A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (16 page)

Believe it or not, I miss my family. Especially Brad. He has had chicken pox all week and is finally getting better. Doug seems to be managing.

Doug hasn’t gone back to counseling. But I’m starting to figure out the pattern. When he’s tired or after a trauma, he can’t cope. That’s when he gets mean and stupid. I’m getting better at ignoring him.

I know I’m battle fatigued and weary. I’m learning to do less and getting better at not wanting to do as much. Someone else can do it! Now, I’m on vacation! For now I need to focus on this moment. This place is really pretty, lots of birds of paradise, bougainvillea, lilies.

April 3

Back home, back to work. I’m still fairly relaxed, but it’s being tested. The kids are great. Kim went from an F to a B in Science. Brad is over the chicken pox and is back to school. I’ve been to work every day for at least six hours. Work is a zoo. My boss was offered the job in Europe. I don’t know yet how this will affect me. She’s made some promises but nothing is formal yet. One of my peers doesn’t have a job anymore—watch him become my boss!

Doug always reminded me of the tortoise—“steady as she goes,” more than occasionally hiding his head in his shell, getting clobbered, lashing out at times. He navigated the course with conviction, plodding around obstacles, seeing the goal, always taking the long view, never wavering. I was the hare, racing through life and bouncing off the walls, expending enormous amounts of energy. How did we wind up together?

Doug always knew and never asked why. I always asked why and never seemed to know. It seemed cancer was making our differences more clear.

Chapter 14

May–August 1996

U
p until the breast infection I was able to envision chemotherapy as therapeutic. Through meditation I could visualize the chemicals attacking any remaining cancer cells. But now my infusion appointments seemed more like going to the gas station for a fill-up. I was ready to move on with my life. What I really needed to do was to get back and focus on my job.

My boss already had one foot out the door. As it turned out, the consultants were more annoying and numerous than ants at a picnic. I felt absolutely out of the loop and unqualified to discuss with them what was going on in my department. It was simultaneously interesting and horrifying that the people in my department appeared to be perfectly able to get by just fine without me. In truth, I had given no more than a 20 percent effort, on average, for the last few months. Now that I was back, I was just another layer of bureaucracy.

The new “decision maker” had a technology systems background and knew nothing about what we did. We went out to lunch. I wore a red power dress and a sporty chemo crew cut; he, an empty suit. At lunch, by asking questions and interpreting his cryptic responses, I learned that the plan was to roll up all the accounting, finance, and reporting functions into a “shared services” department. It would have five or six senior officers, probably reporting to this man, whom I assessed to be very political. The team of consultants was in the process of interviewing everyone in my department. My interview was scheduled for later that week.

He also told me that Jacqui had indeed recommended me for an important role, but he wasn’t yet sure how all of this was going to shake out. I was now on the front line of a new battle—the battle for my job.

In the middle of May, the chemotherapy ended without much fanfare other than collecting my twelfth teapot. By the end of the month, Mr. Decider told me that I would have a key role, that I needed to think broadly, and by the way, how would I feel about having so-and-so reporting to me? I felt hopeful. The next week I shared with a colleague—who no longer had a job—that I had been told I would know what my role would be by Memorial Day. My colleague told me he would be throwing his hat in the ring for the same position I was up for. That meant that now there were five or six people, including me, in contention for just one senior officer position. I should have kept my big mouth shut.

Our nanny informed us that she was moving back home to Colorado. She missed her family and had just broken up with her boyfriend. She was going to leave at the end of June, when we were scheduled to take a family vacation to Disney World. We were all very sad. She had become part of our family and was the human glue that had held it together for the past year, all at the tender age of 24.

Deep breath, I thought, time to find another nanny. I asked, no begged, Doug to take the lead on finding another nanny. The poor kids would have to deal with a stranger for the summer. By now I realized that it ends when you are dead—so stay focused, positive, and just deal with it.

The stress was fierce. Every night after strategizing, executing, and campaigning in the workplace all day, I began to have increased symptoms of a feeling that had accompanied the later part of my course of chemo. When I was overly tired, which was frequently, I would feel indescribably blown away—just hollowed out in my gut. Now this feeling became so intense, it felt as though I was not just emptied out but that my life force, or chi, was pouring out of my center into a puddle on the floor. I didn’t know what was going on.

