Authors: Michele Weldon
T
here it was, the perfect almond shape, like a ruby eye glistening wet and liquid, a glossy color you would paint a child’s playroom. I stared at the shape in my left breast in the reflection of his wire-rimmed glasses, oddly unafraid, buoyed by a trusting detachment, as if it wasn’t me I was watching, my body I was seeing. I was listening to the breath in my ears bouncing inside my head as if it was a favorite song on my iPod. It was a week later and this was the second step.
In the operating room Dr. Dowlat worked with nimble gloved fingers, red with my blood, his calm voice punctuating the silence with periodic reassurances. I was not asleep, I was not under, but I was dwelling in a suspended fiction, not quite sure how I could watch the image of my own operation without emotion. I was fascinated by the insertion of the brachytherapy tube, the new device that would deliver the radiation for my breast cancer treatment, the turkey baster that would save my life. I would have none of the skin problems or exhaustion associated with six weeks of traditional radiation. I would not get the tattoo. Every other external radiation patient I knew had
a tattoo on her breast to mark the exact spot where radiation should be concentrated.
Dr. Dowlat described every motion aloud, into a tableside tape recorder to be transcribed for the surgeon’s report, the one that would cost me twenty-seven dollars for a copy, the one I left unopened on my desk for weeks. I put it in the manila file folder marked
C
, next to the gas, electric, and Verizon wireless bills for four phones, one for me and three for the boys who didn’t answer it when you needed them to. Maybe the folder would get lost and it would not be true anymore. I wouldn’t have cancer. I dared not write out the full word on the folder for fear that labeling it would make it indelible, permanent.
The boys would find it cleaning out my desk after I was gone and they would cry. Here was the cancer file. Oh no. This was the beginning of the end. Mothers die.
Draped in a hospital gown with a floral print, my left breast exposed, seated upright at a seventy-degree angle, slightly reclined, I imagined that I looked like an old man watching the Super Bowl in a La-Z-Boy chair. I was not nervous, feeling only numbed pressure, no specific target points, even as the instruments went in deeper, inches inside my chest. It felt as dangerous as someone pressing against me on a crowded bus or the dentist working diligently on my novacained mouth. Dr. Dowlat quickly maneuvered the brachytherapy tube, implanting it in my chest, deep inside the hieroglyphic eye of blood, filling the attached balloon with saline. I took a breath and shut my eyes. But the image was still there.
He closed the single wound across the front of my breast. He had made a nick, a hole on the side of my body, like a bullet wound where they inserted the device. A catheter stuck out of my body about four inches, like a Bic pen. The nurse taped it down and bandaged the rest. The catheter would be where they inserted the radioactive pellet, and it would travel to the balloon that filled the cavity from the lumpectomy. My breast and side were sore. If this is what it took for implants, no thanks. I had briefly entertained the thought of having implants if I needed a mastectomy.
Maybe I would get stripper breasts.
I didn’t need implants after all; they removed only the cancer in a neat slice and a tidy incision. I was a B cup before, so perhaps now I was a B–. And I didn’t really want stripper breasts; I imagined they would bounce when I ran.
I tried to keep straight in my head the list of appointments, follow-ups, treatments, procedures, heartbreaks, terrors, details of what they all said, the what’s nexts, the todays, the tomorrows. As if the mere chronicling of details would make it less terrifying, less like a bad dream.
The wound would need fresh dressing. I was to come back in two days to begin twice-daily radiation, Dr. Dowlat explained once we were back in his office.
“That’s a lot of parking,” I said.
“No one has ever remarked about the parking before,” Dr. Dowlat said.
“Think about it, at least fifteen minutes of driving up the ramp to find a space and then you have to walk to radiation and then you have to pay at least five or ten dollars to park—twice a day. That would take so much time. It would cost so much. A week of that?”
Fay at the front desk explained I would get a parking pass to place on my windshield, park right in front of the building in the circular drive, and walk only a few feet to radiation.
I can park in front. I won’t die.
The pink pamphlet I received with my diagnosis, “Breast Cancer Survivor Guide,” had a self-described “patient-friendly” tone and stated: “Your diagnosis has probably put your emotions into a tailspin and your mind into overdrive. You’re thinking: How will this illness disrupt my life? How will it impact my family? Above all, what are my chances of a cure?”
No, no chances, I had to be cured. I had sons. I had students to teach. I had a book coming out. This must be my cure. I had to be cured.
