Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (17 page)

“Geralyn, call this woman. She’s dying of breast cancer and making videotapes for her young daughter so the girl won’t forget her. Here’s her phone number. Sounds like a good story, right?”

Meredith was horrified when she realized that he’d given me this project. She made him call me back to express some fake concern.

“If this is too hard for you to work on, then we’ll reassign it.”

But it was too late. I had already called Erin. And I wanted to hear her story.

She and her husband, Doug, were reluctant to share their story with anyone because they were wary that their story would become too tabloid. I understood their fear, and in an attempt to offer some credibility I explained that I had just had breast cancer. Instead of being reassured, she surprised me with her hesitation.

“Will this story be too hard for you to work on, Geralyn? I’m going to die.”

I couldn’t believe she was thinking about me with everything she was facing. I told her that maybe her story would lead me to some answers I had been searching for.

“Erin, I think about this all the time. I’m so scared. Please tell your story for me and all the other women who need this hope.”

She explained that the hardest part was starting the video camera. On the first tape she had started and stopped five times. She kept crying, then saying, “Pardon,” and turning off the camera. I think it was the hardest part because she knew that in that beginning was her end. That when her daughter saw that tape, she would no longer be there to hold her. After that, Erin became a madwoman, recording through the night. The video camera was her new umbilical cord to her daughter. It was her salvation.

Erin’s courage answered my greatest fear about leaving a child motherless. Erin would always be Peyton’s mom, and she had found a way to stay in Peyton’s life.

But it was not that easy to grasp. Just when I had worked up my confidence to try to get pregnant, I saw the little girl holding the pink stuffed bunny rabbit in my oncologist’s office. God must have placed her there to taunt me. The first thing I noticed, which anyone would have noticed, was that the velvety fur was missing from the bunny—it had almost bald patches. And the next thing I noticed was the little girl gripping her bunny, holding onto the fur that was left. She was standing next to a seat in the waiting room. Then her mom walked out and that’s when it made sense: Her mom’s hair had fallen out, in patches, like the bunny’s. Her mom had breast cancer. I was at an after-chemo check-up. I had come to see my oncologist, Dr. O, to ask her permission to get pregnant. Erin had showed me a way. But the pink bunny was not a vote of confidence. My mom had come with me for support. She saw the pink bunny, too. We both started to cry.

I kept focused on my goal. I wanted Dr. O’s approval. There were magical reasons to get pregnant: To trust my body again. To believe in the future again. To run towards life and away from death. To pick up where Tyler and I left off before my diagnosis. Tyler told me he wanted me to have a baby so that he could always be with me. He wanted to take a piece of me into the world with him in case I died. He promised he would always be there for her, that he could handle being a single dad.

I didn’t get Dr. O’s approval. Not even close. She lowered her eyes and almost whispered, “It is so hard to take care of sick mothers. It is so sad.” I was about to challenge her until I remembered the pink bunny that I had just seen in the waiting room, and I knew that she had seen things that would ruin any joy in motherhood.

But I needed to have a baby. I had earned this. I was a sherpa who had scaled Mount Everest with the fragile eggs in my backpack. Every step over the jagged and steep terrain, I watched my breath in front of me, but I worried more about the hope trailing behind me. Every time I stumbled, I only wanted to protect the eggs. But now that I had finished my trek, with my eggs not broken, I realized I had maybe a bigger trek ahead.

My body was there, my eggs were okay, but my mind was unsteady. Was it irresponsible to have a baby if I could die on it? What kind of mother would that make me? If I did manage to have a normal baby, and beat all the odds, there was still the greatest problem: I might die. The baby might never remember me. Suppose I had a daughter. Would she live her life under a cloud of fear because of her own breasts? Would she resent my cancerous breast and see it as a road map of her own doomed destiny?

When I heard that Erin had died, I was sad and scared. But her death strangely convinced me that I, too, should become a mom. I was haunted by how unfair it was that she was robbed from Peyton, but I loved how she tricked the cancer and found a way to be Peyton’s mom forever. Erin gave me my baby.