In early June, I was informed that I wouldn’t be told what my role would be until after the new organization was formed. I knew from this that things did not bode well for me. If I was a significant player, I would be on the inside, helping to form the organization. By the middle of the month, Mr. Decider informed me that my colleague had indeed thrown his hat in the ring. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on; I knew that my colleague had almost certainly got the job. The following week I was officially informed that my position was going to be eliminated and that I didn’t get the senior role in the new organization.

Hearing this was the final straw. After two breast cancers, two real or imagined near death experiences, numerous bouts of physical torture, loss, and impending loss, I became hysterical, sobbing in my glass-walled office for the entire world to see—broken.

Days later, my new boss (his name began with D so I’ll just refer to him as Dick) offered me a consolation prize—any of several other positions in the new organization in areas that didn’t interest me, were not senior roles, and might or might not be a demotion. Even though I previously had some regard for Dick, I had to wonder how he’d gotten the job. I didn’t think he’d even gone to college (neither had Mr. Decider), and he certainly didn’t have a CPA designation. I surmised it was the usual “old boy network,” although I had to admit that my having been MIA at various points over the past year could have been a factor. I hadn’t been able to contribute much to the organization, and maybe my health history made me seem like a risk. In any case, there was no job posting, no formal interviews, just a few casual conversations with Mr. Decider, and absolutely no discussion around the decision points—absolutely no whys or wherefores. What happened to the published human resources policies?

Even though nothing had yet changed in my responsibilities, I met with Dick regularly to get a sense of the logistics of the transition, if for no other reason but to update my staff—to little effect, since he didn’t have a plan. At one meeting we discussed that his wife’s position had been eliminated at this same company many years earlier, and that she had subsequently changed careers and was doing just fine now. (And how is this relevant? I thought.) Then he told me that his mother had had breast cancer and was a survivor, so he understood how difficult it could be to deal with. I remember thinking, Does he mean as a patient, and your point is?

In any case, I considered the discussion—while probably well intentioned—inappropriate under the circumstances. I was personally and professionally offended by his condescension.

Before we left for Florida in June, I initiated the process of negotiating an exit package. I was scheduled for the second mastectomy in the middle of July. I couldn’t imagine returning to work between my vacation and the surgery, to my all-too-public glass office or whatever smaller space that would replace it. Besides, the thought of reporting to this person was absurd.

We left for vacation with nothing settled. We returned from vacation and still nothing was settled. I used up my paid time off in the days before my surgery thinking, Here I am relying on this unqualified person to execute the necessary conversations and paperwork on my behalf. I was determined to leave this job and wanted the best severance package I could get without quitting outright and thereby getting nothing. Suddenly it dawned on me, hadn’t I prayed that God would make it abundantly clear whether or not I should continue work? Now, lo and behold, here I was in a situation where my position was eliminated and all options presented to me were intolerable. But, even though this was exactly what I’d asked for, I was angry about how things happened. I felt cheated and believed that the process used to decide who would get the job wasn’t objective; therefore, this was a case of flagrant discrimination.

I wasn’t sure but perhaps this new sense of purpose and focused anger helped me to face what I had been dreading, the mastectomy. Once again, I was laid on the gurney and wheeled into the operating room, this time to lose my second breast. There would be no reconstruction. I was in the hospital for just a couple of days. Physically, I recovered quickly, but mentally and emotionally, I was not well at all.

My parents came out again to help us. They needed to feel like they were doing something; staying home in North Carolina was not an option. My mother spent the entire time sewing draperies for our living room and dining room, a project she enjoyed and that helped her feel productive. I appreciated my parents’ desire to help, but I realized immediately that my mother couldn’t handle the visible loss of my breast. She wouldn’t talk about it; she couldn’t even ask me how I felt. My father was even worse. He wandered around aimlessly, not knowing what to do, or just slept to escape.

By this time in my life, I understood that they loved me the only way they knew how. During this visit, I started to view them differently, as older and weaker. I was able to forgive them for the disappointments I had felt in the past and love them for who they were—my parents, flawed, human, and incapable of openly dealing with the mutilated horror that was their perfect baby daughter.

It took a while to get used to the new “me” with the amputated breast. Doug tried hard to be loving and supportive. My insurance covered a breast prosthesis, a breast-shaped silicone blob that I could wear in a special bra, but I needed to go to a medical supply warehouse in an industrial complex to be fitted and covered under my plan—a cold and impersonal scenario. I decided instead to go to a store that specialized in these matters, unhindered by the cost. I was lucky to have such an option.

