Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (12 page)

But I couldn’t tell Tyler how scared I was because he was grumpy the entire flight. To add to his bad mood, we had a mechanical failure and were diverted to Atlanta. My life felt like one big mechanical failure. I, too, am experiencing engine trouble. When we finally arrived at the wedding, we had already missed the ceremony and most of the party, but I did get to see my friend in her gorgeous Vera Wang wedding dress being skated around the ice rink on a chair by her hockey-playing groom and his groomsmen. I got my picture taken with the bride and I felt I had accomplished my mission because I was somehow there. I will be in her photo album. Even if I die, my picture will be there.

On our return flight, when we landed, I was so scared to face the
Terminal
sign again. And there was more bad news blaring in our terminal on CNN airport televisions. Linda McCartney had just died of breast cancer. I had been obsessing about dying anyway, but this news put me over the edge. How could someone that healthy (Linda was a vegetarian), that fierce, that rich die of cancer? If anyone could have “beaten” cancer, Linda McCartney could. I was starting to realize that cancer plays by its own rules.

That is why I need to show up at my reunion—I need to be accounted for today because I might not be here tomorrow. But I definitely don’t want to tell everyone from high school that I have breast cancer. That I am in treatment, doing chemotherapy, and undergoing reconstructive surgery. I am embarrassed. I still feel like a freak for being so young and having breast cancer, and it is mortifying to have to say the word
breast
to people I have not seen since high school—how immature is that?

I also need an escape now. Everyone at work knows and I have basically become the Cancer Girl. I am nostalgic for the me before the cancer. And, I am also being practical: I am not sure my high school class can handle it. My high school class was high school shallow. The cool kids did drugs and were pretty mean to the smart kids, who studied and were pretty mean to each other because they weren’t cool. Do I trust revealing my cancer to this group? Have they grown up? Will they pity me? Will they look at me with the are-you-going-to-die question mark on their face?

And there are logistical considerations. Will I need to tell the whole story again and again or will it spread like a virus after one person is infected with the gossip? Geralyn has cancer—other people have a baby, a husband, a big job, a red Porsche. It feels cruel and unfair. I know that I have accomplished so much more than a cancer diagnosis, but how will they know? Cancer is the headline. Anything else I say will get lost.

My high school class voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I was managing editor of my high school paper,
The Merionite.
That was high school, but my life has gone on, too, even though it is stalled right now. I graduated from U of P and Columbia Journalism School. I’m married to a smart and good-looking doctor. I’m a producer at ABC News. I am convincing myself that I am not only a cancer diagnosis, and that I deserve to be more at my reunion.

I decide that I will reveal to my classmates the truth that they hadn’t seen in high school: I have become cool. But I’m scared of getting caught. I’m scared they will realize that I am hiding my cancer.

To pull off my ruse, I need to keep dressing the part of my new cancer chic. I call my friend Rebecca and explain my dilemma to her: I need to find a shirt that is really daring, but also makes my boobs look even. So many of the shirts I have been wearing make me look uneven. I am sloping downwards on the left side, too high on the right. Rebecca becomes my accomplice and tells me to meet her at Bloomingdale’s. We find a chocolate-brown satin shirt. The shiny texture surprisingly covers the bump from my falsie nicely. My boobs just look big and firm. There is no plastic Jell-O jiggle from my falsie when I walk because we also bought an 18 Hour support bra (I always wondered who needed those things). I pick a brown suede baseball cap and stacked brown men’s shoes. I wear extra-tight khakis and I tie a sweater around my waist for effect. Rebecca is totally into the stylist role and even tries to trim the straggly micro-wisps that peek out from under my baseball cap.

I am an imposter, scared of being caught and judged. Isn’t that so high school of me?

I can tell I’ve put on too much makeup when I see my reflection in the mirror behind the bar after I walk into the restaurant in the Philadelphia suburbs on the night of the reunion. That wasn’t part of the cool plan—it’s just that my skin is really green from the chemo. I have never pencilled in my eyebrows before—but they, too, have thinned, and now I realize I’ve made them too dramatic. But wait, this
is
dramatic. This is
Terms of Endearment
,
Steel Magnolias
, and I could be up for a Golden Globe.

