think). I went through the motions at work but was still very focused on my health crisis, or my new lack of health.

At some point Doug expressed that moving to California wasn’t turning out to be what he expected. I understood. He had left behind his family, friends, the familiarity of his New York associates. He had all he could do to manage adjusting to the new environment, the people, the new office, proving himself to a new client. In addition, the months of November through March being the busiest time of year for his profession, let’s heap on a mega-mortgage, a wife of five years with cancer who is grieving and juggling a career, and a family that includes an angry teenager and a preschooler. He tried so hard to be positive.

“We’ll get through this,” he would say.

Chapter 10

April–December 1994

D
oug was so busy at work, he was even working some weekends. We hired a new nanny named Suzanne, who soon became a hit with everyone. She was cheerful and full of energy. She was also young, blonde, and athletic. She was just what we needed, a real Mary Poppins who blew in with an umbrella on the wind of a rainy day. Yes, it was still raining. The winter in California was not that cold compared to the East Coast but was bone-chillingly damp nonetheless. Our plywood ranch was drafty and I always felt cold.

Doug was continuing to sporadically see the macho psychologist. I also contacted a therapist, whom I saw for maybe three visits. It was a waste of time. I wanted and needed specific skills and constructive techniques to live and think differently, and I got nothing. So I began reading voraciously about physical and mental health, living in the moment, about meditation and doing anything that I thought might be relevant. I started going to the spa for massages. I joined a gym.

Meanwhile, things were busier than ever at work. I was selected for a team that was involved in the merger and integration of a newly acquired bank in Chicago. It was exciting work, but now I was also traveling back and forth to the Midwest on a regular basis.

Suzanne was creative and planned loads of great activities for Brad. Kim also seemed to bond with her and was finally making friends. For her thirteenth birthday, she had a group of girls over for a mystery party and a sleepover. Many of her new friends shared choir and dance as a passion both in and outside of school.

Kim had also discovered boys. She had a series of boyfriends and typically spent excessive amounts of time on the telephone. She was just holding her own at school as a C student but was not interested in changing to a private school. We’d have to revisit that again the next year.

Having a great nanny eased my sense of guilt about working and traveling. But something huge had just happened to me and I didn’t think I should just forget about it. My friend Lyn was progressing with her chemotherapy and radiation. She had become a vegetarian and was tapping into all sorts of avenues to assist with her healing. And then it struck me. All of this had happened to my body, but I hadn’t really healed.

I had no feeling in my reconstructed breast, my abdomen, or my newly enhanced remaining breast. I did not even get goose bumps in these areas. No one had told me to expect this. I remembered that the plastic surgeon, though skilled and knowledgeable, was male, and with him everything had been about the aesthetics. He was an artist. He’d created a new breast that would look and feel as close to a real one as possible—but only to others, not to me. The implant on the left side certainly did look good, but I had no feeling anymore in the unaffected breast. I’d completely lost sensation on both sides. I felt betrayed and very angry. No one said there’d be a loss of feeling when we were discussing the left breast augmentation. If they had, I would have evaluated the pros and cons quickly and opted not to do it.

I beat myself up for my vanity and realized I had no one to blame but myself for this irreparable mistake. Since my breasts played an important role for Doug and me when making love, I had another loss to mourn.

Years before, when I was in nursing school, we had learned about the stages of grief as promulgated by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. Her theory was that with any significant loss, a fatal diagnosis, or the death of a loved one, most people go through five stages of grief. The first stage is shock, denial, and isolation; the second stage is anger; the third and fourth are depression and bargaining, respectively; followed finally by the fifth stage, acceptance. But it’s not a simple progression. People who are grieving can go back and forth between the stages until they finally reach acceptance—and even then, they can backslide.

I realized that of course I had experienced shock when I first found out about the cancer. Then, when I wanted to delay the surgery until I had finished the financial reporting quarter at work, I was in denial. Denial also played a part in not wanting to tell anyone. Now that I was back to work and acting as if nothing happened, I was still in denial. But something had happened, and every time I saw my scarred body or was reminded that I had no sensation, I was angry—stage three.

