Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (2 page)

Oops. She definitely caught me checking her out on the stage and I think I am turning bright red. I’m trying to dab my cheeks and trying to wipe my mascara smears with my palms to hide the fact that I have been crying. She finishes her dance, comes off the stage, and walks towards the back of the club right over to me.

“Can I cheer you up?”

She must think I had a really bad break-up with a girlfriend. She straddles me and starts to push her perfect mounds of cancer-free flesh into my face, and all I can think about is how beautiful her nipples are, and how I need to cut one of mine off to save my life. I am trying to play along and be cool, but I have never had a lap dance and now that she is pushing her breasts against me it is making me sad and envious. I don’t even care that there are guys staring at us now. I am no longer self-conscious about being a woman sitting in a strip club. I have joined the guys and I am in a booby trance.

There is something about her and the way she has stripped in front of me. She is holding on so tightly to herself that maybe she is sending me a message? It is like she is telling me to hold on tight and not give it all away. She finally finishes and I notice her swagger as she walks away.

I cool down, order another Bud, and start to refocus on my agenda. I remember what I said to every male breast surgeon during my appointments: “My breasts mean nothing to me. I studied hard my whole life. I did not get where I am because of my breasts. I will cut them off to save my life. Please tell me the truth.”

My dad was the one who flagged it. “The lady doth protest too much.” His probing green eyes were telling me to go deeper. I was just intrigued that Shakespeare could hold a key to my boob dilemma. “Of course your breast means something to you, sweetie.” Both my parents are therapists so it figures that I am avoidant.

But I know why I need to use the blatant disclaimer that my boobs don’t matter. The six male surgeons I have had consults with about my case can’t look me in the eyes. I have long hair, I wear lipstick, and I know what they are thinking. In fact one of them just said it out loud: “It would be so unfortunate to lose your breast. You’re such an attractive young woman.”

The closest the other five male doctors come to speaking the unspeakable is to tell me the lumpectomy would be easier, it would leave me more “unchanged.” It would leave me with only a small scar—they would have a plastic surgeon come in and stitch me up. So the wild card is there: What would it mean for me to have a mastectomy and lose my breast and a nipple? The nipple part really bothers me. And at the VIP Strip Club all I am thinking is that I could never work here without a nipple. Well, maybe I could be part of a freak show or fetish show or something. But 99.9 percent of men would not pay me to take my shirt off.

Wait! This is ridiculous! I’ve never even wanted to be a stripper! But now it is really bothering me that I can’t do it. I don’t even want to, but I can’t.

Things are getting really rowdy at the VIP Strip Club. There are cheers at the next table and lots of high fives, and it is all about boobs. There is such desire in their eyes and in their hearts, and at this point they are all hypnotized.

That’s when I slowly start to feel the power in this room building force, but draining out of me. Like the water draining from a bathtub, the suction is gathering strength, and I finally understand what is ahead.

Just the way some of the women doctors look me in the eye without even blinking and insist I have my breast removed. In fact, one recommends having both my breasts removed. They are sort of cruel in the way they tell me and seem uncomfortable when I cry. It is as if their faces are saying, “You have a lot more to cry about than just losing your breast . . . you might die.” They don’t want to acknowledge the wild card. Maybe it is easier for them because they each have two breasts that no one is telling them to cut off.

Halfway through my third Bud, the beer is settling in and I have a buzz and I am pretty sure that somehow I can face having a mastectomy instead of a lumpectomy. Because I would never forgive myself if the cancer returned. That, with an open heart and three Buds, feels like the easy part. The harder part is what is happening in this room. Why boobs rule men. Why boobs are a commodity. Why a boob is not an elbow. Why there are such things as strip clubs, where men pay women to see their breasts. That part is as much about my survival as my prognosis. But no one has said that to me—I just know it.

It is a strange place to finally say good-bye to my right boob, but this whole situation is so fucking uncharted.

I remember my first training bra and how the hook never stayed closed.

