A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (11 page)

Once again, Doug and I took turns working from home until we left for North Carolina, where my parents, brother, and Alane now lived, for a family reunion and Christmas. At the family reunion, we had professional photographs taken. We all looked so happy, young, and healthy. It was almost a year since the breast cancer, but I still wasn’t myself, whatever that was.

Everyone said, “Oh, you look great!” Great, I thought. Doug was looking for normal. Where was Linda? Inside, I was in shock and denial, angry and sad—all at the same time. Why did no one seem to understand this? Well, I thought, at least this Christmas would be better than the last one.

Doug, not one to dwell on the past, just wanted our old life back. “Thinking and talking about all that has just happened,” he would say, “only makes me feel bad—and who wants to choose to feel bad? Let’s just focus on moving forward and planning the future. All I want is a normal wife, a normal family, a rewarding career, and a normal sex life.”

Chapter 11

January–October 1995

W
e started the year of 1995 as usual and hired a new nanny. She was a local college student. I was getting so sick of this. Why did we have all these problems finding good childcare? Besides, it was costing a fortune.

In any case, I tried to take it in stride. My department at work moved to a new location so I had to drive to work every day instead of using mass transit. If I didn’t leave the house by 6 a.m., it took an extra hour to get there because of the traffic. Since the new nanny lived out and didn’t arrive at our home until 7 a.m. Doug and I had to negotiate daily to determine who would be able to leave for work first. I usually lost the race out of the house since I didn’t easily wake up after lying awake most of the night.

At the beginning of the year, I got a bonus and restricted shares of stock. Work, at least, was something in my life that was going well.

That winter, in the mornings on my drive to work I began to notice that my fingers would turn white with straight horizontal lines, then blue, and then eventually become hot and red. I thought it had something to do with holding the steering wheel. Then the pattern began happening at random times throughout the day. I went to my see my primary care doctor and found out this was symptomatic of an autoimmune disease called Raynaud’s syndrome and that stress didn’t help, since it contributed to the vasoconstriction, or tightening, of the smaller arteries called arterioles, the blood vessels just before the capillaries. The Raynaud’s hallmark for me was the arteriole spasms and constriction of blood flow to my fingers and toes. My doctor ordered some blood tests and told me I needed to reduce stress.

Ha, ha, I thought, How does any person live without stress? I thought that my body was trying to tell me once again that I had better start to figure out how to do things differently. What was I supposed to change? I couldn’t stop working, being a mother, being mad at the world. I was so ineffective at dealing with stress that I was causing this Raynaud’s myself. I started taking cayenne pepper supplements in the morning, since I read that it would help dilate the blood vessels.

Around this same time, I read an article about stress in a magazine at work. It described the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. The scale had a long list of life events with associated points ranging between 10 and 100 for each event. If your score totaled 150 to 299 “life change units” per year, Holmes and Rahe predicted a 50 percent chance of illness. If your score was greater than 300 units, then you had an 80 percent chance of illness. My points were well over 150. In fact, they had been that high or higher for each of the previous twelve years. I thought, OK, now what do you do with this information? Well, what would an idiot do? I decided that maybe I should study for the GMAT exam and go back to school for my MBA. I was a spinning top, out of control, running from my life. Fortunately, I needed a root canal and a crown, which temporarily derailed that plan.

Up to this point, Doug and I were still going sporadically to the Wellness Community, but that was about to end. How much time can you spend on counseling? Months before, at my urging, Doug had started participating in a weekly men’s therapy group that I referred to as “Executive Men with Hearts of Stone.” It was facilitated by a PhD and recommended by his first therapist. I was hoping, praying, that he would learn empathy as defined by me—be a soul mate (the term du jour) and learn to really roll around in my sadness with me.

In March, I began having some problems with my reconstructed breast. A hard spot had formed on the side and it was painful, pulling. I went back to the plastic surgeon and he told me that it was not a big deal to fix. I had corrective surgery as an outpatient and bounced back to normal pretty quickly. Anesthesia was becoming the only time I was able to really rest—imagine having to be knocked out just to relax.

I thought I must be mentally ill. I decided to see the therapist who was in charge of my group at the Wellness Community. The fact that she was always asking “So tell me, how this is helping in your recovery?” really appealed to me. She had plenty of great suggestions and was helping me to deal with difficult people—just about everyone in my life, I told her. She urged me to start keeping a journal. She asked me where was a place I could go that would be healing. I knew it had to be somewhere warm and near the ocean.

