Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (8 page)

When Dr. B arrives he immediately clears the room and sits down softly on the corner of my bed. He must know after performing so many surgeries how much a little bed pressure can hurt a wound.

“Geri, wow you look like you’re feeling well.”

It is quiet and the only noise is the beeping of my pulse monitor. It starts to quicken because I know what he is about to say.

“Have you looked yet?”

“I can’t.”

He walks to the door and locks it. He walks over to the bed and pushes the white waffle bathrobe to the side and opens my blue surgical gown and his face drops a little because he sees what I feel: fresh blood seeping though the gauze.

“Don’t move—you need to have this dressing changed and we’re going to take a look.”

I turn away and close my eyes again. I have been closing my eyes every time a nurse, a doctor has changed the dressing.

Dr. B is wiping off my wound, asking if it hurts, telling me that he is almost ready for me to open my eyes. I remember all the times I opened my eyes when I was little, anticipating surprises—wonderful presents. I try to imagine what I will look like and Dr. B answered my question:

“Geri, open your eyes. You look beautiful. It’s okay.”

Before I open my eyes I remember the bizarre photo album in the office of my plastic surgeon. Dr. P was the last doctor I went to see before I decided that I could have my mastectomy. Her photo album convinced me that I could do it. I had needed to see what it was going to look like.

She is an expert in breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. She took out a photo album unlike any photo album I had ever seen: disembodied torsos of reconstructed breasts. Really, they looked like mug shots of breasts—bad lighting and the breasts looked so serious, like they knew they were posing for a reconstruction photo album. They looked better than I thought reconstructed breasts might look, I guess, but just so much blankness where the nipples should have been. And that was when I realized that having a mastectomy meant having my nipple removed as well as my breast. No one had told me that part.

A breast without a nipple? It just wasn’t right. Like a pizza without pepperoni, a cake without icing, a sundae without a cherry on top. Dr. P must have read my mind and kept flipping the pages until we arrived at some tight shots of nipples. I am confused but she explains that she made those nipples. Nipple tattoos. She folded skin on the reconstructed mound to make a little pucker and then tattooed it a nipple color.

I think I was even more surprised when Tyler told me that there’s a doctor at Mount Sinai who is famous for his nipples. Strange specialty. Especially when introducing oneself at a cocktail party. But now I was relieved that there were experts in this type of thing. Maybe I could be whole again. Maybe I could get a fabulous reconstructed breast and even a nipple. Maybe I could pass.

Dr. P explained that there were choices on how to build my new boob: traditional implants or a tummy tuck where stomach fat was used to build a new breast. (After some serious pinching Dr. P told me I didn’t qualify because I was too skinny.) Another option involved a “donation” from another part of the body. The only fat source I had was on my butt and yes, that was where she would take it from. How strange. If I was going to lose my breast, why would I want to lose my ass, too? I still want to be a piece of ass. It just didn’t make sense. Especially after I asked what my ass would look like after the donation? There was even a photo in the book to show what that looked like: like a shark bite.

Dr. P told me that she would insert a special breast implant called an expander when my breast was removed. It is a temporary one, a place holder boob that she will keep blowing up with fluid to stretch the skin so that when she switches in a regular implant my skin will slope and look like a natural breast.

I was just so relieved that there would be a mound there when I woke up.

After I saw Dr. P, I needed to ask Tyler what would happen to my breast after it was cut off of me in the OR. Would it just be thrown away? Would my nipple end up in some garbage dump somewhere? Tyler reassured me it would be refrigerated in a pathology lab, and somehow the idea of my nipple in some large refrigerator in a Tupperware container marked “Lucas-nipple” was an odd comfort. He probably made this up and I am so grateful. Like a kid who needs to believe in Santa, I need to believe my nipple is not just being thrown away.

But now I will see the reconstruction results on me and not in that breast book. Dr. B has finished removing the dressing and he’s begging me to look. “Geri, come on, open your eyes.”

When I open my eyes all I can see on my chest is a bright red line that looks like I took a Sharpie indelible marker and drew a diagonal line exactly where my right breast used to be. There are stitches that look like black spiders climbing up the red line, and except for the red line down the middle, it is a regular smooth skin mound that sort of looks like a breast mound. I try to remember what had been there only days before but I can’t.

