She seems to terrify everyone around her, and John and I both love her right away. She knows the details of my case off the top of her head. She refers to my cancer as being “highly curable.” She says she prefers to call chemo combinations “recipes” because “cocktail” makes her think about having a drink too early in the day and that’s disappointing. So maybe we are not polar opposites.
“I like how nonplussed she seems by the whole thing,” I say to John after she leaves the room and I’m wiggling back into my sports bra. There is still a huge bruise on my breast from the biopsy, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not the tumor—just a side effect. “She’s totally unimpressed by my cancer. Maybe even a little bored by it. I think that’s good.”
“I don’t think nonplussed means what you think it means,” says John, half listening to a work voicemail he’s missed.
“Really?” I say. My shirt is inside out. He helps me pull it back over my head. “Doesn’t it mean blasé—like not worked up about something?”
“It’s the opposite.” Now he’s groping around under my shirt with one hand as he googles the word on his phone with the other. “I don’t believe you,” I say. He shows me the definition.
“Oh,” I say, pushing his hand away. “Then I like how non-nonplussed she is. And I am frankly nonplussed by your behavior in this exam room.”
The rest of the day: scans, waiting, talking to pharmacists, more waiting, and meeting the rest of the team—the radiation oncologist, the surgeon. The surgeon makes me smile when he makes a Freudian slip while referring to the choice between lumpectomy and mastectomy as being “my incision” instead of “my decision.”
7. At Chemo School
Everyone is fiercely upbeat as we learn not to eat rare tuna and how to tie a square scarf and what kind of mouthwash is good for mouth ulcers.
I sit with a friendly-faced nurse and a number of other newly diagnosed folks in their seventies and eighties, crowded around a table in the bowels of the cancer center. There are so very many of us, actually, I might be suffocating.
“Are we having fun yet?” asks an abundantly lipsticked lady as she fiddles with her cane.
“I know I am!” pipes up her husband, grinning at the nurse, then me.
I text Tita, who had offered to come with me. “Now I really wish you had come. You would adore this scene.” She is a fiction writer, and she loves the inner workings of things: bodies, minds, relationships, support group meetings. She loves to pull things apart and examine every weird corner of them. We can spend hours dissecting a strange interaction at the grocery store or a waiter’s mannerisms or the emotional challenges her sister’s ex-boyfriend’s mother might be facing. “I feel like I’ve been granted access to the mecca of unexpected intimacy,” I say.
“PLEASE. WRITE. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. DOWN,” she texts back.
The nurse emphasizes the importance of condom use during midchemo sexual intercourse and everyone stares in my direction. I take furious notes in my binder. I underline condom twice, maybe three times.
“I have the c-word but the c-word doesn’t have me,” someone says and we all nod.
Discussing the chemo shellfish prohibition, a gray-faced man in a golf jacket announces that he has a “sexual attraction to pulling the shell off shrimp by the tail.”
“Oh for God’s sake—this again,” moans his wife. After a big pause, everyone laughs for real.
We recite the cancer center phone number aloud in unison, with gusto. We wish each other well.
We graduate. We’re ready for the big leagues.
8. In the Chemo Bay
The treatment room has no doors. Maybe a pulled curtain, a hushed voice, but in the end it is an open sea of people waiting together to take in the poisonous stuff that we hope will make us better. Time moves differently here—so much waiting, so much taking place. All the double-checking and bracelet scanning. All the side effect management: Zofran, steroids, saline flushing. The please-repeat-your-name-and-birth-date. Do you need a snack? More water? The keen eyes of the hazmat-suited nurses, the steady drip-dripping of the IV, laughter, the smell of french fries, ginger ale tabs fizz-popping open, texts pinging in from all directions.
“Are you doing okay?” I ask myself in the chemo bay.
“I think so,” I say.
9. Suspicious Country
Right after the diagnosis, I find it nearly impossible to read. I can’t think clearly, and I don’t have the patience for the development of other people’s ideas and images.
“Yeah, I had that, too,” my mom says when I mention it to her. “I did a lot of staring at the wall. And I watched every single episode of NCIS. It’s kind of like having a baby. Don’t worry—you’ll get back to it.”
I remember a Christmas several years back when she was feeling very ill and directionless, and we spent a chilly weekend at the beach reading and discussing a biography of Michel de Montaigne. It left her on more solid ground. I pull out my old graduate school copy of the Montaigne Essays and start to read.
In one of my favorite essays he writes about his brother’s sudden death at age twenty-three after being hit in the head by a tennis ball:
He did not sit down or rest, but five or six hours later he died of apoplexy caused by the blow.
With such frequent, common examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly get rid of the thought of death; how can it not seem at every moment to be gripping us by the throat?
Montaigne came to know death well during his life in sixteenth-century France: the loss of five of his six daughters in childhood, the sudden demise of his closest friend in his arms at the hands of the plague, a lifetime of debilitating kidney stone attacks.
It is a continual source of torment that cannot be assuaged at all. There is no place from which it may not come; we may keep turning our heads ceaselessly this way and that, as in suspicious country.
Suspicious country—I’m beginning to know that place.
Certainly, it is the far better name for a boutique in town called A Special Place Wigs: a chemo/hair loss specialty shop full of hats, bright scarves, wigs, appeasing creams, even sad little yellowing packets of eyebrow pairs shaped of human hair.
The first time I went there, I opened the door gripping a paper prescription from my oncologist that said “head prosthesis.” In my postdiagnosis haze, I had thrown out the first one she gave me, thinking: Oh, this must be for someone else. I haven’t lost my head.
Katrine, the stylist, shaved off what was left of my hair in a back room and helped fit me for my wig. Tita took lots of pictures and we laughed and laughed.
Montaigne writes: “When a horse stumbles, a roof tile falls, however slightly a pin pricks, let us immediately ruminate on this: ‘So, what if this were death itself?’?”
When the scissors’s snips are brusque and sudden. When the clippers buzz on. When your new hair emerges sleek and orderly from a shoebox.