I have only two co-conspirators in the room, my closest friends attending, Jessie and Julie, who have been so supportive since I was diagnosed. I smile at them and know my plan is working when Randy tells me he had a crush on me in seventh grade. Rob can’t stop staring at my new rack and is suddenly interested in me even though he never seemed that interested when we spent an entire year together on the student government executive committee. He suddenly wants to know all about my life.

C for cool is going smoothly. Tyler is in the room and I feel like I’m showing him off like a trophy because in high school I always thought that guys weren’t interested enough in me. I was too smart, too serious, and maybe my boobs were too small?

No one is even suspicious that I’m not having a drink: In high school I was president and founder of a Students Against Driving Drunk chapter. A few classmates are teasing me that I still don’t drink. (If they only knew about my chemo cocktails.)

I am giddy and I’ve forgotten that C is for something else until I see Ted. He sat behind me in homeroom for four years. He always hid my pocketbook. He picks up with the lame flirting where we left off ten years ago.

He is teasing me. “You think you’re so cool—so bad. You live in New York, look at your hat!”

Suddenly, he is reaching for my hat.

“Stop! Ted! I have cancer, I have no hair under this.”

A drama is unfolding. He is crying and fleeing to the bathroom, and two girls follow. My cover is blown. I need to get out of there quickly. I run over to Tyler and Jessie and Julie and tell them that I need to go because I’m exhausted, and I am. I am not sure if it’s the chemo or the energy I’ve put into being such a faker.

When I say good-bye to Jessie and Julie I don’t know how to thank them. Despite all the high school drama we lived through together, I love Jessie and Julie most for being there with me tonight. For supporting my decision to fake it and never judging me. Tyler did not understand why it was so important to me to fake it, and he really wanted no part in it. He just stayed in the corner with Jessie and Julie’s husbands. I wish he had understood and had stayed by my side, held my hand, been my co-conspirator. He is always curious about why I even care about what other people think. I think if he had been me he would have walked into that room and told everyone. But I just couldn’t admit what was happening to me.

I am so exhausted from the reunion that I cannot even eat Thanksgiving dinner when I get back to my parents’ house where I grew up. My mom and dad and family friends are there and everyone wants to ask me about the reunion. All I can think about is a nap. But once I am in bed upstairs, I feel so disconnected, like pretending at my reunion that I don’t have cancer. Showing-Up-Syndrome is starting to feel so shallow.

I am in my old bedroom, still painted yellow with all the yellow fake country French furniture from my childhood. Under my blankets with my hat still on in the dark and cold, I hear everyone downstairs, singing “Happy Birthday” to our family friend, the song I’m so scared of now.

The sounds of “Happy Birthday” are just hanging there in the darkness. I hate that song so much now because it is reminding me that I might not live. That I had to have a mastectomy a day after my birthday. And now I feel that life is happening without me already. It’s like I already died. I always wondered how my family would be without me. Would my brothers be okay? Would my parents drown in their grief? I am relieved that they can go on, but selfishly, I want there to be sadness downstairs, too. I feel like a ghost in my own life. Why am I even trying to be a part of things when I am not really even here?

But I am not the only one feeling strange. My mom tells me the next day that everyone was crying when they were singing “Happy Birthday.” It was not happy, because I had cancer. And a few of my classmates called who had been at the reunion to see if I was okay—they must have heard that I was sick.

Despite being “caught,” I am still glad that I went to the reunion. No matter what anyone else in the room had accomplished—how big her house was, how much money he made—I realized I had earned the title my classmates had given me: Most Likely to Succeed. Just because I showed up. In that room I felt the sadness of my life now, smacked up against all the promise I had thought it held.

I never thought I would get cancer. Especially not when I was only seventeen years old and about to graduate from high school and the world was waiting for me. I thought I would do great things.

I knew now that in a strange way I had.

Everything about me seemed different now because of the cancer, but some things had remained exactly the same.