I remember going to second base in the stairwell after junior prom with Flip.

I remember my first red-and-white bikini and how daring I felt when Patrick untied the top so I wouldn’t get a tan line on my back.

I remember when all the girls came back from summer vacation after seventh grade with boobs and I was still waiting.

I remember that I was always the smart girl.

I remember when boobs were not my best feature, clearly not what defined me.

I remember when my breasts were not something that could kill me.

Now I want more. I want the power in this room. I want to have what they have. Now that I’m losing that feature, I am concerned that it mattered more than I thought.

It is just too deep and complicated for me to figure out right this minute, especially with Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” blaring in the background. I know my husband will probably go to strip clubs with his orthopedic surgeon colleagues at conventions. I will sit at home with one boob, thinking of him looking at perfect boobs. Will my brother Paul plan our brother Howard’s bachelor party in a strip club? I look around the smoky VIP Strip Club and I see brothers, husbands, dads, friends, bosses, all leering, and maybe because I am drunk I will admit that I am jealous and want to know they would leer at me, too, even after my surgery.

I leave forty dollars on a twenty-seven dollar tab because I am too embarrassed to ask for change. I stand up to leave the club. I walk past the breasts on parade, past the commotion, and past the testosterone.

The bouncer smiles at me when he holds open the door and I feel a small victory. Because I caught his eye with my smile. There’s a ratty maroon velvet rope outside to cordon off the entrance to the club. I am leaving the world of boobs.

As I hail a taxi at the corner, I start to think about how the excitement in that room did not begin until the tops came off. I have kept my shirt on until now (well, most of the time) and still gotten paid, gotten loved, and gotten noticed. When I lose my breast I will be stripped of part of what I thought made me a woman, made me desirable. But, I think, I will still be me.

Maybe I am like an antique table that is being stripped before being re-varnished. Layers will be peeled away to reveal something beautiful underneath. Actually, maybe the ultimate striptease is ahead of me: First my breast will be cut off. Then my hair will fall out. And when there is nothing left to strip, maybe there will be a revelation of a different beauty underneath, one that I never knew existed.

I will be stripped to the core but I will still be there.

I think of myself on that stage with the strobe light on me: it is the striptease of my life.

I will find a way to exist.

Somehow.

2

Lumps

I knew it was bad news.

Two men in white coats. Both of them crying.

I was in a windowless white room with a tacky nature print on the wall and it felt like the scene in a movie where the woman finds out that she has cancer and she will die young. But it was real.

My husband’s white coat says “Dr. Lucas” across his chest in happy cursive. Maybe Tom Cruise would play Tyler? It is a total stretch, but Tyler is handsome and has amazing blue eyes and fabulous shoulders. He looks like a doctor on a soap opera, but he really went to medical school. But I know that medical school hasn’t prepared him for being thirty-two, married only two years, and finding out that his wife has breast cancer.

The other white coat belongs to my breast surgeon, Dr. B. He had predicted it would never be cancer because I was only twenty-seven, because I had no family history, because I looked so healthy. Bruce Willis or another sexy balding actor would play him. He looks exactly like what a doctor looks like in the movies when there is bad news. But his tears are real. He looks at me and finally says it.

“You do have cancer”—pause—“but we will cure you.”

Strange, I have never heard the words “cancer” and “cure” in the same sentence before. Is he lying to me?

I understand why Tyler is crying. I know that we said in sickness and in health, but there has got to be some sort of exit clause when something like this happens. Dr. B, I understand his tears, too. He probably has done this scene hundreds of times in his office. I wonder if delivering bad news got easier after some practice. Clearly, he is not immune to it. But there is an extra level of bad news here. I am his colleague’s wife. It is personal.

Now, if two grown men, doctors, cannot handle this information, how am I supposed to? But somehow I hear myself rally like I always do. I should not have been cut from the seventh-grade cheerleading team. I do not cry.

