Bad Days, Good Folks

I knew when I saw the pink t-shirt in my CIBC Run for the Cure bag that I wouldn’t be running the race. Yesterday was not a good day. My bag of t-shirts, identifying number tags and other race paraphernalia contained an extra t-shirt. A pink t-shirt. A survivor t-shirt. And I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t even look in the bag once I realized what was lurking there. I “earned” that pink t-shirt because I have an embodied relation to breast cancer that is recognized in this particular fashion. I am, in some way, symbolically aligned, now, with the motivational engine that runs the race - that makes the race run. No survivors, no race. And yet, I can not identify with the survivor emblem, nor the survivor discourse. I have written about this before.

It’s surprisingly hard, in this space, to tell a story that is not happy, or that doesn’t contain some generative moment of insight, or victory against ignorance, or fighting back against “the system”. I am very aware that you may not like this story, or that you may think it should have a different ending. Sometimes I think that blog entries should have ratings like movies do. This entry could be rated as, RA (Reading Avoidance advised): Theme or content may be excessively maudlin and introspective. May contain trite observations and narcissistic self-indulgence.

Yesterday was a sad day. It was a day of remembrance, and of mourning. I don’t know how to be a “partner with cancer”. I miss my old body. I miss the carefree relationship to my body that I had before cancer. Sure, it was often an unhealthy relation. As if immortal, I used to smoke, drink to excess, and ingest olive oil as if it were air. Cancer eats through fantasies of the displaced body. Cancer is really not sexy. And cancer makes happy places a lot harder to find and to sustain. I don’t need any extra burdens in the “look on the dark side of life” department, believe me! My life has always been a precarious race against anxiety, and now, I feel like I am dragging some enormous and unwieldy set of bags alongside me that I just can’t shake. I can’t talk my way out of this one.

Lots of good folks contacted me this morning to give me their CIBC Race for the Cure news. Thanks for that! Brandy’s Babes is the team I was registered to run with, and they had a really great time, despite the deluge of rain that blanketed Vancouver yesterday. And I heard from P/J who ran and fund-raised in my name, that they raised serious cash and were like gazelles from start to finish. My buddy S, in Regina, was led through a pre-race warm-up to the tune of “it’s raining men”, which, knowing S, he may have been hoping for. S ran on a 23-person team that raised lots of dough. WAY to GO!!!!

Thousands ran yesterday, and I was not amongst them.

 

The Cost of Living and the Return of the Repressed

“My intellectual work, I now know, is an outgrowth of the life I’ve led. It has transformed whatever traumas I’ve survived into something useful for myself, and I hope, for others. My work has changed my life. My life has changed my work. … I know that my work must be accomplished in the face of uncertainty and chaos, when instability threatens to engulf me, to spin me out of control, for only then will I achieve a clarity of vision that comes when I try to integrate my life’s work with my life. … Now, and not later, I will try to understand.” Louise deSalvo, Vertigo

Why am I continuing to write this blog now that my terrifying “really bad brush with breast cancer story” has come to a happy ending? Perhaps I should stop writing. But I am not ready to stop writing about this - either my own experience, or what I have learned about the terrifying “facts” of breast cancer and the not unrelated gruesome details of the pink politics of breast cancer cash, the cancerocracy, and the misuse of breast cancer by major corporations to brand their products to the boomer generation with those fucking ribbons.

Breast cancer does not ever disappear, nor is it “cured.” And we are living in the midst of an epidemic of breast cancer. Cancer’s return overshadows life itself. Yesterday a friend sent me an article about the relationship between daily consumption of vegetables and “cancer’s return.” What blew me away about the article is not that an excess of vegetable consumption is unrelated to breast cancer survival, but that within time elapsed in the five-year study, a whopping 10% of the study participants had died - and these were “women who had been treated successfully for early-stage breast cancer.” Holy shit. 10% of early-stage, success stories of breast cancer treatment have died after five years, and we are supposed to be thinking about vegetable consumption? What is wrong with this picture?

All I can think about when I wake up is - it just takes one rogue cell — yeah I know that I am not being the compliant happy heroic figure of my own tragedy. But that is all it takes for metastatic cancer to set up shop in the other places breast cancer likes to live - about 25% ea for bones, lungs, liver and brain. And my life, or at least prognostically speaking, hangs on the competence of the guy who reviewed my pathology specimens. And they don’t look at it all, of course. They just look at slices.

That’s the thing about cancer. Well, one of the things. It’s never over. No sooner do they tell you about the pathology report, then in the next breath is information about recurrence.

I wish I could be more cheerful today and celebrate the happy news about my pathology report. I am supposed to feel like I have been handed my fresh new identity card for a “second life”. But actually, there is no second life. There is just this life. And I have work to do, now, with this life that I inhabit. And so I will keep writing. I will write to save my life — as if writing might save this life. As deSalvo articulates so beautifully, “Now, and not later, I will try to understand.”

 

Survivor, 2.0: Just Say “No!”

“To the extent that current methods of detection and treatment fail or fall short, America’s breast-cancer cult can be judged as an outbreak of mass delusion, celebrating survivorhood by downplaying mortality and promoting obedience to medical protocols known to have limited efficacy. And although we may imagine ourselves to be well past the era of patriarchal medicine, obedience is the message behind the infantilizing theme in breast-cancer culture, as represented by the teddy bears, the crayons, and the prevailing pinkness. You are encouraged to regress to a little-girl state, to suspend critical judgment, and to accept whatever measures the doctors, as parent surrogates, choose to impose.” Welcome to Cancerland
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Harper’s Magazine, November 2001

The first weekend after my diagnosis I made Janice and Sz take me down to the Dragon Boat races where there was a whole slew of ABreast in a Boat breast cancer “survivors”, paddles in hand, taking to the water with style and great energy. After their race, the survivor teams held carnations in the air high above their votes in tribute to those women who had died. I knew that watching was going to be hard, but I needed to begin to imagine myself in one of those boats, and soon, paddling my way to survival. I was haunted by the voice-over narration during this very moving event. Maybe I am just an over-achiever, but I was struck by an intense pressure both to meet the challenge of being a “survivor” and to feel a fearful guilt that I might be always-already a loser in the survival game. What if the probability of death and the will to agency don’t actually intersect in a Lance Armstrong moment of skilled determination?

There is a hard kernel of an obscured Real - a residual by-product of deliberate ideological distortion - in the “survivor” discourse that is foundational within the breast cancer community. I am supposed to be learning how to “be a survivor” of breast cancer. How can I not want to survive? After all, I have just undergone radical surgery and will in all likelihood be faced with countless further treatments all aimed at producing enhanced longevity in the face of an illness characterized at its root by its relentless capacity to cut life short. Do I just have a bad attitude? What is wrong with the discourse of “survival”?

Go and watch Alien Song, an animation created by Victor Navone that went viral online a while ago. It’s a perfect enactment of the Real that lurks in the survival discourse. Full of energy and passion, mid-song, our friendly alien is crushed by the disco ball. I loved it when I first saw it years ago, and it seems especially insightful now.

Yeah, I want to survive. But cancer is a process of cellular proliferation. It just takes one cell. If it shows up somewhere else, well, there goes “survival” and I don’t want to always-already feel guilty that somehow I have just not been strong enough, or virtuous enough, and have therefore failed the survival challenge because I didn’t try hard enough, or I wasn’t cheerful enough. And I am no god damn hero.