One in Eight

“Why me” never crosses your mind. Maybe you feel it’s inevitable; after all, your best friend and first boyfriend both died from cancer—not breast like you, but cancer nonetheless. And your favorite grandfather and most of his brothers and sisters—except the sister who died in the influenza epidemic—died of cancer. So many tumors. So many errant cells run amok. You should be grateful breast cancer hasn’t run in your family. Now it does.

How did you join the one in eight? You breastfed, exercised, ate well, never smoked, and drank in moderation. Wouldn’t you rather have been with the seven in eight? Perhaps different cancers wait for them.

You’re lucky you caught it early. You don’t think five centimeters and five lymph nodes sound like early detection. It could be worse. Your tumor could have invaded your chest wall. Why not say your pectoral muscles? It sounds like your tumor is on the other side of a barricade, as if it weren’t able to breach your body’s defenses other than the five lymph nodes it infiltrated. 

Chemotherapy doesn’t make you sick. Isn’t that wonderful? Lucky you! The medications to prevent nausea give you insomnia and constipation. You laugh and say you’re full of shit and can’t sleep. Everyone applauds your great attitude.

When you begin shedding, your hairstylist shaves your head. Gay waiters say your head is lovely. Straight men don’t look at you. You play the cancer card when you take your smoothie into the shoe store, daring the clerks to say something. They don’t notice you, your bald head, or the smoothie. You feel invisible. The stubble is annoying so you roll a lint roller over your scalp. Little flecks of hair stick to the tape looking like a code or an infestation. You do it every day until your scalp gleams. You wonder if you should pretend you’re Telly Savalas and suck DumDums or sing like Sinead O’Connor. But you’re avoiding sweets because too many so-called experts have told you sugar feeds cancer. You try not to sound like the expert you are becoming when you tell them sugar feeds all cells. It doesn’t discriminate and neither does cancer. As for singing, please don’t unless you’re alone in the shower or car.

Your surgeon says you don’t need a lumpectomy. Isn’t that grand? You get to keep your breast. But he keeps carving at it to get clean margins. Inexplicably, your tumor grew after you finished chemotherapy. Your oncologist recommends removing your ovaries and fallopian tubes so you won’t produce estrogen. He suggests a medication to block estrogen production. You agree and think cancer is like a carnival ride you can’t get off. While waiting for your mastectomy—so much for keeping your breast—one of the nurses reviews your patient record and discovers your tumor is HER2 positive. How fortuitous! You wonder if that is why your tumor continued to grow. But you stuff that thought away into a box buried deep within and focus on how lucky you are she discovered this. Anger seems dangerous. You don’t want to open that door, that Pandora’s box of emotions.

After each operation—four in six weeks—you take a deep breath. On your own. Without a ventilator. You’re grateful you made it through. You never tell anyone how afraid you were to go under. You hate to lose control. Your cancer has put you in the backseat of a limousine driven by people you barely know and yet, for the most part, trust. 

The medication your oncologist prescribed makes you feel like your feet have been beaten to a pulp every night while you sleep. Although your pain tolerance is high, you wince and groan with each step you take in the morning. It feels as if all of the bones in your feet have been broken. You keep moving, otherwise the pain remains. You run. You do yoga. You walk your dogs. 

Incrementally, the effects of no estrogen take over. Most of your hot flashes happened during chemo. You don’t miss sweating through multiple pajamas every night. But, you do miss vaginal discharge—what a surprise! Your vagina is as dry as the Sahara desert. Your eyes are dry. Your nose either runs or dries out; there is no in between. You wish you could slough the dead skin cells off your entire body—every twenty minutes. You gain weight. Your temper is short. You cannot abide stupidity. But, really, is that new? You can’t blame that on the lack of estrogen. 

You feel brittle, inside and out. You wonder if you will crack open one day and there will be nothing but the husk of your former self. Or maybe you are like a matryoshka with a new, cancer-free body inside. If that’s the case, you want your same brain.

With each scan or test, you are relieved the helpful medications aren’t harming you too much and your cancer has not recurred—yet. You research odds, percentages, and recurrence rates as if knowledge will keep you alive just a little bit longer. 

You wonder if you’ll ever date again and think it’s a good thing you had loads of great sex during your twenties and thirties. You miss sex, but you’re grateful you don’t have to worry about a partner. You feel invisible to men. 

Anytime someone begins a conversation about your cancer with the statement, “It’s a good thing…” you try not to eviscerate them. Perhaps this is some sort of retribution for all the stupid things you have said. 

You’re not grateful for cancer and you never will be. But, you’re grateful it was your breast and not your brain—and your breast rather than your mom’s or nieces’ breasts. If anyone had to have breast cancer, you were the healthiest woman in your family and most able to handle it. So, you’re grateful for that.

You’re one in eight. Isn’t that great?

-Kathleen Quigley

Kathleen Quigley is a writer, massage therapist, and marathon runner. She pursued an MFA at Columbia College, Chicago, and took a hiatus to raise her son. She has published fiction and nonfiction in HCE Review, Hypertext Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Seventh Wave, Hairtrigger, among others. She lives in Wisconsin with her crazy rescue dog and is writing a memoir about cancer and running.