Dropped Threads 2 (12 page)

The Fall,
                    and After

Linda Harlos

I am ecstatic about my new job, which provides both intellectual challenge and emotional engagement. I adore my new husband (four years of marriage is still relatively new). After ages of low-maintenance apartment dwelling, I’ve recently come to cherish the residential mess-in-progress we now call home. For the first time I could remember, no aspect of my forty-something life desperately cried out for major repairs. Gradually, I’d been lulled into enjoying my days without the omnipresent fear of jinxing the future. In the months preceding my diagnosis, I’d catch myself muttering my novel new mantra, “Life is good.”

It was October—Breast Cancer Awareness Month—when I, along with about seventeen hundred other Canadian women, became breast-aware with a vengeance. From the beginning of the month, when I first found a small, palpable lump, to Halloween, when I committed to surgery, I was intensely breast-aware every day. In early November, a twelve-by-eleven-by-six-millimetre lump of invasive ductal carcinoma was removed from my left breast.

Lumpectomy alone is no big surgical deal, lending itself to outpatient day surgery under local anaesthetic. The big deal requiring general anesthetic is the slice under the armpit (axillary dissection) to remove lymph nodes to help gauge whether cancer has spread elsewhere in the body. Following this surgery, severed nerves and swelling meant my left arm felt numb and huge. Nerves slowly repaired themselves, replacing numbness with tingling. The closest thing to it that I’d previously experienced was extreme sunburn, albeit never in my armpit. With the swelling, I felt like an involuntary participant in some bizarre novelty race where, instead of having my ankle tethered to another human being, I was obliged to carry a grapefruit under my arm all day. Eventually, zealous performance of the recommended boring exercises yielded results: I lost the grapefruit and the sunburn gradually receded. Within a month, although I would hardly describe things as completely normal, a trip to an indoor driving range inspired me to drag my golf clubs with me to St. Kitts over Christmas.

Taking the opportunity to dip good breast and dented in the Caribbean waters provided a fun distraction. More important, it allowed me to build up a reserve of energy and calm before undergoing my first chemotherapy treatment the day after our return. At this juncture of my adventure tour to the kingdom of the unwell, I calculated that I was probably still hanging around some foreign airport departure lounge. My journey was under way, but the rough stuff hadn’t begun yet.

Although my research somewhat prepared me, and I did escape physically unscathed, my first meeting with my oncology team was nonetheless bracing. Because my tumour was relatively small and showed no signs of having spread, I was semi-expecting to be offered “chemo lite.” However, my age and a combination of diagnostic factors pointed in the direction of a full-meal deal. For a combination of reasons (being shit scared probably the strongest), I asked a perfunctory few questions before readily acquiescing to the recommended treatment plan. To extract something resembling informed consent, they then disclosed all of the risks commonly, or rarely, associated with treatment. Some are potentially fatal in their own right (heart damage and leukemia). Others are merely unpleasant, predictable indicators of extreme toxicity.

In addition, chemotherapy offers no guarantees. What an understatement! As my oncologist conceded, there’s no guarantee that any individual patient actually requires chemotherapy, since most breast cancer patients are cured by surgery alone. There’s currently no reliable way of separating the sheep from the goats. There is also no efficacy guarantee, since the disease spreads and kills some women, despite chemotherapy. Finally, there are no guarantees which, if any, of chemo’s side effects will be experienced. It’s essentially a crapshoot—you just sign on and take your chances.

Much of what I could look forward to involved ingestion and/or elimination: appetite loss, mouth sores, nausea and/or vomiting, constipation, diarrhea. I wondered how I could suffer from
both
constipation and diarrhea…. Would it be one or the other, or would they occur in sequence? Curiosity notwithstanding, I didn’t actually want to know.

My husband consoled me with the reminder that no single chemotherapy treatment was likely to make me feel any worse than I had from previous recreational activities. One of my preferred forms of self-inflicted abuse over the past decade has been expeditions to high altitudes, most of them in countries not blessed with North America’s bourgeois amenities. Once, my African guide on Mount Kilimanjaro learned enough English-language synonyms for “vomit” to fill a thesaurus over the course of six memorable hours. I’ve dragged my ass out of a sleeping bag at–20°C, stumbling in the darkness, in a desperate search for a discreet out-of-the-way rock to squat behind. The relief of finding one (kudos to zip-crotch outdoor apparel!) was tempered by the grim realization that if I toppled one way I’d plummet a few thousand metres into Chile, while a fall in the opposite direction would launch me on a similar trajectory into Argentina. Thus, vomiting and diarrhea in a venue with central heating and indoor toilets and no obligation to get up the next day and keep climbing?—
please!
—a walk in the park in fuzzy bunny-head slippers.

