John hates change, and cancer is change run amok. “Can’t we please just opt out of this whole cancer thing?” he asks one night in bed.
“Nope,” I say. “And you have to love me even more now. You’re not allowed to leave your bald, one-breasted wife. That’s very gauche.”
“Just tell me where I’m allowed to put my hands so I don’t hurt you,” he says during sex.
“Nowhere,” I say.
16. Personals
One day Ginny texts: “Here’s a new card for our collection: Thanks so much for coming to visit and fucking my husband. I needed a divorce to keep my mind off cancer.”
The visitor in question is one of her close friends from college who has come to help take care of her during chemo. A new level of casserole bitch. She catches them in the living room one night when she gets up to get a glass of water. Ginny goes into lawyer-warrior mode. She makes them sign affidavits before they even get up from the fold-out sofa.
I have no idea what to say. I spend days scowling at every man I see. For the first time in all of this, I can’t sleep. John sees the silver lining: “I’m really looking better and better, aren’t I?”
I text Ginny: “You are fully entitled to slap the next person who tells you that God only gives us what we can handle.”
The day after the divorce finalizes she writes: “I’ve decided I’m going to take out a personal ad on craigslist.” We’ve been bemoaning our post-treatment bodies. “One-boobed, mentally unstable, newly divorced, borderline obese freight train with cankles, two kids, a silver-fox butch hairdo, and vaginal dryness ISO hot-bodied twentysomething with a large trust fund and larger hands who likes long walks on the beach, intelligent discussion, and uncomfortable sex.”
I think of a match immediately: Montaigne. His middle-aged craigslist ad (not that he was on the market—his wife glimmers into view from time to time): Straight-ish White Aristocrat/Thinker with persistent kidney stones and gout, robust bowels and waning sexual appetite, impressive book collection in welcoming medieval tower, and a passion for the Ancients and spicy food, ISO moderation in everything, long walks in unsettled woods, and intimacy with fear. Bandits, skeletons, and Death welcome. Politicians and doctors need not respond.
The man dreaded medical inventions as much as Ginny and I do: “To be subject to both kidney stones and abstention from the pleasure of eating oysters: that is two evils in one,” he wrote. “The illness pinches us on one side; the remedy on the other.”
The illness, the remedy. We are such fragile creatures, although we feel far more like oysters until we are dying—those rough husks.
Like Montaigne, Ginny has always lived not far from the coast—for her: the low country down in South Carolina. On one visit, she takes me out shell collecting with our kids and I can hardly believe the bounty: The lettered olive, she teaches me, looks like a rolled bill—smooth and heavy in your palm, rarely found intact. There is angel wing, moon snail, sand dollar, and slipper. The fighting conch is a beauty—midsized and spiky, and the unrolled lip at the edge is as inviting a castle as I’ve ever seen.
17. Tumor Board
Tonight my dad has invited us over to eat his famous barbecued chicken, and my mom feels strong enough to come to the dinner table. Usually she eats in the room she calls “the salon,” a room she had my dad paint a warm yellowy orange a few years back—where she can recline on her favorite couch next to the gas stove. She looks like a child in the dining room chair—a tiny version of herself, half-there at the head of the table, her legs curled up under her body, picking at her food, smiling at me briefly when I catch her eye.
Just as we start to eat, my phone rings. An unfamiliar Raleigh number—but I know right away who is on the other end.
“Hi, Dr. Cavanaugh!” I answer, getting up from the table.
*
Several days ago we went to Duke expecting answers and a plan following the mastectomy. Unfortunately there had been a delay with the pathology and the tumor board so we came home with neither.
Tumor board: the term kills me every time I hear it. You’re just saying that to freak me out, I think. What is actually a group of doctors from different specialties discussing the specifics of your case together around a table sounds like a cancer court-martial or a torture tactic. You could call it a “patient review meeting.” You could call it “checking in with my colleagues.” You could call it an “exaltation of oncologists.”
“I promise I’ll call you right after the tumor board meets on Monday afternoon,” she’d said, “But you don’t have to answer the phone if you don’t want to. You can always just let it go to voicemail and I’ll let you know what we’ve decided.”
She is on her way home from work, she tells me when I answer. But she wanted to call because she’d promised.
I can picture her tucked in some cool, pristine luxury sedan gliding along I-40. Unmelted iced coffee in the cup holder. Her blond hair still pulled back tidily from her face. A guided meditation CD whirring quietly in the player on pause.
The restained pathology report is back and the tumors are as we thought—only maybe not quite as dumb as we hoped. The tumor board unanimously recommends that we do another four cycles of chemo—this time with Adriamycin, a harsher drug.
And because it turns out a tenth of a millimeter margin isn’t enough to let anyone breathe easy, I will also have six weeks of radiation when the chemo is done.
*
My hair has just started growing back and it’s soft and downy and makes me feel human. My eyebrows are coming back, too—although in an incredibly disorganized way that I can kind of relate to. And I just rejoined the gym. As Dr. Cavanaugh is talking I feel like I’m hurtling backward, that I’m that many steps farther away from getting back to normal—whatever that is.
“Nina,” she says as we start to hang up, “I just want you to know that I still feel like we’re in a good place on this.”
I’m rethinking my image of serene, smooth-sailing Dr. Cavanaugh. It is 7 p.m. on a Monday night. She is headed home after a long day discussing tumors and telling patients who wouldn’t just let their phones go to voicemail that they need more chemo. Maybe worse. At home: her kids—two, not much older than mine, hastily crafted dinner, a mountain of email, a bag unpacked from the conference she returned from late last night. She probably used the only quiet moments of her whole day to call me from the highway.