Two years ago I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. I’m okay now, and with the experience receding in the rear-view mirror, I can finally write and talk about it. From that impulse comes this post, another about getting radiation treatments, and my recent coming out as a cancer survivor on Facebook — mostly to offer myself as a resource, but also because it had started to feel as if I were hiding something. There’s a point at which keeping things private starts to look like lying, if only by omission.
I don’t want to lie. I had cancer. It wasn’t pretty. Like everyone ever diagnosed, I worry about it coming back. I’m in good company — cancer is common, breast cancer nearly epidemic — but the path can feel solitary. Even with good people at your side, you’re the one with the dark humming hive making its home in your body.
One of the reasons it took me so long to come out of the cancer closet was that I could hardly manage my own response, let alone other people’s. I don’t judge people who share everything about their journey, but I myself couldn’t bear the thought of people following along as I got cut, prodded, stitched, and burned. I didn’t want anyone picturing me on the dissection-tray gurney. And I wasn’t ready to reveal my dark hours self, awake all night, the iron slab of anxiety pinning me to the bed. I didn’t want to admit that even as I gratefully accepted the support of my husband, family, and friends, I secretly wondered if I deserved that support and feared they would tire of me in my compromised state. At 4:03 am I was sure I’d have to crawl into the bushes alone, like a sick and abandoned dog.
I also kept the cancer quiet because I didn’t have the strength to fend off the positive energy goons: robust cretins certain that their physical health made them morally and spiritually superior to those of us struggling with illness. Or the fuckwits convinced it’s your own fault if you get cancer. That you’re paying a karmic debt. You’re too angry, or not angry enough. You drank too much or ate the wrong things or didn’t have kids or didn’t breast feed your nonexistent kids or used the wrong deodorant and now your body is so out of whack you need a tuning fork to rebalance it. Someone at a gallery opening actually suggested the tuning fork treatment to me.
Even saner people are often unable or unwilling to say the word, as if pronouncing it releases toxic spores into the air. I’ve heard cancer called a mishap, a condition, and of course, that old rotten chestnut, the C-word. A post in a Facebook breast cancer group called it “lady cancer,” as if ladies only get cancer in our lady parts. Medicine has its own arsenal of weasel words — malignancy, neoplasm, mass, and growth — that can leave you wondering whether or not you actually have cancer.
Given such widespread fear and avoidance of the reality of cancer, I worried that if I spread the word, people would steer clear of me, and that I’d be offered fewer gigs as a freelance writer and teacher. Even after you recover, the taint of cancer remains, and in this world of glancing attention, people might think, years later, “Doesn’t she have cancer?”
The flip side to people stigmatizing cancer is those who don’t take it seriously, especially breast cancer, supposedly tamed by girly pink ribbons and walk-a-thons. You hear that it’s nothing, that other cancers are the real cancers, and that with early detection hardly anyone dies anymore. In keeping with me telling it like it is: that’s a big ole heap of bullshit.
Recently, my husband was leaving another message at an uncommunicative doctor’s office. “Please call me,” he said. “I really need to know more about my father’s, um, situation.” When he got off the phone, I said, “That’s great that you keep after it. But next time, maybe call it what it is. Not you’re father’s situation. His cancer.” His father is 96 and was recently diagnosed. Cancer comes at all ages and in so many forms it’ll make your head spin. All those varieties and stages and grades crouch under one crow-black word: cancer.
I’ve been under that dark wing. Now that I’m back out in the open air, I have the energy to be a pest, a not-so-quiet crusader for calling cancer by its true name.