I was also at the beginning of the bargaining stage of my grief, since I was trying to ensure that this wouldn’t happen to me again. So I started to mobilize. I went to a talk given by Dr. Susan Love, who had written the quintessential bible of breast cancer at the time, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, to learn more about the latest news on the disease. I wanted to know as much as possible.

I ordered the videotapes of Bill Moyers’s series Healing and the Mind to find out more about new theories of the mind-body connection (America’s version anyway). There was a segment of the program that discussed how your thoughts and emotions create chemicals that affect every cell of your body. There was also a segment about Chinese medicine and one on living in the moment. The program also discussed scientific studies that showed that breast cancer patients survived longer if they were involved in a support group. It included a segment of a live support group. Because of their common diagnosis, they could be real with one another. They didn’t need to wear a mask for the world and could discuss their fears and grief in a safe environment. The last segment introduced a place called Commonweal in Bolinas, California, which was a retreat for healing when dealing with cancer. I sent away for the paperwork and applied.

A few years before this, I had read Gilda Radner’s book It’s Always Something, a candid account of her struggle with ovarian cancer and her remarkable ability to stay upbeat, which she finished writing only a month before her death. I had always been a big fan of hers, having watched her often on Saturday Night Live. The book also recounted her and her husband Gene Wilder’s journey of being diagnosed and then joining an organization started by Dr. Harold Benjamin called the Wellness Community. This organization provided support to people dealing with cancer and the significant person providing care and support to the cancer patient.

As luck would have it, there was a branch of the Wellness Community not far from our home. Soon after watching the Moyers program, Doug and I joined the Wellness Community for a weekly immersion into the world of cancer. I was assigned to a participants’ group and he to a support persons’ group. We became members of the village called Cancer.

At the Wellness Community I was attending guided-imagery workshops and taking classes in tai chi and qigong. While listening to the stories and trials of people in the group on a weekly basis, I realized that most of them weren’t as lucky as I was from the prognosis standpoint. Once again, I fell back on my old mantra—What do I have to complain about?

The group’s demographics ran the gamut—all types of cancer were represented and the average age was probably late sixties. I learned so much from these people. I was so impressed with their humor, their courageous spirits, and knowledge of alternative treatments, but most important, I was inspired by their hope. I became attached to many of them and was sad and frightened when any of them died, which a couple of people did during my tenure. And it was in the group that I finally cried—the first time since the surgery—when I had to tell them my story. I was usually just a bystander and a listener, certainly not a veteran of this war. What made my story unique in my support group was that I was so young, with a toddler and a teenager.

One man in the group believed he’d cured his colon cancer by doing coffee enemas and following a special diet. Some people swore by the Gerson diet or the macrobiotic diet, or they became strict vegetarians or drank essiac tea. One person was going to an alternative medical treatment center in Mexico, against her doctor’s advice. Their myriad journeys and different approaches to dealing with cancer and healing were an eye-opening education for me. I had always been tuned out to such basic lifestyle issues as healthy eating, getting plenty of sleep and rest, centering myself spiritually, and other basic survival techniques. But now my needs were reduced to exactly these, the simplest of needs.

The commonality of the group was that the individuals were just regular people from all walks of life sharing the experience of living with cancer. Some people in the group had very advanced cancer; others, like me, were supposedly cured. The group forced me to look at my prognosis, which was excellent. I still felt, however, as though I had been hit in the head with a two-by-four. It was a huge wake-up call.

In Doug’s support persons’ group, they had their own issues to deal with. I remember thinking that he seemed to have sympathy for some of his group’s loved ones but was in his own denial about cancer hitting so close to home. I felt like he was going through the motions but still denying and keeping a distance from his deepest feelings of fear and potential loss.

After reading about the gasoline additive MTBE leaching into the water supply, I signed up for purified water delivery. Seeing the five-
gallon jug in its porcelain and wooden stand gave me some comfort, even if Doug insisted that the water wasn’t any better. I didn’t care.