The pamphlet listed side effects. I half expected each paragraph to be punctuated with a smiley face. After diarrhea and constipation was
listed “fuzzy thinking,” defined as “symptoms dubbed ‘chemo brain’ include an inability to concentrate. You may also feel a bit ‘down.’” Great, now I’ll be dense and depressed; I’ll forget what I am supposed to teach and I’ll stand on stage in front of students for an hour and a half and whistle. Following the diagnosis of fuzzy thinking was the bold-faced solution in red. “Try to keep your perspective and sense of humor. If depression develops, talk with your doctor.”
If it helped, I would laugh. I would heal by
Seinfeld
. I owned every season of the show on DVD. I loved the characters George and Elaine; Cosmo Kramer in smaller doses. The actress who played Elaine, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was a few years behind me in college. She had been a star at Northwestern as well, in the campus productions, the comedies, the musicals. Her boyfriend, and later her husband, Brad Hall, lived across the hall from a man I dated in junior year. The sitcom dialogue made me laugh. I watched the DVDs for an hour or more a day.
Two weeks into my
Seinfeld
therapy, Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer, made an explosively racist remark at a Los Angeles comedy club. The cringing scene was on YouTube and every news broadcast in the country. I couldn’t watch anymore; suddenly
Seinfeld
episodes didn’t seem so funny.
“Try
The Office
,” a friend suggested.
I went online and bought seasons one and two of
The Office
, and at night I watched Michael and Dwight and Pam and Jim and laughed. I would get into bed and put a DVD in the player in my bedroom; the boys would come in and lie down near me on the bed or sit on the settee against the wall and we would all laugh. Sometimes I laughed so hard I would not think about cancer. And I could fall asleep. Colin would take off my glasses, place them on the side table, and turn off the television. And I would dream about Pam and Jim falling in love.
I
wanted a new bag of ice to call my own.
At home we always had a few plastic food storage bags bulging with ice cubes shoved onto freezer shelves ready to be called into healing service. The boys used and reused the homemade ice packs for muscle injuries from practice, weight lifting, or a match. Lodged between Costco-sized sacks of pot stickers, or packages of ground turkey or boneless chicken breasts, they were on hand to soothe an athlete’s aching body parts. I stopped endorsing the boys’ practice of placing bags of frozen peas on sore muscles. Once I cooked a bag of frozen peas not realizing how many incarnations it had spent on Brendan’s neck, Colin’s shoulder, or Weldon’s knee. Brendan recognized them right away.
“Those peas have been all over,” he said when he saw them on his dinner plate.
“Rude, those are the ice pack peas,” Colin announced.
“Did you use the edamame too?” I asked. Repulsed, I reached for a bag of salad to serve for dinner.
It was the day after the surgery to implant the brachytherapy tube, and I needed to attend a curriculum meeting on campus. I didn’t feel so bad, I could go, I wanted to go. The journalism school was launching an ambitious multimedia initiative beginning with the freshmen with me as the lead instructor, overseeing a dozen instructors and two hundred students. The cancer just complicated everything, took time away from what I needed to do.
I was tired of thinking about myself. I wanted it all over and done. I wanted to get on with work, life, what the boys needed, and everything else. The work helped.
“How are you?” some people I knew not so well would ask, sometimes while standing in the deli line at Jewel, the local grocery store, their voice half-dipped in what felt like pity. Word got around fast in the suburb where we lived.
I minded that near-strangers would ask, perhaps to fill a gossip quotient, maybe idle chatter, or maybe they really did care.
I did not want to have cancer and I did not want to have had cancer, and I did not want everyone to ask me about cancer because I was sure I was OK. Yes, I was sure I was OK. And it was my breast, for goodness sake, not my big toe. Stop asking about my boob. Just a little cancer. I am Cancer Woman, no, Used to Have Cancer Woman. No More Cancer Woman. Wait, that sounds final. It was just a little, teeny eeny weeny cancer, the size of a thumbnail. Stage 1, not so bad. Invasive, that’s not good, but stage 1, no nodes.
I didn’t want anybody to know; yes, I was pretty sure I didn’t want anybody to know. Then again maybe I wanted everybody to know so then maybe they could worry about it for me and I wouldn’t have to.
Fireworks of pain shot through my left breast, and the left side under my arm was sore and swollen. Dr. Dowlat said it would hurt for a while and gave me painkillers I was afraid to take.
“Don’t be a martyr,” my brother-in-law Mike, who is a doctor, said. “If it hurts, take the pills.”
I could keep going. I couldn’t slow down. I kept working because if I didn’t keep working it meant, well, it meant I was going to die.
