I. Nightmare

Ten years from my diagnosis and safely into remission, I dreamt my old breasts popped out through a set of stitches. Like in those time-lapse nature videos of plants bursting out of the earth. The stitches gave way without any resistance as if they knew these new “breasts” were flimsy, didn’t stand a chance. The old guard was asserting itself again with the momentum of a leviathan. The grim reaper was coming. I sat up unable to breath for a few seconds, sweat on my forehead, heart so fast it fluttered more than beat. I shrieked for my husband with a sound he had never heard me use. He rolled over hugged me and when I calmed down, he wrapped my arms around his neck in our usual sleeping position, my hands covered by his. I was awake, and my new breasts were intact.

II. Haunted Landscape/Foreign Land/Bad Weather

We had moved to London ten years earlier, selling our house in Connecticut and giving away almost seventy percent of our stuff. A big truck hauled it off to a charity shop and I felt like spinning in circles from the freedom and lightness. We had raised our two children in this house and now they were both off to college. Free of my active parenting duties, my house, a space opened for my husband and me to play, improvise, travel. I would be a literature professor in the Institute of North American Studies at King’s College London and my husband would head up a separate institute in international development. We rented the top floor flat of a mansion house overlooking the Hampstead Heath where green parrots flew by and landed on the windowsill. The Heath itself was an ancient tract of land with murky ponds, fallen trees covered in moss and a strange knack for making everyone get lost. The Heath had no signs saying, “You’ve arrived at the Ladies’ Pond,” or “This Way to the Spaniards Inn.” Cell phone reception disappeared as you got deeper into the murky middle. Fog and rain shrouded my time on the Heath and throughout were benches with different inscriptions honoring the dead, one of them said: “For Nell who loved the fields.”

III. The Beast Within

After one semester teaching at King’s college, the meticulous NHS found cancer in a required mammogram. After this speedy diagnosis, I was no longer on speaking terms with my breasts. Our relationship was over the minute they tried to kill me. I avoided looking at them and took no pleasure in seeing them. I included the other breast in my cold war since there was a strong chance it would also get cancer.

IV. Doom/ Claustrophobia

At home there was now a third presence, shadowy and frightful that followed us up the stairs and into bed and lay flat against me in the dark. Night was now my enemy because I knew how alone I was, isolated in this experience. I endured the night listening to podcasts with earphones, a BBC series called Desert Island Discs where people chose the eight songs to bring with them to a desert island and one luxury item. I was on my own island. I so associate the opening music with my nighttime terror that ten years later it triggers a traumatic reaction. But the worst was my self-pity. At 3 am, I folded into a fetal position and waited to grow a film of algae around me, bury myself in ugliness. I was going to die.

V. Mad Scientist

The doctors talked to me about one of my options: chemo to try and shrink the tumor. But chemo is so toxic it had given my friend Lynn a new chemo-created cancer when the breast cancer didn’t manage to kill her. If the tumor did shrink from the chemical onslaught, I’d get a lumpectomy. Another option was to lop off both my breasts and also remove some lymph nodes in my armpit which would leave my right arm partially numb permanently. The cut off breasts could be replaced with two artificial breasts—they would insert breast expanders to stretch the skin and then ports to fill them up in stages.

During my recovery, I’d need four drains coming out of my torso to evacuate the fluids. I was supposed to be teaching Gothic literature in the spring term. I imagined walking in with a trench coat and then flashing it open and they’d see the four post-reconstruction drainage tubes coming out of me like spider legs, red fluid flowing into bottles. I’d say, “Welcome to Gothic literature!” like the character in The Mask, manic and crazy town.

VI. Labyrinth

The doctor gave us a magazine to page through that Peter, my husband, called “the opposite of porn”—pictures of women’s torsos with reconstructed breasts. The scars, the mismatched udders on either side. These new fake breasts would have no sensation. That knob of pleasure, the nipple, was gone, so the new faux nipple was like an elevator button that didn’t work. Yet it remained permanently erect. Franken-tits, I thought, but didn’t say out loud. The nurse said they had patients look at the catalog to prepare them for the fact that the resulting constructed breasts weren’t always so pretty. A feminist cancer survivor I met at the cancer center argued against reconstruction,

“Just leave the scars, badge of honor. Hell, get yourself some radical tattoos over the stitches.”

My nurse told me, “This has to be your choice, and your choice alone. Otherwise, it will be hard to live with.”

When I asked about doing one breast only, she said “If you do one, that one will be perky for the rest of your life, enough to balance a teacup; but the other will make its way to the floor over time.” A doctor kept trying to push nipples on me, showing pictures of them, “Look how realistic! We tattoo the areola pink, so it looks natural—you can choose the color,” he said, like a hawker at the fair selling fried dough. Nipples, nipples, who wants nipples!

I went home, took a shower that evening and with my usual decisiveness came out and yelled, “Off with their heads,” in a British accent. I told my husband, “I want them out of our lives forever.”

VII. Damsels in Distress

Leading up to the surgery, Peter and I stopped having real conversations and spoke in sighs. Sometimes in unison. I’d hear him sighing in the kitchen and in his home office, and I’d sigh from upstairs like we were singing a round. He used to whistle; now he just sighed. His eyes that were so reassuring in the past had gotten smaller from sleeplessness, but fear had also shrunk them into the desperate look of a squirrel guarding its nut, paranoid someone will take it away. His wife was going to die. My guy. We had met at twenty-five and now we were both middle-aged. We used to joke he’d get five cats if he ever lost me. Stinky, Scratchy, Sweaty, Smelly, and Spitty. Not funny anymore.