The beaches in Northern California are not warm, ever. I wanted to go to Hawaii again or some other tropical island. Instead, Doug planned a family RV vacation to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons for the following summer. That was what Doug wanted to do, and he asked, “When is it ever about what I want anymore?” I felt guilty about being so self-absorbed, and he was right, I was being selfish. He thought maybe now we could start to live again. Things were looking up. We were getting along so much better. I had hope.

I received a letter from Commonweal, the cancer retreat I had applied for, notifying me that I had been wait-listed. Our nanny gave notice at the end of her school term. She was ready to move on. We interviewed several nannies again and hired another. She was the mother of two teens. She told us that she was on a diet and ate only raw carrots and boneless, skinless chicken breast. She insisted that she was never late.

On her first day she arrived at our house thirty minutes late, carrying bags of potato chips and a box of white powdered donuts. On her third day, Kim came home from school and found Brad watching Barney on the television in the family room in wet underwear while the nanny snored loudly, lying on the floor behind the living room sofa. In hysterics, Kim called Doug at the office, and he immediately left work, came home, and fired the nanny. We spent the next couple of weeks alternating working from home again until we found a new nanny. I wondered when the screaming roller coaster would end. We needed a break.

We found and hired yet another nanny. Her name was Jill. She was in her early twenties, from Colorado, and was to live in our home, complete with her two cats. We had the now-standard criminal background check performed on her as well, and she did fine. The children really liked her and she came highly recommended. She was looking for a family she could work with for one or two years. And we were looking for continuity, especially since Brad was going to start kindergarten and Kim, high school in the fall. Jill was responsible, and she truly tried her hardest every day.

Early that summer I finally had a Pap test, the first one I had time for since moving to California, even though it had been on my calendar as a to-do for months. The doctor called me and told me that it was abnormal, but not alarmingly so. He wanted to take some samples of my cervix. It could be done in his office. Lyn went with me. I was not particularly concerned, but it was just one more thing. It was hardly a pleasant experience, but considering what I had been through, it also wasn’t that bad. While I was waiting for the results, we celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday.

For my birthday, Doug bought me a Victorian dollhouse kit. Our own house was dark inside, dated by almost two decades, and needed a lot of work. We had already been living in it for two years but we never seemed to have any time to focus on fixing it up. I was excited about the dollhouse. I could build and create a fantasy house. It was 1:12-inch scale, something I could manage. I always loved having projects. I thought this would be something the kids and I could do together. It was a perfect gift.

That night while I was taking a shower before bed, without even trying, I found a new lump near my armpit in my other breast, the left one. I knew it was not there the day before and I would know, since I was now checking obsessively. The doctor had just done a breast exam earlier that month. I had just had a mammogram, even magnified views. I don’t know how I found it. Maybe my unconscious was guiding me to find this lump. I told Doug. He felt it. We went to bed in tears. I think we both knew—Here we go again.

That weekend Lyn came over and I asked her to feel the lump. She did and was upset as well. I think she knew it wasn’t good news. Four days after finding the lump, I had another mammogram, which of course now showed a questionable area later documented as “highly suggestive of malignancy.” No surprise there. Once you put a metallic bead on a palpable lump, well what do you know? There it is on the film for all to see! Did they even look to see if they missed it when reading the last set of films?

The next day I was on a plane for a business trip to New York. I thought, Is New York now to become a place to feel dread rather than energized? I realized at this point that I had a new habit—holding my breath.

When I saw the surgeon the following week, I told her that if this breast also proved to have cancer that I wanted both this breast and the reconstructed breast removed. I was sick and tired of dealing with these breasts. Who would have thought that my little titties would be the cause of so many problems? While she understood my reaction to the news of my other breast possibly having cancer, she strongly urged me not to have such a radical surgery. The next day I took a scheduled stress management class at work. Do you want to hear about stress? I thought. What a riot!

Three days later, just two weeks after my birthday, one and a half years after the first mastectomy, I had a left breast lumpectomy. The pathology confirmed that I had invasive cancer this time. This was a new primary cancer, not related to the other breast. But according to the surgeon, when we met three days later, they got it all out. Thank God.