Busy people didn’t die. I had boys to raise, I had students to teach. The cancer was gone, I was dutifully doing everything they said to do. I would not die. I could not die. Sam I am. I am Sam. I was trying so hard to pretend it was all normal, while I was screaming on the inside that it was not. I couldn’t concentrate for long stretches. Because over and over in my head like a mantra, I asked myself:
Where else is there cancer?
In the hour ride to campus from my house, I kept the bag of ice on my breast—ten minutes on, ten minutes off; bag on at North Avenue, bag off at Cicero, bag on at the Edens Expressway, bag off at Dempster. It wasn’t so bad with the ice. I listened to the Rolling Stones and tried to think about the new courses coming up and how they would work, how they had never been tried before at this level, and what I needed to get done before January.
Mick Jagger was an old man and he was still rocking. Keith Richards might live forever.
That first week of the winter quarter I would stand in the lecture hall with all new material. I would stand there with my tamoxifen-generated mood swings and hot flashes, a hole in my chest where the cancer used to be and a closed, bullet-hole scar where the radiation tube had been, pretending everything was dandy. Cancer was one thing. Teaching alone unprepared before two hundred eighteen-year-olds for an hour and a half in a mandatory class was quite another.
I felt as if I was swimming in glue.
“I don’t feel like myself,” I told Colin later.
“Who do you feel like?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
My shapeless, dark-colored sweater concealed the bag with enough ice to cool a very small keg. But it was starting to leak. Just before I walked into the faculty conference room, I took the ice off. I later placed it on the floor beside my chair; I could excuse myself in case the pain increased and stick it under my sweater.
When I walked into the room, five of my colleagues applauded. It was OK they knew; I was grateful.
“This is the first time in a month I have been to a meeting where I kept my shirt on,” I said. I knew as soon as it came out of my mouth it was a dumb thing to say.
But when you have cancer—and I imagine most any other disease as well—the separation of the personal sphere from the medical arena involves such a pervasive and thorough disruption of your privacy, you get confused. Mostly it’s because you feel as if you are evicted from your own life.
You initially were red-faced and embarrassed when someone new saw you half-naked in the offices of the oncologist, surgeon, or radiologist. But after you did it so often you expected to be topless in front of every person you met.
Nice to meet you, want to take a peek?
“So you teach journalism?” the resident asked the first time I met him after radiation. He was trying to make small talk, I gather practicing his bedside manner on topless cancer patients. “My roommate just graduated from there in the master’s program.”
“What’s his name?” I asked, pretending this wasn’t incredibly awkward.
He told me. I knew him. He would go home that night and tell his friend about Professor Weldon’s breasts.
I began teaching journalism as an adjunct ten years earlier when I was freshly divorced. I had a cinematically romantic notion of what it meant to be a college professor. I thought the whole scenario would resemble
Goodbye Mr. Chips
,
Wonder Boys
, or even
Dead Poets Society
. I would engage impossibly bright, grateful, and eager students who would hang on my every syllable, taking notes on all my comments and nodding in agreement, calling their parents to remark on my brilliance and insight and how grateful they were to be in my class. They would quote me years later when they won awards. They would all like me.
When Julia Roberts played a college professor in
Mona Lisa Smile
, I thought,
there, that could be me
. Every part of my life was mimicked in at least one scene of every Julia Roberts movie, and most of them have happy endings. You befriended your students who emulated you and whom you inspired to achieve greatness; that was reward
ing. You could do all that while looking amazing. And when the spring quarter of the school year was over, I would relax all summer, doing something intellectually stimulating that would further my career. Write more books and articles, give more speeches. Then in September, I would do it all over again. I wouldn’t ever burn out. I would never have a bad day.
It wasn’t exactly like that. No, really not at all.
I saw myself in the young women who sought my advice and I saw my sons in the young men who asked for recommendations and sometimes told me jokes after class. I expected to connect to them all in a way that rewarded us both because I liked them all even before I met them, just by seeing their fresh names full of possibility on the roster, their photographs so innocent and promising. Every quarter I was determined to make this their favorite class ever, align myself with their trajectories, guarantee their successes, show them what I knew, help them every way I could. Help them meet their goals, their dreams. Be their Julia Roberts.