The anticipated loss of my limp, thin, mousy hair wasn’t cause for vanity tears. I pre-emptively got an extremely short, low-maintenance haircut suitable for expeditions to places lacking running water and mirrors. Chemo then propelled me through stages: first, moulting animal; then, ugly duckling; and finally, bowling ball. When the occasion calls for hair, I now don my blond party head. Friends and near strangers alike assure me that I’ve traded up. My treatments have managed to rid me of that annoying middle-age shadow moustache and have temporarily made shaving legs and armpits redundant. To help me adjust to cancer’s vanity challenges, I attended a seminar that could have been called How to Tart Yourself Up When You Feel Like a Bag of Crap; I left with more free cosmetics than I’d ever owned. Luckily, I still have some eyelashes to which my free mascara can adhere.

Back in 1974, my mother had found a lump larger than mine and underwent more extensive surgery than I did. That era’s characteristic secretiveness was part of her package of fears, horrors and burdens. Few facts routinely changed hands in those days, even between family members. The sudden appearance of my mother’s wig while she was undergoing treatment led to my juvenile conclusion that her daily trips to the hospital included chemotherapy. Since we didn’t discuss it, my private guess was not confirmed. Decades later, while comparing treatment regimens, she surprised me by saying that she hadn’t undergone chemotherapy. Her wig, she belatedly assured me, was a result of nothing more dramatic than our genetically shared bad hair.

Keeping secrets costs. Isolation adds immeasurably to the sufferer’s pain, so I experienced great relief when I decided to share my lousy news with as many people as was conscionable. I invited recipients of my first widely distributed e-mail on the subject to discuss its contents with mutual friends. One caveat was that they not reverse the intended spirit by talking in hushed tones about “poor Linda.” The other was that for the time being, I preferred not to entertain horrific cancer anecdotes. (Once you break the secretiveness taboo, people’s sense of what to share can be surprisingly off the wall.)

When e-mails, telephone calls, cards, flowers, gifts and offers of food started arriving after my first mass e-mail, I was initially horrified at the prospect that someone might think I’d shamelessly and opportunistically solicited them by sharing news of my diagnosis. Once the flurry of post-surgical sympathy subsided somewhat, and the ordeal wasn’t yet over for me, my only regret was that I lacked the foresight to make my circulation list even larger.

Some difficult and disagreeable life events are inevitably solo experiences, but attending chemotherapy sessions doesn’t have to one of them. Friends accompanied me in small swarms, an assortment of amusement devices in tow. During my inaugural treatment we watched
Shrek
. I knew that the anti-nausea drugs were working when, without the slightest flinch, I watched the movie’s ogre tuck into a bowl of eyeballs. Between videos and the more or less constant offers of cappuccino, boxes of chocolates and homemade cookies from Tupperware containers, we didn’t even get around to playing Scrabble.

I desperately need this cacophony of company, an audience whose existence requires my bravery, even if I have to become a one-dimensional cliché of the perky little survivor to ensure their retention. I need their hugs and casseroles. Someday they may get the full story of this unsettling experience. I don’t dare tell it even to myself most days.

What, for example, do I do with the seismic rage? Since the time of my mother’s diagnosis, there has been an alarming increase in the number of young women being diagnosed with breast cancer. Inspired by researchers and charities, a cheerleading press reports “amazing cancer breakthroughs” with clockwork regularity. So why do about fifty-five hundred Canadian women still die from breast cancer annually? In the past century, there were at least as many highly publicized wars on cancer as there were major military conflagrations, with approximately the same result as the war to end all wars. Mammography, radiation and chemotherapy have barely budged breast cancer’s mortality statistics. (This information so flagrantly violates media reports implying constant progress that I had to read it in not one but two reputable sources before I could believe it.) Most of my friends and relatives, who inhabit the same pink-ribboned hope haze that I did until a few months ago, are incredulous when I tell them. If I notice furrowed brows, wide eyes or frowning mouths, I don’t always persist. I need their ongoing support, and hope sells better than fear.