It was astounding to me that the owners of this store, a mother-daughter team, were among thousands of entrepreneurs that owned businesses providing only this service. I felt far from alone when I saw the quantity of options and sizes, bras and bathing suits. These proprietors took a hard and ugly situation and turned it into something warm and bearable. For the first time, I also realized the epidemic of breast cancer was more than a statistic but an industry supporting an entire economy of clothing and prosthesis manufacturers, storefronts and catalogs, not to mention the pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, and therapists whose entire livelihood was derived from this disease. It was a sobering thought.

Doug hired another nanny, but she was really more just a housekeeper to help us for at least the summer. Although she was nice, she could only deal with one or two items on a to-do list without winding up in tears before the end of the day. She didn’t last.

In August, I finally received my severance package. Now I finally had the time to think about myself.

That summer was a complete blur of heat and haziness. Somehow, I got through the days, but along the way, the feeling of being physically emptied out increased to the point that there were times that I just couldn’t breathe. I was given medication for anxiety, Ativan, which I had to take around the clock to relieve the symptoms. Since the medication seemed to help, I figured I now had an anxiety disorder. Although I was never officially diagnosed, I believe I had a nervous breakdown. When I started to think about my life, I just couldn’t bear it. I became a walking, talking zombie.

At some point our friend Janet came to visit from New York for a couple of weeks. Nancy also came. Both of them, as well as other people who called or stopped by, casually offered the same comment—“Your life reminds me of the Book of Job.”

“Great,” I responded.

I felt like I must have done something horrible, or that I was so horrible, that I must have deserved to have all this loss and suffering in my life. I constantly questioned what I was doing wrong, what the message was that I wasn’t getting—how many times did I need to be hit with a scud missile to get it? I didn’t believe that this was all just random bad luck. Maybe I just needed to search deeply to give meaning to all that had just happened just to avoid hurling myself off a cliff.

In the Book of Job, Job loses his family, his wealth, and his land and is left in an instant with nothing except his faith. His cynical wife survives, and chides him for not cursing God. But he continues to be held by God as a righteous man, even though all these things had been taken from him.

Job says, “We accept good things from God; and should we not accept evil?”

When he is then covered in boils, his friends come to sit with him and give him comfort. In front of his friends, Job laments and curses the day he was born, but the Bible says, he “never sinned against God with his lips.” Eventually “even his friends were convinced that Job had brought this suffering upon himself through wicked deeds or sin.” They urge him to repent to end his suffering. For Job, the greatest trial is not the pain or the loss; it is not being able to understand why God allows him to suffer.

Well, I certainly couldn’t say that I was focused on God like Job, but I believed I did have a strong faith. I also believed that, while I was far from perfect, I didn’t deserve this. But I had to wonder why all this was happening to me. What meaning was I to derive from the events of my life to date? God wasn’t answering. It was all too much for me to deal with, so, I concluded, maybe it wasn’t just about me.

At this point, Doug and I were not getting along well—again. I began to blame Doug and our relationship for everything. The emotional pain, feeling unloved, and the despair of abandonment that I now believed created the cycle of illness for me. Cancer was not something tangible to blame. My rage multiplied to borderline insanity and was appeased only by my overwrought outbursts, frequent lamenting, and ranting of “he this” and “he that” in whatever venues were available to me—usually to close friends over lunch or on the telephone. My ego couldn’t imagine that I was anything but the victim here, and as usual Doug was at fault.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the chemotherapy had done a real number on my ovaries. I hadn’t stopped ovulating from the chemotherapy, as I’d been told would happen, so I didn’t think about it. But I had been hurled into severe hormonal upheaval—peri-menopause in the extreme. In an earlier period of history my irrational, mercurial behavior would have gotten me locked up in a wing of the house or an institution, or even burned at the stake for witchery. Fortunately, Doug saw it as just another difficult period in our turbulent marriage, a period that he had referred to as a “bad patch.”

Now I was the one who became Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. Doug didn’t know who he was coming home to, how I would react to anything he said, or why I would fly off the handle at just about everything. When he was home, he tiptoed around land mines with bombs and bullets flying around his head. Somehow though, he knew that it wasn’t always going to be like this. He offered his arms for comfort, sex for closeness, was open to do anything to help. He was met with a head spinning 360 degrees, vomiting pea soup.