Ghost Crabs
On November 1, 2022, at a hospital just outside Chicago, a surgical team excised a ghost from my chest. It weighed 28 grams, my ghost, and after it was removed, sectioned, and placed in formalin I did feel lighter. But a year later I remain haunted.
I had surgery on Samhain, the moment celebrated by my Celtic ancestors when the veil between the worlds is so thin that your ghosts can come to visit. When the forces of darkness, death, and decay are set loose from the underworld to roam freely, come into your house, and sit for a time by the fire. It marks the end of one year and the beginning of a new one; the end of one life, one body, and the beginning of the next. But Samhain itself is a liminal space – neither old nor new, summer or winter, living or dead. Perhaps this is anesthesia? Alive but unconscious, feeling no pain.
According to Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book – “the Bible for women with breast cancer” – a lumpectomy to remove the tissue where a tumor that has been obliterated by chemo once grew is known as a “ghostectomy.” No medical professional has ever used this term with me, but since I stumbled across it in Dr. Love’s Bible I have been unable to shake the hold it has on my imagination. Part of having cancer is struggling to shape an inexplicable experience into a coherent narrative arc, and who doesn’t love a good ghost story?
This story begins in medias res: a woman is lying on a table, crying. What has happened? By one telling, she has finally had her ghost – the unwelcome presence, the unsettling lump – recognized by science. She knew it was real all along, but no one else would acknowledge it. It’s nothing, people said – don’t worry. I’m sure it’s benign; an errant twist of muscle, an irritation, a cyst. Lacking an alternative, she believed them. Is she crying because she finally feels heard?
The ghost is captured by its tail and a tiny nip is removed, whisked away to the lab, and named: invasive ductal cancer, grade 2, triple positive. It is measured and deemed to be a grape, or an olive, a biological reality, not a phantom at all – though it turns out it has secreted other more spectral offspring in nearby ducts and nodes.
The ghostbusters are brought in; the chemicals that whittle the tumor down to nothing deployed, streams crossed. I feel it happening, week by week, until there is nothing left to feel but the emptiness where something novel once grew and thrived. This absence is what goes under the knife, leaving me to wonder: Is the void the ghost or is the cancer? Is the tumor the ghost of my past, finally being liberated from haunting my present?
Is it an exorcism, this surgery? Should there have been a cleric on hand, scrubbed in with the rest?
Dr. Susan Love herself died of cancer – of the blood not the breast. A pioneering surgeon, she pushed for a holistic and conservative approach to treatment. She spoke truth to power, empowering women to ask questions and push back against the monolith of male medical authority. Before she became a doctor she was studying to be a nun, a profession more forgiving of spirits.
In her chapter on surgery, Dr. Susan Love notes the phenomenon of “phantom breast symptoms” – the experience of postsurgical sensation where there should be none; a nipple itch, for example, where there is no nipple. She quotes Audre Lorde’s description of “fixed pains and moveable pains, deep pains and surface pains, strong pains and weak pains. There were stabs and throbs and burns, gripes and tickles and itches.” A friend who had a single mastectomy refers to this situation as “ghost boob” – and indeed, my ghost stabs me in the crater of my tumor bed once, twice, three times a day.
“It’s just the nerve endings regrowing,” says the surgeon, but she has the grace to add, “I know that doesn’t help the pain.”
Science has no answer for these strange haunting pains. Every stab and spasm are both an intrusion and a familiar presence, a reminder of who you were, where you’ve been, what was once there but now is gone. Illness makes you a ghost in the life you had before, a friend told me. And the life you had before becomes the ghost in the new life.
My mind turns to other ghosts. Ghostwriters, for example: helpful ghosts who work in shadow, helping the writer find her voice. And ghost lights, the solitary lamp left lit in the theater after hours. On a practical level, this is meant to prevent late night visitors from falling into the orchestra pit. But theater lore holds they are lit to appease the theater ghost, who feels abandoned if left behind in total darkness and may act out in unsettling ways.
Have you ever been ghosted by a lover? One moment your life is entwined with another’s, the next they are gone – and you are left to sift through the shards of your heart for clues. As a breakup tactic it is disorienting and dehumanizing, and far less clear a demarcation of ‘before’ and ‘after’ than a medical diagnosis. In the common parlance the leaver is understood to be the ghost, the memory of their presence haunting the left behind. But I think the one abandoned is the ghost, left to wonder if they really exist at all, to behave erratically, lost in lamentation. Are you the ghost, to them?
And then there is the ghost crab, the scuttling cancer made solid. Ghost crabs are pale, sand-colored scavengers able to change color to match their surroundings and hide in plain sight. They’re fast runners, faster than you’d think, retreating to their burrows or into the sea at sign of danger, but they’re also vulnerable, valued by ecologists as an indicator of the adverse impacts of human activity. In the zodiac system to which I subscribe when it suits, the crab of Cancer lies opposite my Capricorn goat, two poles forever twinned to chase each other around the wheel.
“I wanna be haunted by the ghost/ of your precious love,” sings the late, great Sinead O’Connor in her precise soprano, and then Shane MacGowan growls into the song in counterpoint, beauty and the beast. In the video for this song Sinead looks demure and uncomfortable, dolled up in a long sleeveless dress, lipstick, and eyeshadow – but at one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment she glances sideways –at MacGowan? Someone off camera? – and raises her eyebrows with a shrug, as if to say, “I don’t know about this ghost thing, do you?”
I didn’t know I believed in ghosts until mine was taken away.
For the writers: I wrote this under the loose guidance of Summer Brennan’s weeklong Essay Camp, using my own version of her “Five Things” method of generative writing. I highly recommend her Substack, A Writer’s Notebook; it’s a wealth of wise, unfussy writing advice infused with low-key good humor. Thanks Essay Camp!
Absolutely riveting. Gorgeous writing about the mysteries of the body, illness, and our relationship to the world.
Martha, as a breast oncologist this puts so many words in my head. Thank you for voicing your ghost so that we can name ours. Beautiful essay, truly.