I think about the Tupperware to calm myself down. Dr. B and I look at each other. I just nod and I feel relief that the curtain has been pulled away. Dr. B readjusts the bandages and tapes them back over my mound. No more hiding. No more mystery. This is my new breast.

Now I need to show Tyler.

After five days in the hospital, they send me home with the plastic drains still sewn into my chest. I need to keep emptying them every few hours and keep measuring the fluid coming out to make sure that I am not bleeding too much. I want to leave the house, but I don’t own any shirt that fits over these milk quart–sized plastic containers. Tyler lends me his Tulane sweatshirt and I put on some lipstick and finally leave the house for a sushi dinner with my parents. It feels so good to be out of the hospital and to eat my dinner off of Japanese pottery instead of a plastic tray and plastic containers. But every bite of food and every swallow feels like it is pulling the milk quarts down on my chest and pulling my skin, and what would happen if my drains fell out in my favorite Japanese restaurant?

Tyler has not seen my chest yet. But tonight when he gets out of the hospital he is going to snip the milk quarts out of me so that I don’t need to visit my plastic surgeon for that part—after all, he did a breast cancer rotation during his training.

It will be the first time he has seen my breast after my mastectomy. It is so humiliating that this will be his first look. I want to be able to clean it up for him first, dress it up a little. But it’s hard to find a negligee that will fit over the milk quarts. My hair is greasy, too, because I still can’t take a shower and get the dressing wet. What will he think when he sees this? I know he has seen a mastectomy before in his training, but he has never seen it on his wife.

Tyler is concentrating so hard when he is snipping the stitches off my chest that I can’t tell if he is shocked or just in surgeon mode. It is still raw and burns. The strangest part is that I can’t feel his hand moving along my new breast as he is snipping. There is no sensation. I am trying to remember what the nipple felt like there, when it used to feel so good.

I don’t know what to expect. It is almost like a doctor-patient moment and it feels very professional. He finishes snipping the especially hard pieces of string, caked with my blood, that have kept the milk quarts on my chest.

When he finishes he puts the scissors down and wipes off the wound. He is looking in my eyes and I notice that his eyes have changed from a medical, surgical look to an “I want you” look. Tyler smirks and his hands have moved from my wound. I notice that I have started to bleed a little where the stitches were. Tyler does not miss a beat.

“Geralyn, let me put on a fresh bandage so we can have sex.”

I need to put on some lipstick.

7

Cocktails

When I see the IV bag with a skull and crossbones on it wheeling towards me I realize that I am actually about to get poisoned. I am sweating as my oncologist, Dr. O, begins to explain the chemo “cocktail” the nurse is about to push through my veins. But I finally hear a word I can hang on to in this white sanitary place:
cocktail
!

A strange thought pops into my head: When was the last time I was actually at a bar drinking a cocktail? I could really use a very dirty martini, Absolut vodka, extra olives on the side, right about now to help my courage kick in.

Funny, I was never daring in the cocktail department. I was president of Students Against Driving Drunk in high school. I never had a fake ID. A Sea Breeze was as cool as I got. I could never say “Sex on the Beach” or “Orgasm” with a serious face to a bartender. Now I’m having a poisonous cocktail.

First day of school, first kiss, and now first chemo. I’m not sure what the dress code is for first chemo, I mean I know this is not a time for appearances, but I do want to look good facing this assault. I have worn lipstick and my favorite crimson suit because I have just come from
20/20
. I am also wearing the beautiful antique Murano glass necklace that Tyler gave me the night before my mastectomy. One of the glass globes is pinkish red, and it highlights the crimson of my suit and the red of my lipstick perfectly.

Tyler can not be here because he has to be at the hospital with his patients. So my mom has taken the day off from her job as an elementary school guidance counselor to come with me to my first chemo. My mom used to love telling me that my first word was
out
. I’d stand in my crib and point and say “out.” Right now I would do anything to get the hell out of here.

