I have wondered how to start this blog. Just thinking about writing my cancer onto the screen is way too real.
I have been living with a breast cancer diagnosis for three short weeks - days that have been filled to bursting with specialist appointments, blood tests, MRI, and hundreds of desperate and sometimes awkward conversations with friends and family. And I have cried. I have never cried so much as I have over the past 21 days. Buckets. I never know when the tears will start.
The beginning of this story probably involves a minimum of three combustive elements: queer love, a tattoo and cancer. I could start this account 17 years ago, when I had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Ange. She seemed like a heroic figure to me at the time. When I met her, Ange had just been through surgery for colon cancer. She had “the bag”. And she had a poster on her bedroom wall of an Amazonian woman with an amazing floral tattoo that wound its way across her double mastectomy scar. Ange died of cancer about six months after getting the all-clear from a doctor at the B.C. Cancer Agency. And now, today, I am quietly waiting for my own bilateral mastectomy (double) which is scheduled for the day after the day after tomorrow. And the tattoo that I have so proudly sported for the past seventeen years - a floral wreath that winds its way across my breasts in Ange’s honour - will itself be severed, and distorted; brutally cut short, just like my love of Ange.
I wanted to start this blog right away - back then - in the early days - but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t have the energy or perhaps, the courage. So this first entry will be a retrospective on the first three weeks.
June 8 - a mere three weeks ago - I got the call from my doctor with the results of my core biopsy. I was sitting in the Edmonton airport, waiting to fly back to Vancouver after having done a couple of really good research interviews. I am working on a project where I am looking at media, sexuality, communities and knowledge. When I saw my doctor’s name flash across the call display I knew before I even clicked the little green button that the news wasn’t good. After all, why phone me with good news? “Are you sitting down?” she ventured. My doctor told me that the biopsy of the right breast had revealed DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ). “We’ve found it very early,” she exclaimed buoyantly, “and it’s totally curable. 100%” She then told me that she was heading out of town herself, but that she had set up an appointment with a surgeon. I remember that I couldn’t hear the surgeon’s name, and that I was utterly at a loss for words. I couldn’t metabolize the information at all.
It was a Friday, which meant that I couldn’t get into the doctor’s office until Monday to read the radiologist’s report on the biopsy. So I read whatever I could get my hands on about DCIS. Monday, I knew what to look for in the report. And when I finally got to see the report, I couldn’t fathom the intention of my doctor’s good cheer. The DCIS was multi-focal, grade 3 comedocarcinoma, and with a focus of microinvasion. Not good. But my doctor wasn’t around, and the next step was to get in touch with the surgeon, and to see what I could find out about her.
Dr. C works at VGH and is an oncological surgeon. So far so good. I found published papers she had authored. I didn’t find anything awful, although I am not sure what I was expecting to find. When I called Dr. C’s office, her secretary set up an appointment the very next day. I was just four days post-biopsy news, and heading into the oncological surgery floor of a major hospital. I didn’t take that as a very reassuring sign although, of course, I was also really grateful.
Dr. C’s office manner was a breath of fresh air for me. She took one look at my page crammed with notes and questions, and asked me what I thought about the situation. I remember thinking, “Wow. How novel. A doctor who wants to know what I think before even giving me her opinion.” So I ventured forth with my impression of the biopsy report, outlined my family history of bilateral breast cancer, and ended with the notion that I would probably be more comforted with a simple mastectomy of the right breast than a lumpectomy, despite the equivalent survival rates, because the fear of recurrence would likely prove untenable for me. My presentation felt oddly clinical - like I was an extra on House who had just nervously stumbled her way through a case presentation during Rounds. I thought Dr. C would vigorously disagree. After all, how hopelessly old fashioned of me to suggest a mastectomy for DCIS when I could opt for lumpectomy and radiation - or what we call, “breast conserving” treatment. But instead of trying to persuade me to keep my right breast, Dr. C steered us right down the path of deciding the fate of the left breast, and about 60 seconds later, I had settled on a bilateral mastectomy. There wasn’t a whole lot left to talk about at that point, save for a discussion of the sentinal node biopsy - a technique for testing the cancer status of the lymph node closest to the cancer and that is designed to reduce the risk of unnecessary lymph node removal. Then came the date for the surgery. July 3. 3 days from today.
I don’t know how to accommodate to the fact that I have cancer, nor to the fact that in three days, my breasts will be removed. Some days, the loss of my breasts seems like the really bad thing that I have to somehow get used to. And then, cruelly, comes the realization that after all, what’s the loss of breasts in comparison to the very real possibility of metastatic cancer?
