The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

JUNE 13. GUILT

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 moved from the breast to crack into my spine. That it’s only, in the words of one blogger, garden variety cancer. Sunday I heard that an out-of-town friend had had a mastectomy and was having a hard time. I e-mailed her. She e-mailed back. 93 She seemed reticent. I named my meds. She said she was on pretty much the same, and that the experience had been very difficult. I felt guilty that side effects weren’t wiping me out. Though I get days in a row when I’m tired and depressed. But now I feel fine. When I feel fine I stop feeling sorry for myself. I feel guilty. Linc reminded me that I’m not taking Cytoxan, which is one element of the usual so-called act chemo brew—Adriamycin, Cytoxan , Taxol—because of my platelet disorder. Cytoxan could cause a blood clot, which is more dangerous than the cancer. It could be the Cytoxan that’s causing my friend’s side effects. Linc also reminds me that I’m getting less anticancer protection, too. I’m lucky that the anesthesia didn’t make me sick. My cousin (by marriage) in Marin County was diagnosed just after I was, and she threw up for days from the anesthesia as well as the sedative they gave her when they installed her port. I feel I should be suffering more, that I’m faking it. That I don’t really have cancer. That I’m not really getting chemo. How can I be thinking this? Is this a manifestation of denial? No, it’s a transmogri fication of the essential feeling: that I do not deserve to live. That I should perish soon. I was not made to live a long time. I was made to live tragically. Different from other people. I was made to be mourned. And to mourn while I was alive. Because I did not deserve to be alive. So living was treacherous. I had to live secretly, secretively. Under the radar. Feeling like this because of asthma. Or for no reason I can find. Let me try to find logic in this feeling about my cancer, here and now. That I feel guilty because I feel good even though I’m supposed to be dying? That seems like it. The Cancer Bitch who would not die even though it was in the cards. She shuffled the deck. Used...