Teaching was more work than I imagined in my fantasy, definitely more work than I had done in a magazine or newspaper newsroom or as a freelancer juggling magazine, newspaper, and any other writing and speaking assignments I could land. For every one hour of lecture, I could do at least ten and more likely twenty hours of preparation. Most of the faculty did that. Aside from the hours of research for every class, it was the grading that could do you in, six or more hours a day to edit lab and homework assignments—and the scores of hourly e-mails that demanded immediate action. The committee meetings, the advising sessions, the faculty meetings, the mandatory meetings when someone of note or newsworthiness came to campus, the lunches in the dean’s office with the same sandwiches every time, the favors from colleagues in other parts of the university, the feedback sessions, the lectures of friends, the lectures of visiting authors, the announcement of new procedures, the announcements of ended traditions. There was a parade of new deans—more than a half dozen over the years, each one with his (always his) agenda
and peccadilloes, favorites, and danger zones. New turf to navigate. New rules to ingest and obey.
There were the colleagues you shared birthdays with and the secretaries who made you laugh and brought you Christmas gifts. There were also colleagues who did not respond when you said hello in the hall. Colleagues in meetings who countered whatever you said.
And there were the course and teacher evaluations filled out online that included, “I hate her chunky bracelets,” “Her voice is annoying in the morning,” and my all-time favorite, “She teaches us too much.” Of course many of the comments were gratifying, but there were always hate-filled comments about what I wore, my feminism, or that I should be despised because I had age spots on my face.
Still, it was an undeniably good gig. Teaching at what we considered the best journalism school in the country at one of the top universities in the world. Great benefits. Retirement plan. Dental! Vision! View of the lake from the parking garage and the classrooms in the buildings where I taught. Coffee in the faculty lounge. Smart women friends. Big ideas, always talking about big ideas to change the world. A top administration that felt open and warm and encouraging. Professors and adjuncts and researchers you met at cross-disciplinary functions who were blindingly bright and also trying to manage their roles in the universe.
And for your part in the whole equation, you did what was asked, you did what was expected. You never said no. You contemplated what new, inspiring lesson to teach every second, how to improve your approach, and you stayed awake nights thinking about how to help improve students’ writing and reporting, what you could do or say to make it go well.
You ignored the white-haired male colleagues who snored or snarled in faculty meetings—and that was definitely the majority—who objected to every new idea, even the name change for the school. And you ignored the mean woman who smirked when you commented in a meeting. It was OK because you were smart enough to sit near the people you liked in the group meetings and the convocations and the lunches and the presentations, the people like
you who worked hard and cared about the students and the quality of the content, the journalists who were still committing journalism, not just talking about it, the ones with the book deals, the documentaries in the works, the new sites, the side gigs, and the excitement about all that was new in media and the world. There were enough of them to make it fun.
I learned that some quarters the teaching was more difficult than others, and that most times I could divide a large lecture class into thirds. All the students were very intelligent; it was the attitudes and approaches that varied widely along this triptych.
A third of the students were every professor’s dream—ambitious, polite, energetic, eager, respectful, very advanced in their skills and abilities. Another third were ambitious and respectful, newly exposed to the skills needed, but eager to learn. Another third were what academics call strategic learners, who cared principally about the grade and what it took to get the grade they wanted. Some students would come to my office and argue over a single point on a grammar or current events quiz, even though it was one point out of four hundred possible points in the course. We would go over the student’s concerns, I would show him or her the page number of the correct answer, and the student would still ask for credit. These students, at any given moment, any hour of any day, wanted an answer right now, right
now
, even if they e-mailed me at 3
AM
on a Tuesday.
“You never answer me until Sunday when I e-mail you on Saturday, and I do my homework on Saturday,” one student chastised me in an e-mail. Another told me in an e-mail the quiz was too “fucking hard.”
It struck me as odd that it never occurred to some students that a professor would have a life, his or her own children, problems, concerns—heck, cancer. That sometimes we walked up to the podium out of a complicated life.
Sure, most were not that way. Many more students from India to Indiana made me want to call their parents and say what a good job they did raising smart, curious, and respectful people with ambition, talent, and humility. I got to do that at graduation—meet their
parents—and promised to stay in touch while they took pictures of me with their children on their digital cameras under the white tents that housed enormous strawberries, the red punch, and the small cucumber-and-turkey sandwiches. With many of the students I felt deeply responsible for their initiation into the profession, for helping them love storytelling, for helping them become writers. They hugged me at the start of every quarter, brought me small gifts, mementos from a study abroad quarter.
There were former students from as far back as my first year of teaching who called and e-mailed me with news of new jobs, new accomplishments, awards, life events, even heartaches. A few invited me to their weddings. To be electively included in their circle of friends and mentors was an honor, because that was their choice. They did not have a choice in choosing me as their professor; I taught the “vegetable classes,” the required fundamental skills classes in their major, not the “cake” classes of the electives with ten or sixteen upper graduate students, the seminars, the independent studies. But for some of them, after they finished the course, years later, they did choose me.