11

18-Hour Support Bra

The first thing I think when I wake up after my implant surgery is that I have a newfound respect for strippers. This hurts soooo much.

After four blow-ups in my plastic surgeon’s office, I have reached the final phase of my reconstruction, which involves a surgery to replace the reconstruction expander implant with a real saline implant. I have also decided to get an “enhancement” implant on the left side to match the new bigger fake boob on the right. During my intake at the hospital, the nurse seems to be very rude to me.

“Have you had any other surgery?” she asks.

“I had a mastectomy in August.”

Her face drops and she actually says she is sorry and I realize she thought that I was just another one of those silly plastic surgery junkies checking in to have a boob job. Well, sort of.

They send me home with drains stitched inside of me again and I empty my drains all night. I am pretty used to what the wound fluid should look like after wearing the milk-carton drains so often after surgery, but this time it looks like pure blood. Tyler comes home from his hospital shift at midnight, and when I show him the blood he mumbles that I should probably go to the emergency room and then passes out from exhaustion.

When I call Dr. P the next morning she is panicked and I am rushed into emergency surgery because I am bleeding where my new implant is. I am too scared of the drama to feel angry at Tyler for blowing me off last night. He has been so sleep-deprived from his surgery residency and taking care of me during the night shifts at home. It is so hard for him to be on-call for me, too.

On the way into the operating room I am thinking how crazy it would be if my breast implant killed me and not the breast cancer. Am I vain to be going through this?

After the surgery they check me into Tyler’s orthopedic floor in the hospital. He’s on call so if I’m on his floor he can see me tonight. Tonight, I just want to be one of his patients, not his wife. I want my bandage to be on my knee and not my boob so that he can change my bandage and reassure me. I want him to care about my cancer the way he cares about his patients. One of his bosses comes to my hospital room and hands Tyler a textbook and a video and tells him that he is doing a hip revision surgery tomorrow . . . another patient is pulling him away.

But even after all that expanding my skin is still not sloping naturally enough and it is pushing the reconstruction implant too high up on my right side. So like all construction projects, we are over time and over budget. I need another surgery to move the implant lower down. Dr. P is working so hard to make my now reconstructed boob perfect and I do appreciate what a perfectionist she is because I do not want to be lopsided in my new tight, tight sweaters.

After my final fix-it reconstruction surgery there is a beautiful gift waiting for me, a box wrapped in beautiful ribbons and tissue paper, from a fancy lingerie store. It is from Meredith. I open up the box and smell lavender, and underneath the tissue paper is a gorgeous see-through white lace bra with satin loops stitched all around the borders. When I take it out and hold it up to my chest, I realize how out of place and ridiculous it will look over the plastic drains with the wound fluid accumulating, over the red Sharpie line, and over the jagged stitches. I feel like Cinderella covered in rags and ashes but still dreaming of wearing a ball gown and glass slippers.

I decide that this nippleless mound, this implant, this stretched skin will someday deserve to wear a lacy bra, too. This beautiful bra has given me hope and somehow showed my boob its future. I remember the pictures of the nipple in the photo book and I think that as soon as this scar is healed, as soon as these drains are pulled out of me, I am getting my new nipple, and putting on this bra.

Meredith’s gorgeous bra makes me realize that I need to trade in my 18 Hour support bra, throw away my falsie, and find a bra that fits because my boobs are finally even—well, the most even they have been in a long time, after the last surgery. I now have matching implants on both sides so I do not need to keep wearing the falsie, the plastic chicken cutlet–feeling fake boob that I have been using on my real boob to match the expansions. The falsie has become part of me; if it’s not on my body it is sleeping beside me in its plastic holder.

I finally get to remove the plastic pup tent that’s been over the wound for weeks. And it hurts. I don’t want Tyler to touch it because I just cannot summon any sexiness. I have not showered and I still smell like the hospital. I take a shower and try to wash the hospital smell off of me and my new breasts. It is finally time to throw out the falsie and my 18 Hour support bra. They have been my crutches through this whole experience.