She told me I did not need to have another mastectomy. However, I would need chemotherapy, radiation, a lymph node dissection and biopsies, a metastatic workup, and assorted other assaults. Also, since they had such a hard time starting an IV for the lumpectomy, she recommended putting a Port-A-Cath into my arm to facilitate the chemo treatments. The good news really wasn’t that good.

I spent the next few weeks trying to work while at the same time making a flood of medical appointments with specialists, each recommending their particular brand of roadside remedy. I found out that the treatment was relatively standardized, based on tumor size, grade, and the degree of metastasis. The doctors told me that after the treatments, I had somewhere around an 80 percent chance of being cancer-free for five years. This news certainly was not as optimistic as the first time around, but I still felt hopeful.

The only way to deal with the barrage of good and bad news was to take one day at a time, literally. I already knew that I was a strong—whatever it is, I can take it—type of person. I couldn’t help but remember the expression “God never gives you more than you can bear.” I think I first heard that from my maternal grandmother at my first husband’s funeral. I remembered thinking at the time, Why would God give you these unhappy and sad times and then give you more than you can bear? I thought the whole expression was absolutely ridiculous. I knew I would get through this and was not yet ready to fold up my tent, but I was sad that another year of my life would be gone when this episode was over with.

I decided to heed my therapist’s advice and keep a journal as best I could. I found the perfect journal. The cover art was by Mary Engelbreit, and it was aptly titled “Snap Out Of It.”

August 3, 1995

I don’t think I can be superwoman anymore. I’m starting to tremble. I can’t think. I can’t finish sentences. I feel like I’m going to throw up most of the day. Tomorrow I am not working a full day. I’m leaving at lunch.

I’m starting to feel scared. I’m tired of all this waiting. I want to know what I’m dealing with. One thing I do know, I don’t have time for anything. Not enough sleep, not enough time for the children, no time for me.

My therapist told me today that my life is killing me. I’ve known this and have told Doug this exact same thing for the last year. What do I change? I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

August 7

We celebrated Brad’s 5th birthday a couple of days ago. His party was at the Jungle, which is an indoor play gym. He had a wonderful time. He’s all boy—rough, tough, and tumble. Kim has her best friend from NJ here. Kim has been testy and has been getting in a lot of trouble. We haven’t decided if she is showing off or acting out. In any case, we don’t like it.

Tomorrow is a day at the hospital. It starts off with a visit with the radiation oncologist, followed shortly after with blood work, a radioisotope injection for the bone scan, chest X-ray, a break for lunch, and then for the signature treatment, the bone scan. What fun!

I’m really starting to get cranky. I keep dreaming about a crown on my tooth that keeps coming off and I bite it back down. (Interpretation—I’m either about to lose it like a volcanic eruption or there is an unplugging of the dike or, put simply, I’m just falling apart.)

We went to the ocean yesterday at Santa Cruz. I love the ocean. It is so peaceful and healing there for me. I love the smell, the sound of the waves, the seagulls. I have a CD of the waves. My family tells me I’m crazy.

August 8

Well, today wasn’t too awful when it is put into perspective. The good news is that the bone scan was negative. The bad news was that the 2.0 cm tumor was as virulently aggressive as one could get. An SBR grade III, estrogen receptor negative, therefore, no tamoxifen. It even had hair in it.

I didn’t think about work all day. It was wonderful. Doug and I went out after lunch and bought paint for the dollhouse kit he gave me for my birthday. I’m so excited. I really think this is going to be so much fun for Kim and me to do. I identified all of the parts today. Now I’m ready to sand.

What we do know from today? Radiation for 5½ weeks, daily. Supposedly that would kill any residual DCIS in the breast, which I just learned they found as well. I hate this.

August 11

My youngest sister Diane sent me a letter apologizing for her behavior when I was in NJ a month ago. She is so unhappy. She is an at-home mother of four children with maybe seven or eight years between the oldest and youngest. While I was visiting her, she was always yelling at her kids and smacked one. I told her to calm down and she told me that at least she knew what was happening to her children. She said since I had a nanny, what did I know? I feel so lucky when I look at her life. Anyway, she sent me a book When God Doesn’t Make Sense. I don’t think I want to read it. I don’t feel like I’m being punished or “why is this happening to me?” like the last time. I feel like the last time prepared me for this time.