*
Tonight John has gone to the bar to meet some friends. Emergency beer. He needs this as badly as I need the mastectomy. I can feel the Arbella tacking through the night toward my kitchen window. Stack of dishes to dry, my children to fold into their beds, but enter Anne Bradstreet: both of us so far from home in this kitchen. Neither of us can feel ground beneath our feet. We stand at the dining room table sorting clean laundry. “These towels are so soft and warm,” she marvels, sipping from her glass. Her husband is up on deck spotting some green shore, and mine is down the hill at the bar like a pin on a map of a place I’ve visited.
John Winthrop noted in his journal that before they ever saw the New World, they smelled it: “so pleasant a sweet ether, as did much refresh us, & there came the smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.”
*
Pilgrim. Peregrinus. Foreigner. I am trying to uncross my arms in the darkness. I am trying to keep my eyes open.
Early this afternoon on the back deck there was a ruckus in the upper branches of the giant oak. Two or three crows were loudly mobbing a hawk, and the hawk was sitting on the branch stoically ignoring the whole to-do. What is this? I was thinking. Couldn’t that hawk make mincemeat of those crows in about three seconds if it chose to? But then in a minute or so it was over—the crows having moved on, the hawk still perched on the branch, its genius eyes working the horizon.
I’m terrified. I’m fine. The world is changed and exactly as before. There are crows in my hair. I have no hair. Bring me a jug of wine. Bring me a kerchief to scrub spotlessly clean.
7. Damaged Goods
My friend Ginny who lives down in Charleston has the same kind of breast cancer as I do, and we like to text each other with ideas for a line of morbid prefab cancer patient thank-you cards to real and imaginary people that Ginny calls the “casserole bitches.” She’s a trust and estates lawyer, so she’s an expert in casserole bitches and their eyelash batting.
Our business is going to be called Damaged Goods and we plan to leave our children wealthy.
Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners.
Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better.
Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do.
All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective.
Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you.
When they found Ginny’s cancer, a few weeks after they found mine, it had already jumped into one of her lymph nodes. Ginny is a Carolina grad just like I am, so naturally she named her evil cancerous node after Tar Heel nemesis Christian Laettner. Neither of us know what to make of relying on Duke to save my life. She named her breast tumor after another famous Dookie, Bobby Hurley. “The chemo is going to blast those motherfuckers to obscurity,” she texts.
8. Drama
Nine p.m., and my half-front-toothed older son is loitering in our bedroom after his nightly insulin shot. He’s pretending to tell me about an idea he had for a comic book, but he keeps stealing looks at the TV screen, paused in Netflix binge mode on the Watch the Next Episode screen with the little text teaser below.
CHASING LIFE: Episode 12. April’s cancer goes into remission, but her return to work isn’t as smooth. Meanwhile, Leo languishes in a coma.
“So, you’re watching a cancer show?” he finally says sheepishly. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it makes me feel a little more normal. Plus it has really terrible writing, so it makes me laugh.”
“Terrible how?” he asks.
“Terrible like characters bawling, ‘Well, maybe you forgot, but I have cancer!!!’?”
“Oh,” he says. “That kind of terrible. Like, ‘Calm down. We know. We’re sorry about your cancer but please stop yelling.’?”
“Yes,” I say. “Just like that.”
9. Geography
On the latest mammogram images, it looks like you’re staring down from an airplane at night. The two tumors are lit-up cities—say Greensboro and Winston-Salem. And the four-centimeter stretch between them is Interstate 40, illuminated by headlights. We won’t know exactly how trafficky I-40 is until the surgeon gets in there.
According to Dr. Cavanaugh, this is a stupid way for cancer to behave. Smart cancer explodes itself like an atom bomb—mushrooming out wherever possible and jumping on the lymph node train to ride to the far reaches of the body and set up diabolic satellite campuses there. Stupid cancer makes a tumor, gets bored, sidles around, builds a nearby tumor. We hope.
Cavanaugh is not afraid of saying things like hopefully cured and probably no more chemo. But she also sends me for more imaging—the packed room of anxious women ranging from twenty to ninety all in our identical gray dressing gowns, half of us texting, half knitting—just to confirm the geography, as she says. As though having a map makes the trail less snowy.
10. The Wolf’s Lair
Here’s how the doctors will figure out whether or not your cancer has likely spread: The day before surgery, under an imaging machine in a cold basement room, a needle will be inserted into your tumor and you will be injected with a blue radioactive isotope dye.
As the stinging wears off, you will lie very still. The machine will be the only one that speaks to you—a robot voice commanding you to breathe.
Next, you will be sent off to have some lunch. You will sit in the sun on the patio of the Cancer Café eating a turkey wrap and watching a couple your parents’ age, both in wheelchairs, one of whom has become tangled in his oxygen lines, the other of whom is tenderly unwrapping the line from where it is caught in the wheel as she holds her cigarette aloft.
Later, back in the basement, a radiologist will track the path of the isotope with a Geiger counter. Whatever surrounding lymph nodes light up will be the nodes the tumor most likely drains to—the sentinel nodes—therefore, the ones most likely to contain escaping cancer cells. They will still be lit up when the surgeon goes in there the next day.
These are the ones he will pop out and send off to the pathologist who will chop and smear and stain them onto slides to examine under the microscope in a darkened room like your two sons memorizing dinosaur books and baseball cards with flashlights after lights out.
*
Only one node lights up during the sentinel-node mapping. Lone sentinel at the castle gate.
“Is that bad?” I ask the tech.
“There is no good or bad,” he says. He sounds tired. “It just means you have one sentinel.”