Early on, I had to counsel myself—sometimes daily, sometimes hourly—not to indulge my simmering anger. I need all my emotional energy, and my allies, to persevere through what’s still coming. I can’t afford to alienate any among my army of caregivers, for whom I am genuinely grateful and on whom I am genuinely dependent. Some sources suggest that anger can distract from recovery. Self-interest suggests that I defer any fits of indignation.

Camouflaged by my periodic fury is something even more disconcerting—immobilizing fear. I’m afraid of dying before I’ve lived “enough,” whatever that means. I’d always assumed, based on longevity in my maternal line, that “enough” included entitlement to a three-digit age. Instead I’m currently struggling with the thought that until now I’ve been waving hello to the world, while hereafter I’m likely to be waving it a slow, loving goodbye.

Despite apocryphal stories about vile side effects, the worst I’ve experienced thus far is fatigue, the onset of which is mysteriously inconsistent. Some days I’m a ball of fire; some days I’m an inert blob. But no nausea and nothing else unbearable. And with chemotherapy behind me, the worst is probably over. My surgery was both a technical and a cosmetic success, with healing progressing astonishingly well, according to an assortment of professional and non-professional viewers. The removal of the lump and surrounding margins of healthy tissue initially produced a slight divot. That said, you’d still pick the pair out of a laundry basket as a matched set. (I diligently consumed more than enough ice cream to fill the hollow in the affected breast.) It takes twelve to eighteen months for surgery scars to heal and recede into their permanent state, leaving me plenty of time to decide whether to turn any residual line into a long, thorny stem by having a rosebud tattooed to the end of it.

I’ve just scanned my screen to see which words the spelling feature doesn’t like. It balks at the cancer-specific medical jargon, the same words I wouldn’t have recognized just months ago. Should I allege that no one prepared me for this? Or should I admit that before I needed to, anything more than a cursory glance—accompanied by a relieved sigh and a crossing of fingers—at the reality of breast cancer was absolutely nowhere on my priority list?

Lest I’m tempted into Olympic-size self-pity, even a naturally half-empty-glass gal like me can acknowledge that there’s room for gratitude amid this crummy experience. There’s lots of information and support available. My employer took it on the chin and is cutting me some slack. My lump placement couldn’t have been better for early detection. I had a skilled surgeon and a mercifully quick surgery date. I’m blessed with a sturdy constitution that, remarkably, tolerates and regenerates after each new treatment onslaught. I have a wonderfully supportive spouse, family and friends. I have a secure job, high-quality public health care and two supplementary insurers underwriting everything from prescription drugs to faux hair. I’m aware that not every cancer patient has all these soft landings. I also don’t know a single person who hasn’t suffered an episode of job hell, or relationship hell, or some version of unsolicited and undeserved misery. Tempting as it is occasionally, nurturing a grievance against the universe would probably be misguided.

By
            Choice

Hildegard Martens

When I was a young girl in the 1950s, the thought of getting married was merely a misty, unfocused image in my mind. I never dreamed of a trousseau, a wedding dress or a wedding day. I was struck much more forcibly by the sheer need to survive on our cold and isolated farm in Manitoba. New life and gruesome death seemed to be present everywhere—the horror of witnessing slaughtered animals juxtaposed with the joy of finding a new litter of kittens in the barn loft or seeing a newborn calf.

My parents seemed exhausted much of the time, and we children had an endless list of daily chores—milking cows, feeding calves and chickens, washing the cream separator and the dishes, helping with the cooking and the hoeing in the garden. Electrification did not come to our area until about 1950; this meant melting snow for the wringer washing machine, baking bread in the wood stove in the kitchen and chopping wood or carrying coal from the cellar to feed the Booker stove in the living room.

