Some personal news

"I am a ridiculous, embarrassing gratitude monkey on the regular."

Ten days before my wedding last month, at the age of 54, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

There. I didn’t bury the lede.

The weeks since getting this diagnosis in late May have been … accelerated, to say the least. I had to wait seven weeks for a mammogram to get a look at the interesting lump in my breast, but once the results were in things started happening very fast. Two days later, lying prone, a biopsy needle buried in my boob, I asked the radiologist what else it could be besides cancer. “I don’t think it’s anything else,” she said. And that was that.

I spent the time we had allotted for a honeymoon having my lymph nodes biopsied, meeting with doctors, and getting an MRI, a CT scan, a bone scan, all the scans. I got a port implanted in my chest and started chemotherapy on June 27. If all goes well – and they tell me it should go well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t, the cancer I have is, while not the best, also not the worst* – I will be done with treatment in about a year, with some cocktail of surgery and adjuvant (postsurgical) therapies to look forward to.

I’m laying all this out here, in such baldly declarative form, for a couple of reasons. First, for those of you who actually see me in person or on Zoom, this situation will be pretty obvious, as once my hair started to fall out last week I said fuck it and shaved it all off. I like it! It’s very breezy.

Second, it’s helpful to have some foundational facts out there in the world. As anyone who has ever been sick can tell you, the admin comes at you fast. Keeping track of doctors appointments, meds to take, the business of caring for yourself and trying to keep your life running, all on top of communicating with the people who love you by phone, by text, by email is A LOT. I’m not about to start a CaringBridge (really, I’m not that sick) but I abruptly understand why people do.

And while sticking to the quotidian rhythms of life has taken on a new urgency, it’s also generating some cognitive dissonance, as I post photos of my wedding, or the circus show I performed in recently, or the ducklings in the yard on social media, with no hint that they are already relics of another life. Only a few intimates at the wedding knew what was up. I didn’t want to be the Cancer Bride, an object of pity or concern. But on the day of the ceremony, which was beautiful, in a sun-dappled park in Wisconsin full of family and friends, the low-frequency thrum of a secret hummed in my thorax, and it has gotten louder since, relieved only by the process of telling people, one by one, what is happening.

To some degree it has actually been a good intellectual workout to have to tell this story over and over, playing around with variations, trying to make narrative sense of it all – or not, because cancer defies a narrative arc and it is liberatory to just sit and revel in the absurdity of the fact that here I am, happier and to all appearances healthier than I have been in my whole long, weird life and I have … cancer? 

But, still. One of the many famous side effects of chemotherapy is “chemo brain,” a foggy, fatigued condition akin to the lately equally famed “covid brain.” And, well, since I somehow also managed to get covid the same week as my first chemo treatment – a combination platter of torture I emphatically do not recommend – I’ve been experiencing it, or both, in spades. I have neglected this Substack for a long time but it occurred to me that this is a space to try and think through this story in some sort of creatively generative way. So now here I am, trying to remember how to think better in public.

Two years ago, at the start of the pandemic, when “essential workers” were suddenly the talk of the town, I had an idea for a project celebrating the inessential, the frivolous, the acts of pointless pleasure that give texture and beauty to day to day life. I went to Joann Fabric & Crafts and bought some whistles and a bunch of bells – the little jingle bells you’d find on the tip of a jester’s cap – and started passing them out to friends. When you’re feeling overwhelmed I said, take a moment to ring your bell, or blow your whistle, and know that out there someone else is doing the same goofy thing. Like most of my bright ideas, the execution was kind of half assed, but I remembered the bells and whistles when the surgical oncologist, upon hearing I was about to get married, took a beat and said gently, “Go have your wedding; we can finish the testing later. Focus on the joy.” So I did, and I am.

It is a glorious summer evening here in Chicago, and I am about to go work out at the circus gym that has been my go-to joy factory for years. One of my coaches is herself a breast cancer veteran, and has been a wellspring of support and advice. Last night I took to the water of Bubbly Creek to row in an eight-woman shell as a novice member of a crew team for breast cancer survivors. I have a good job and decent health insurance for the first time in fifteen years, and the sweetest husband, of all crazy things, and the support of family and friends, including a few in the same crappy boat. I am a ridiculous, embarrassing gratitude monkey on the regular. And I am joyous.

On Monday I have my second cycle of chemo. I hope that, sans the special covid sauce, it won’t be as bad as the first. If nothing else, when it’s over, we can get ice cream.

* For the breast cancer geeks out there, it’s T2N1 and triple-positive.