When I miss my period, I think it might be menopause. At the hospital, they tell me that I need a blood test and sonogram, just like the sonogram that saw my cancer for the first time. This sonogram will show clump of cells, too, but not like the cancer.

It is a baby.

I get genetic testing to see if the baby is okay after all the poison my eggs endured. I should be relieved when the genetics counselor calls me.

“Congratulations, you’re having a healthy baby girl.”

But all I can think about are her breasts and her future. Will she live under a cancer cloud? Fear of death circles me like a vulture. I become obsessed that my child will be motherless. It sends me into a depression. I do research and find a group called “Motherless Daughters.” Rosie O’Donnell’s mother and Madonna’s mother died when they were young, from breast cancer—Rosie and Madonna turned out normal, right?

When I begin to vomit from morning sickness, I remember the vomiting from chemo. It reminds me that even when I am about to embark on creating a new life, there is unfinished business lurking. Vomiting becomes my bridge between death and life . . . the connection between the oncology office and the maternity ward. Although I had mastered vomiting systems, nothing prepared me for leaving the cancer ward and entering the maternity ward: I went from a world of death to a world of life.

Vomiting is a constant reminder that for me these two worlds are connected, and I can never just leave one for the other.

When they put the microphone to my stomach to try to hear the baby’s heartbeat, I swear it is so loud that I imagine it is reverberating all the way to the cancer ward. It is so loud that maybe the IV poles are stirring in the chemo room. Maybe they have all heard its hope? It is pulsating and screaming that a life has gone on. I imagine her heartbeat ricocheting through the white sterile hallways: “life, life, life” is what I hear each time the machine beeps.

But I feel like an imposter in both worlds: I am embarrassed to be pregnant in the cancer ward. It feels like I am betraying my comrades. As they remain in the land of the dead, I have moved on to life. In the maternity ward, I think about them. I cannot believe we are in one hospital, only floors apart.

I am so scared when my body starts to grow during the pregnancy. How can I trust it is growing a baby and not a tumor? How will my body know what to do when it has gone haywire before?

I remain obsessed with the idea of dying on my daughter. I think often of Erin and Peyton, and my biggest fear is that I will die before my daughter has time to remember me. Tyler will be there for her, but a father is not the same as a mother.

I still go to work every day and I am vomiting again constantly. I am now in maternity clothing and my real boob is starting to grow again, on the left side, so now I have begun wearing my other falsie again to even myself out—but I switched to the right side. I am so glad that I threw out only one and kept the other. My stomach is expanding, and I cannot believe all the different variations of myself that have existed in this one office. What do my colleagues think when they see me in the elevator? What else can enlarge itself on my body?

It is hard to keep up the new downtown look in maternity clothes, but I try. I wear everything in black and even find a pair of leopard platforms that I can squeeze my pregnant feet into.

Every time I am at Dr. O’s office, I search for the pink bunny and the little girl and her balding mom. I wonder about them. I wonder about us—me and my baby—and I wonder if we will be back in oncology together. I cannot bear to be so pregnant in the oncology ward. I know that everyone is looking at me and remembering how I was one of them, and now I have left them. But I want to tell them that I am really here with them in this world of cancer and death. I just cannot leave it.

This is where I belong.

16

Leo, Not Cancer

When I walk into my baby shower the first thing I notice is all the pink—and I panic. Pink is precarious and dangerous to me now: I have been wearing pink ribbons since my diagnosis.

Everyone knows that I am having a little girl. The pink at the shower is reminding me of the pink signs from breast cancer walks and runs—signs that say “In memory of” for all the lives stolen by breast cancer.

My friend Jen, and her mom Jane, who has survived breast cancer, are insistent that they throw me my baby shower. Jane’s toast reminds us all that this is not an average baby shower: “This is a very special baby shower.”

Before I open my presents, I lose it.

“I feel uncomfortable opening presents,” I start to sob. “You’ve already given me this baby. Because I know if anything were to happen to me, I know you will all fill in for me.”