I can’t imagine I was much fun to live with at this time. I was tired, stressed, depressed, mourning, and mostly sad. Family life, though, goes on. The kids would ask Doug, “What’s the matter with Mom?” His regular reply was, “She’s in a bad mood.”

How do you get from what I had just been through and how I was feeling to being in a bad mood? Is that like a bad hair day? I felt like Doug minimized everything. Perhaps that’s how he survived. I would share my heart, my soul, and deepest fears with him to either see him tuning in to the television or actually falling asleep as I was talking. I’d become just another talking head like the ones on TV.

One night, in a flaming rage of utter frustration and bleakest despair, I wanted to murder him—I actually had a chef’s knife in my hand. Fortunately I took my fury out on the knife block instead of him. But I could understand the passion of murder now. After that episode I still didn’t feel any better. In fact, I found I didn’t like myself anymore at all.

Things hit an all-time low when he proclaimed, “I never would have married you if I thought you would be so needy.”

Thanks a lot, pal! Now my anger found an object. I was furious at myself for deciding to marry him and, more important, I was furious with my husband, just because.

Winter became spring, and the grass turned green. California looked like Oz. That spring Doug and I went to Hawaii for the first time. We actually had a wonderful time—except for the suitcase-throwing fight. I loved everything about Hawaii—the warmth, the smells, the flowers, the trade winds, the language, and the music. It felt like you could see heaven watching the sunrise from the top of the volcano on Maui called Haleakala.

I fantasized about moving there and becoming a beach bum. I thought, Why do I seem to want to be everywhere except where I am? Nonetheless, I realized finally that life could still be good, even after breast cancer. What was amazing to me was that all this could be had with only a five-hour plane trip and a few thousand dollars. I felt so fortunate to be there. I was starting to heal.

The school year ended with a myriad of dance recitals, concerts, nursery school open houses, and whatnot. Spring turned into summer. The summer was relatively uneventful, except for the boy I caught trying to fondle Kim in the backyard pool—he was immediately picked up after a call to his father and then never seen again. Doug was traveling all over the country and never home. The nanny took the kids to the zoo, water parks, the beach, swimming lessons…. It was a full schedule.

For me there were too many follow-up doctor appointments and tests along with the associated anxiety, then relief. Except for another week off with the kids at home, I worked. I got a bonus and a raise. We skipped our weekly meetings at the Wellness Community, mostly due to exhaustion. In the fall, Kim started eighth grade and Brad another year in preschool. In October, Doug and I went to Palm Springs to rekindle our relationship yet again. That trip was a disaster. We fought all the time. We could still be so angry and needy.

When we returned home, I noticed our Mary Poppins nanny was starting to act a little strange. Some of her stories about where she and the children had been and what had happened didn’t make sense. I began to have the feeling that she was lying. Things escalated until Thanksgiving weekend, when she told us in tears that the reason she hadn’t returned our car was that her brother was in a horrible accident and was admitted to the trauma unit of the local hospital. When we tried to check out her story the following Monday, unsuccessfully, we confirmed that it was all lies. I confronted her, and she told lie upon lie in response. I fired her.

Subsequently, I found out she had used one of my credit cards. We reported it to the police, and the officers that were sent to the house told us that she also had two bench warrants for her arrest stemming from having previously jumped bail and failed to appear in court after a drunk-driving incident. Shortly after that, I discovered that she had been refilling my prescriptions for sedatives and sleeping pills and had forged my name repeatedly at the pharmacy. She had used all my leftover pain pills from when I had the surgery, which I thought I’d hidden pretty well. We found empty bottles of our wine and liquor under her bed. I remember thinking, No wonder she was never frazzled! I was especially creeped out when I found my clothes in her closet.

It’s funny what you can find so easily if only you spend the time to look. I felt like such a fool. Doug and I had checked all her references before we hired her. In hindsight, we realized that her references were probably her friends. We trusted her with our children. She drove them everywhere. She had infiltrated our lives completely and rifled through our things. I was terrified of what she might still do using my identity to rack up new fraudulent bills, but we never heard from her again. Of course, Kim and Brad were actually mad at us for firing her. They really loved her.