I am being so mean to my mom that it’s reminding me of when I was in high school and I took out all my frustrations and anxieties on her. The other patients keep shooting me nasty looks like, “Be nice to your poor mother—look at the hell she is already going through and you being snotty is making it worse for her.” My mom is being so cool, just there as my pincushion as I am about to get this huge needle.

Dr. O has ordered me a deliberately deadly cocktail called CMF: cytoxin, methyltrexate, and 5FU Fluorocuracil. Cytoxin means cell killing. After I hear that, I figure out that the methyltrexate and 5FU are chasers. Maybe like sucking a lime after a tequila shot, I try to reassure myself. And there are more cocktails. It feels like Unhappy Hour: a steroid cocktail to manage my body’s reaction to the poison and an anti-nausea cocktail to control the vomiting and diarrhea. It will not work, but it will blimp me up fifteen pounds. The anti-nausea cocktail makes me vomit and they try another concoction on me. Instead of Zofran I get Kytrol, which is a cousin of Zofran. Are whiskey and bourbon cousins or somehow related?

I ordered the CMF instead of the AC (adriamyacin, cytoxin) because the doctors told me that although the adriamyacin was stronger, it could cause heart failure. That scared me, but it feels frivolous to worry about a little heart failure when the goal is to kill all the fastest-growing cells in my body.

I think about how the frat guys I went to college with used to chug beers and put strange tubes down their throat to get the maximum amount of liquor into their bloodstreams in the shortest amount of time. Why not just use an IV? I guess because IVs are too serious. There is something really wrong when an IV is involved. Basically because they follow you everywhere—there’s no getting away from them, especially when you badly need to pee. I learned how to walk slightly ahead of the pole so I could look more elegant when I had visitors in the hospital, but it is still a ball and chain. There are too many IV poles rolling around this oncology office.

The skull and crossbones on the IV bag means poison, and the poison is about to go inside my vein. It is going to kill
all
of my fast-growing cells because it can’t find just the cancer. So that is why my hair will fall out, my stomach will cramp, and my white blood cell count will drop, making me exhausted and prone to infection. My veins will turn black, singed from the poison shooting through them, until they look like stripes against my still very white skin. I will look like a heroin addict. Whoever thought of heroin chic never had heroin veins. I will pull my sleeves down and never wear my favorite black dress because it is sleeveless.

My chemo nurse, Nurse C, introduces herself. How does she look so happy in this place? Even the way she snaps on her rubber gloves seems playful. Everything about her does not match the chemo room—her huge blue-green eyes, her fiery red hair, and her large earrings—except for her white nurse shoes and white nurse’s uniform. When Nurse C rolls the IV pole towards me, I remember that I passed out at my high school blood drive. I didn’t even have the needle in me yet.

I have been training myself with the hypnosis for this needle especially, for my chemo shots. I don’t pass out when I smell the alcohol or when they tie the rubber band around my arm to make the vein bulge or when they make me clench my fist around a rubber ball. But I am sweating and starting to see black dots. I tell the nurse that I might faint and she has a glass of OJ and a hard candy for me to suck on. I try my mantra: “I am like the sky and nothing can stick to me.”

The needle feels like it is pulling on my vein and then I feel the rush of the cocktail being forced through it. It feels like it might burst, it is so tight and hard and cold. I did not order my CMF on the rocks. “Nurse this feels really cold.”

She grabs a blanket to cover me and my mom tries to hug me to keep me warm. I am pushing her away to show that I can handle it. But I can’t. I am so scared that I’m at the beginning of the marathon because I have only just started the poison. There are so many patients in the same chemo room who look like they’ll barely hobble to the finish line. Is that where I am headed?

The needle stays in my arm and the pushing goes on for hours and it feels like there is a brick balancing on my tiny brave vein. I am trying to read
The National Enquirer
to take my mind off my vein. With my right hand I’m eating a chocolate Entenmann’s doughnut to get the strange metallic taste out of my mouth that they warned me about. I can’t move my left hand because it has the IV taped securely to the top of my hand. They have started with the vein in my hand to preserve the other veins for future treatments. What feels like forever and a lot of cold pushing later, when Nurse C finally removes the needle from my relieved vein, Dr. O wants to see me in her office.