The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

JUNE 10. LUMP

91 build a Gilda’s Club there. She used me for source material. She had one of her personas tell the crowd that she had a friend who’d hennaed her head to say Obama in ’08. She explained to me that us Out of Iraq would be too political. You’d think that all of Madison would be against the war, but Jodi knows her audience. It’s a sign of progress that supporting a liberal biracial man for president is considered noncontroversial. But what does it say about the chances for this war to end? I was standing in line at Emerald City a while ago when one of the other denizens, a cop, asked me why my message didn’t say, Support Your Local Police. I demurred: Too many words. He has thick gray hair with a receding hairline. He said that his scalp has a tattoo that says us Marine Corps. He was young and drunk at the time of the tattooing. How odd to think that his history will be revealed, slowly, if he goes bald, his own personal archeology. JUNE 10. LUMP My internist had felt a lump in my (former) left breast in August and told me then to get an ultrasound, but the last time she’d sent me for an ultrasound, the radiologist had found nothing and moreover had pooh-poohed internists as alarmists, so I didn’t do anything. I had an appointment with my Boyish Gyne soon after and asked him to check it. He said it didn’t feel like anything. Today I had an appointment with him to check out my fibroids. I had imagined making a dramatic announcement: Remember that lump you said was nothing? Well (whipping open the hospital gown and letting the silence be eloquent ) . . . He walked in with the motto on his lips of All Doctors Who Know You Have Cancer: Are you hanging in there? It’s quite apt but gets tiresome. He did an endometrial biopsy just to make sure there wasn’t another cause for my bleeding, such as endometrial dysplasia, a precancerous condition. I didn’t have the guts to say, Are you sorry you missed the lump? But I did make reference to the lump, and later he said he was sorry I had cancer. What did I expect? I had asked him to feel it, as an afterthought , and I hadn’t followed my internist’s instructions. When 92 I told this to the surgeon, she had reassured me that a few months wouldn’t have made a difference, that this was slow-growing cancer. The real culprit, if there is one, is the Mammogram Factory, the place where I used to get mammograms, which hadn’t picked up the tumor until this year. Or me, for not noticing changes in my breast. But they were both so lumpy and dense and confusing in their lumpiness and density, terra incognita, times two. JUNE 12. BLEED ME A RIVER The Boyish Gyne called to say that my biopsies were negative. He hypothesized that I’m in menopause but bleeding because of the fibroids . I don’t agree. I think I still have real periods but they’re very very looooonnng because of the fibroids. Why would I think this? Am I loath to give up this sign of young womanhood? Maybe. Am I scared? I think I’m scared. Of what, besides death and old age and turning into a crone, a word that feminists reclaimed 20 years ago, after all? Have I enjoyed the sheer weirdness of 38 years of bleeding? The blood seems alive, a sign of life, though I know it’s a sign of death (no embryo taking hold). I am so full of life that I have blood to spare. Menopause is supposed to cause the fibroids to shrink. But if I’m in menopause already and am having faux periods caused by fibroids, then it means that menopause is not causing the fibroids to wither, as Engels said the state would, after the proletariat seized the means of production and abolished social classes. JUNE 13. GUILT The beginning of this guilt. First a feeling of difference, of feeling what I have isn’t serious, not the real thing, starting from reading blogs by people with what they call mets—meaning the breast cancer has metastasized. Reading reviews of books by these people—feeling I haven’t really had cancer until it’s...