I decide that I will explain my ordeal to my daughter in her name. I will name her “Skye” because my hypnotherapist had told me that any time I felt any pain I should think of myself as like the sky, because of its resilience. Whatever happens to the sky—a thunderstorm, paint being thrown at it, an airplane flying across it—it is still the sky and remains unchanged. Every needle, every surgery, I said, “I am like the sky.” I decide to add an “e” to make it more legitimate. Her middle name will be Meredith for my boss Meredith, and just in case she is a Republican and “Skye” is too out there for her. Meredith has never had a baby because of her health, and I remember how scared I was to tell her that I was pregnant. I was scared because she never got to do this. “Meredith, I feel so strange telling you I’m pregnant. I feel guilty because this is something you couldn’t do.”

“But Geralyn, I’m so happy for you.”

And I know she is. Meredith gives me hair ribbons for my daughter. They were hers when she was a little girl—she had always hoped her daughter could wear them. Now Skye Meredith will.

Skye’s name feels like a perfect way to explain our journey together and to look towards her future. Maybe it also shows all the changes I’ve gone through and still managed to cling to myself. Maybe it’s a hope that if Skye’s life is filled with clouds and storms there can still be a pink sunset. Maybe after rain and thunder a rainbow will somehow appear.

Robin made me a quilt that has a picture on it of us with our arms around each other when we were six years old. The picture is surrounded by a sky with beautiful clouds in honor of the name
Skye
. Robin’s present reminds me of her support in my life—always. I know she will always be a part of Skye’s life, too.

That night, the phone rings at 11 P.M. It is my younger brother Howard.

“Geralyn, Grandma Ruth died tonight.”

He is crying and his voice sounds so small and he is trying to explain that our grandmother fell out of her bed at the nursing home. She was eighty-five and had lived a full life. But I feel as if I have been robbed again.

As I stand in the cemetery at her grave with my family around me, my feet sink into the warm earth and it does not make any sense to me. I am so pregnant that my largest black maternity dress can’t even be zipped at the top—it’s held together with safety pins. Why would my grandmother be denied this chance to meet her great-granddaughter by only days?

The rabbi tries to assure me that they have met: two souls, one on the way up and one on the way down. She is very convincing, but I am not buying any of it. This is another robbery when I am feeling so vulnerable.

A religious man pulls me aside and tells me that it is very bad luck to be in a cemetery when pregnant.

“It’s bad luck that my grandmother died right before her great-granddaughter was born,” I snap back. Life is not making any sense lately.

I have not been in a cemetery since I was diagnosed with cancer. I have not seen a body lowered into the earth and felt the reality so strongly. As my grandmother’s coffin is lowered into the sloppy hole in the earth I feel myself being tugged down with her. All around us there are tombstones with women’s names, and I start calculating all the ages on the tombstones to figure out if a mother has died young. “Beloved Mother” appears everywhere.

The baby is kicking hard but I feel like I should stay here, with my grandmother, with the dead. I am an imposter in the land of the living, and it is only a matter of time.

My grandmother’s sister-in-law tries to comfort me when I start to sob.

“It’s so unfair. My grandmother will never know my daughter, Skye. How could this happen?”

“Geralyn, you’ll see your grandmother now more than ever in your daughter.”

I look at her and realize she must know what she is talking about. At ninety-two, she has seen plenty of funerals.

I start contracting when I leave the cemetery. They have been trying to induce me for over a week. I have been contracting wildly, but not dilating. When my water breaks that night, my doctors tell me that I need to deliver the baby within twenty-four hours to prevent infection.

When I check into the hospital with my parents and Tyler, I do not smell life here, not even a whiff of it. All I smell is the smell of death that has trailed me from my cancer. It smells fake sweet and sanitary, like it has been sprayed and washed to cover up the nasty odor underneath. There is a desperation smell, a bad-news smell, a smell of needles and x-rays, and tumors and blood. I cannot smell a baby.

I start to realize this is not the place to bring a baby into the world. I remember everything I left in that hospital.