During this time, I would often look at the postcards and black-and-white photographs my parents had brought from Russia. There were scenes of cherished homes and orchards that had been left in haste, of relatives dressed in quaint clothing looking stoically into the camera and of corpses in open coffins. The pictures spoke to the tragedies my parents had endured when they were still teenagers. My father’s oldest brother, mother and father died from typhus they contracted during the flight from their homes following the Russian Revolution of 1917. My mother’s family had been well-to-do estate owners who lost everything. Relatives who stayed behind often ended up shot or exiled to Siberia.

I would also study a photograph of my father as a young man in northern Ontario, where he first worked in Canada, holding his baby in his arms and standing beside the open coffin of his first young wife. These pictures both fascinated and frightened me and in a strange way exerted an influence on my life. The potential for tragedy seemed greater than “living happily ever after.”

I know now that people who experience horrors of this kind often don’t have the emotional energy to deal with their immediate lives but continue to be haunted by their pasts. While saying little about their own lives, my parents would recount incidents about their relatives in Russia over and over again, but in time I tried to shut out their stories and struggled to avoid taking up their burdens.

Psychologists claim that we live out a script, the main outlines of which are set down in childhood. My script seemed to be that of the misunderstood and tragic heroine. I never felt wanted or understood. After a day’s work, my parents had little time or emotional resources left over, and as I was the youngest of five, my plea for attention could be the “final straw.”

At fifteen I stayed at home to do my Grade 9 by correspondence, at a time when my brothers and sisters had left the farm to attend school or to work. That winter, I became an avid listener of CBC’s Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. I particularly liked the romantic tragedies and identified with Desdemona in
Othello
and with Violetta in
La Traviata
—I was capable of a deep, abiding love that I felt sure no man could match.

Boys were certainly in my thoughts throughout my time at residential high school in the late 1950s. My first boyfriend there dumped me with a rather unsentimental letter, so, even in those days, I felt that boys were undependable and innately promiscuous. And perhaps, quite perversely, I wouldn’t have been interested in those who were loyal. It felt easier to be the wronged party, perhaps because of the measure of freedom that it afforded.

The only time in my life I ever tried on a white wedding dress was when I was sixteen. I was visiting a girlfriend, who persuaded me to try on her older sister’s dress—I remember how its stiff lace scratched my skin and how I felt simultaneously embarrassed and doomed. At the same time, a thrill went through me as I thought of the sexual pleasures I would experience when I married—in the fifties, and in my world, sex before marriage was still a taboo.

By the time I went to university, after a stint of working to earn some money, a second powerful theme began to emerge in my life—equality and financial independence nurtured by the lectures of my favourite professor, a flamboyant Marxist. It seemed to me that the doctrines of Marxism offered an explanation for what had been determining forces in my life. Unequal wealth along with unequal power explained so many things: why, for example, my maternal grandparents in Russia had been stripped of all their wealth by envious poor peasants, and why men, including my father, seemed to think they could simply impose their will on their wives and children.

While I was opening up to a new understanding of my past, boyfriends were still an important part of my life. I was considered pretty, even beautiful, by my classmates who selected me as Snow Queen in my second year of university. The event caused conflicting emotions—pleasure because of the recognition and anguish because I was afraid of being valued primarily for my looks.

Wide reading in feminist literature told me that other women were also chafing against the restrictions and limitations of the times. Books like
The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan and
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir confirmed my feeling of being trapped by the demands of the traditional female role. The world that opened up through my reading seemed to offer a chance to do what I really wanted—to be financially independent, not beholden to any man; to be an actor in my own life, not a satellite. If someone was to have any glory, I wanted it to be me.

This desire for independence became so strong that it invariably won out whenever I was faced with a choice to marry or not, first with boyfriends in Winnipeg and then again with men in Toronto where I had gone to do a Ph.D. in sociology in 1969. I did agree to marry one man in those early years of graduate school, but I could not accept his notion that if we had children,
his
money would remain
his
, so we parted.

In my mid-thirties, I came up against a problem facing unmarried women of this age who have focused on their careers. What about children? Maternal feelings had been deeply buried for a long time. My lovely Persian cat, who shared my room during my years in student residence at the University of Toronto, returned my mothering with purrs and devotion, but the longing for a human baby would not go away.