“It will be okay,” I am trying to convince the doctors. “I’ll be fine.” That last sentence hangs in the air, and they both look at me like I don’t get it. Like, “Oh, we just told her that she has cancer and she’s in denial.” I am not in denial. I am scared, though.

I realize in that small windowless office that this is about having no control. This is something that just happened. So, if I didn’t cause this, how can I fix it? My body has betrayed me. How can I count on it to get better? To fix itself? I have always been a good “fixer.” I am the one my parents call to tell my younger brothers what to do. I instruct my friends about how to break up with their boyfriends. Now I see that this might be unfixable.

“Do I need to have chemotherapy, will I lose my hair?”

I am so embarrassed that the only lame thing I can think about is whether my hair will fall out. I must seem so vain, but I have always pictured cancer patients with bald heads.

Dr. B tells me that it is too early to make that decision, that we will have the full pathology report back tomorrow and I will need to consult an oncologist.

I am not prepared for this scene to unfold in my life. I never had a biopsy. The word
biopsy
even sounds serious. I never even had my tonsils out, or broke my arm. I ate a cheeseburger before my biopsy and I saw white dots when Dr. B was cutting into my breast to get to that lump. During the biopsy I could still taste the ketchup in my mouth even though the smell of alcohol was so heavy in the room.

I knew when I first felt the lump in the shower that it felt like trouble. My fingertips just knew it was bad news. I should not have been worried because my mom and grandmothers had never had breast cancer. But I was worried. I was dripping wet, still in my towel when I told Tyler about the lumps. There were actually three of them.

“Geralyn, you’re being a hypochondriac. Just because you found a lump you think you have breast cancer? Women always have lumps. It’s nothing.”

Tyler was annoyed with me—I could tell by his tone of voice.

I didn’t understand why he was so annoyed, considering he was the one who had taught me how to do a breast self-exam in the first place. When I first met Tyler, he was doing a rotation as the breast resident. Aside from it being especially intimidating to show him my breasts, it affected me to hear him so devastated by what he had seen. On our first date he told me all about the young mother with breast cancer he had just done a mastectomy on. She was only twenty-eight and he thought she was going to die. He couldn’t believe how many women, especially young women, had breast cancer. He made me learn how to do a breast self-exam. He had told me that one of my friends, someone I knew, would get breast cancer—it was pure statistics.

We both never imagined that the woman who would get breast cancer would be me. Meeting Tyler would save my life.

But now that I had actually done the breast exam and I had found lumps, he didn’t seem concerned. He seemed more upset that we were late to a movie, because I was always late. He was always on time. Maybe he was snapping at me because he, too, was terrified of the lump, because he had seen too many bad lumps. He seemed like such an asshole right then, but he must have been scared.

I cried through the whole movie,
The Bridges of Madison County
, not because I was sad, but because I was so worried about the lumps I had found in the shower, and I couldn’t believe that Tyler seemed like he didn’t even care. It was a kind of cathartic and safe place to sob—everyone walked out of that movie sniffling. When I mentioned the lumps again after the movie, he had that same tone of voice. He was so dismissive that I almost believed I was a hypochondriac.

Until I told my gynecologist. The remaining lump (the other two went away after my period) was buried so deep in the right corner of my right breast near my armpit that she couldn’t feel it at first. I had to guide her hand all the way into my breast.

“Geralyn. It’s probably nothing because you are so young. But I never play games with lumps. You need a sonogram.”

It was especially cruel timing. I mean, not that there’s ever any good time to get breast cancer, but I was there to tell my gynecologist that I was ready to get pregnant. Instead of leaving her office with a prescription for prenatal vitamins, I left with a prescription for a sonogram of the lump. A sonogram turned into a mammogram, which then became a biopsy. No one with white coats in those white rooms was treating me like a hypochondriac. I wished I were a hypochondriac. I wished that my husband was right. I thought about all the petty gloats I had had whenever I was right in arguments. But there was no gloating now, just terror, with Dr. B and Tyler and the results we have just heard about my biopsy.