VIII. Heroine Prone to Fainting

I made it through five cancer surgeries and lost twenty pounds from the fear diet. I was very weak after they took my drains out and needed help walking and carrying things. Post lecture and after a lingering student finally left, I sat down. I couldn’t stand up from exhaustion. I staggered over to the seminar table, lay down, put my coat over myself, and fell asleep. I gave in to taking a leave of absence.

When I had physically recovered, I was told in one of my checkups that to be safe, I’d have to now have chemo. I hugged Peter and said into his shoulder, “Why can’t they leave my body alone? I can’t do this anymore.” I didn’t try to be brave, but sobbed aloud in the cancer center, self-pity reasserting itself. My stylish cousin who had come with us for support gave me her designer sunglasses, so I now looked like Jackie O but without any grace, since I was still bawling my eyes out. Days after that, I went numb and into a depression. I dutifully took the required tests to see if my heart could take it, then next I’d put in a catheter. I needed to fill my chemo dance card with people who could take care of me nonstop since I’d be doubled up over the toilet most of the time. My husband had used up his leave with all my surgeries.

IX. Monster

My biggest dread was chemo, not just the thought of pouring poison in through an overworked vein, but having my illness become public. I’d lose my long curly hair which was a part of my identity. My kids who had just left for college, striding out into the wide world, would see me looking like a gothic villain: pale, cracked lips, eyebrow-less, hunched over in nausea.

X. Prophesy

I brought up the idea of skipping chemo after all my surgeries to Judy, my cancer center volunteer, who was a survivor herself. She said,

“I know a woman who said no to chemo. She drank these green drinks and believed in crystals. She’s dead now.”

XI. Hero

My mom came with me to sign the chemo papers with a Dr. Stein. She had lost my brother to cancer six years earlier. He had tried it all: surgery and chemo and still didn’t survive. This made it hard for her to have hope.

In the waiting room were an assortment of people that cancer had turned into ghouls. The orthodox woman with a wig who croaked out through her voice prosthesis that “chemo was awful,” the skinny blotchy faced woman with a catheter who kept moaning, “I’ve been waiting seven hours for my chemo.” The bald woman whose deflated husband held her arm as she limped to a chair. The man with no nose. They were all waiting for the great Dr. Stein.

Three hours passed. Whenever we complained that we were waiting, a woman with a hair wrap told us “He’s worth the wait.” Finally, they called my name. When I walked in, Dr. Stein was sitting in his chair looking thoughtful. He asked me why I thought I was there. A strange question. My mother sat silently next to me in which I found out later was total terror. She thought he was about to deliver a blow.

“I’ve gotten a double mastectomy, but had cancer in my sentinel node, so they want to make sure they clear it all out with chemo.”

“Yes,” he said quietly, tilting his head to the side. “However, I’m not sure it’s justified in your case.”
I froze. “You mean I’m not getting chemo?”

“It has a three percent effectiveness with your kind of cancer. I don’t think those are big enough odds to put you through all that. We don’t like to rush into chemo,” he said. I agreed with him. I would not be getting chemo for that paltry percentage. “If something were three percent off on sale, that would be no incentive,” I said.

“Can I hug you?”

“I have a cold.” His nurse was standing nearby, smiling.

“Can I hug you?” She nodded yes. He excused himself to go and check with my surgeons. I was tearing up with relief. My mom was preserved in the same position.

“Mom did you hear what he said?” She nodded.

He came back, “Yes, let’s leave this be. Just heal through Christmas. You’ll have to get on tamoxifen which will kill off the estrogen that the cancer feeds on. It will wither without it. It may give you hot flashes.”

“Hot flashes, that’s nothing!”

XII. Intense Emotion

I caught Peter right before he went into a launch conference he was hosting for his institute. He just laughed with happiness. The group picture that they took immediately after has him standing with the rest of his faculty with a turbo-charged grin; he looks like he is about to topple over with glee. Everyone else looks dignified.

In the cab on the way home, my mom and I kept repeating,

“I can’t believe it!” and “We dodged a bullet.”

Then we shouted, “We love you Dr. Stein!”

“I love when he said, ‘it will wither away,’” Mom said, rolling down the cab window.

“Me too.”

“Wither away!” I shouted.

I skipped on the sidewalk outside our flat. Then I wrote cards for my doctors wanting to conclude my business with the hospital. Seal it shut. I sang out on the telephone to all beloveds, exaggerating my happiness and energy and health. I slammed the door on cancer talk. When people asked the typical “How are you?” I played dumb and said, “Great!” as if I didn’t know what the hell they were referring to.

I walked on the Heath imagining myself as one of the Brontë heroines crossing the moors. I thought “Not today, Satan!” when my head wandered to worry. My husband and I started referring to cancer as “The Recent Unpleasantness,” what Southerners still call the Civil War. It had that British understatement. Besides, we never wanted to say the word cancer again.

XIII. The Sublime

One evening ten years into remission, my children visit for dinner. After we eat, Mica, my daughter in law, and I play cards sitting on my yoga mat. Lara is drawing next to the fire and Ben is playing guitar on the couch. Peter strokes the cat in his lap. This scene is like a snow globe in its perfection, and my body hums with well-being. I would like to time travel with this amulet back a decade, chase out the remnants of being probed, cut, needles in and out, blood drained, tubes, biopsies, waiting rooms, hospital gowns, scans, MRI tunnels, fluorescent lights, darkness. To come to my weary sick scrap metal of a body with this elixir saying, “It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”

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