I sought out a Gestalt therapy group. Developed by the psychoanalyst Fritz Perls, this therapy was part of the “human potential” movement popular in the sixties and seventies. It seeks to help individuals become fully aware of their wishes, desires and constraints and then to make conscious choices based on this self-knowledge. “Don’t tell me what you are thinking,” I was told by Gestaltists, “but what are you feeling?” At first, the answer was “nothing.” And it seemed that it had been “nothing” for a very long time. After all, who would want to go back to feeling like a wronged heroine?

But Gestalt had an impact, as protective layers were peeled away and I was able to risk feeling vulnerable once again. I subsequently fell in love with an idealistic younger man I met at a Gestalt group meeting and we decided to live together. I felt lucky to have met someone who valued my independence and seemed to want an egalitarian relationship.

The next two years should have been bliss, but they were not. I was thirty-seven and I had my Ph.D., but I felt that time was running out for me to have a baby, and the desire to be a mother was something I couldn’t let go. My partner, being seven years younger, did not have these same pressures, and he would not agree to my becoming pregnant. Now I was face to face with a momentous decision. Should I break off this relationship and do it alone, or should I give up my wish to have a baby?

The worst thing I could imagine was to give up my wish to have a baby and then have the relationship with my lover founder several years later. I thought this was a distinct possibility, and that my sacrifice would then have been in vain. We finally separated after wrenching arguments, and while I felt great pain, I also felt a surge of hope. I would do it alone. I didn’t have any role models except an early British suffragist, Sylvia Pankhurst, who in 1928, at the age of forty-six, deliberately became pregnant and had a baby boy while single. The chapter in the book
The Fighting Pankhursts
that describes this event is appropriately titled “A Woman of Principle.”

I started to put things in place. I secured a good job in government with a pension plan, bought a house and set to furnishing it. I contemplated many methods for becoming pregnant, including asking friends. In fact, one friend considered it briefly but bowed out after consulting his lawyer.

I discussed my plans with a few select women friends and with my oldest sister. Nearly everyone was sympathetic, but most counselled caution. Two friends who were single parents because of divorce pointed out that being a single mother could be difficult; however, my Gestalt therapist, also in her late thirties, gave me her full support, saying, “If this is what you want, do it. Follow your heart.” That felt right to me. I did not give a lot of thought to whether this was a socially appropriate course of action. By this stage of my life, I felt that many social conventions were meaningless or even perverse. After all, social conventions had limited women’s opportunities for decades.

The end result of my quest to become a single mother was settling on a means I could ethically accept, and in 1983 I gave birth to my son. He is an exceptional person, both intellectually and emotionally, and we share many interests—including a love of Persian cats!

Looking back after nineteen years, I can say that being his mother has brought me the most intense joy imaginable; I have never regretted my decision. In loving my son, I’ve been able to understand the nature of men in a whole new way. Of course, there have been times when I felt emotionally and physically exhausted—during the nineties I twice became the victim of the “restructuring and downsizing” so commonplace during that decade. My fear of job loss was enormous, not only because I was solely responsible for raising my son, but also because I remembered vividly what it was like to be poor, and how my parents and grandparents had suffered in Russia. And even though, with considerable effort, I was able to find new positions and continue working, those were times when I would have welcomed having an understanding, capable partner.

Did my career suffer because of my choice to become a mother? In many ways it did, primarily because the workplace has largely refused to recognize women’s dual roles and to offer more flexible work environments. As well, erroneous assumptions were often made about whether I, a woman with a child, was serious about advancement.

My son may have his own story to tell someday about the extent to which he missed having a father in his life. When he was a little boy, he would often say, “I’m so glad you decided to have me.” He certainly knew he was wanted! As he moved into adolescence, we had our share of conflicts, but what is life without differences of opinion?

Ever since my son’s birth, my mother, a widow for the past twenty years, has come in the winter to spend a few months with us, visiting, helping out and, in a way, mothering me so that I can in turn mother my son. Even though she is now well into her nineties, her capacity to give to us is undiminished.

Remaining single and becoming a single parent by choice can raise eyebrows even today, and in many ways these topics remain an area of silence in our society. I’ve seldom been asked why I didn’t marry. To those who do ask, especially if I feel they are merely being nosy, I answer, “Just lucky, I guess,” although obviously more choice than luck was involved. And as for my choice to become a single mother, very few people ever question me about it. Let’s just say if I had to do it all over again, with the same set of circumstances, I would.