The Last Days of My Left Breast
I’m a stripper, rocker, bartender, and writer. I had a lot of plans last year, but none of them involved breast cancer. The disease sidetracked my livelihood, threatened my life, and forced me to reinvent my chest. So far, I've lived to tell the tale.
The Wait
“The Wait” is my favorite Pretenders song ever. Its punk verve has steered me through many a rough patch. But the forty-eight hours between my biopsy and “The Phone Call” (another great Pretenders song) were a symphony of escalating anxiety.
I tried hard to put the questions out of my mind, and to convince myself that the tiny white dots were nothing out of the ordinary. Fortunately my mom was coming for her first visit in ten years, to see the house that my brother and I had bought and shared, so I distracted myself by frantically preparing for her arrival. I hadn’t mentioned a word of my breast adventures to my parents. I figured if I did have cancer, I’d spare them the agony and tell them at Christmas, when (hopefully) I was on the mend. If I didn’t have cancer, why worry them with the possibility that I did?
By Friday, my results were overdue, and I was quietly losing it. I left a message with my nurse practitioner, then headed to my bartending shift at East End, where ten friends coincidentally appeared on a whim to say hello (a clear sign that something bad was about to happen). I was busy slinging drinks when the doc’s office left a message. I stepped outside to check it.
The Wentworth Chevrolet building was wonderfully bright and angular in the late August sun. The building had probably been there a hundred years. I took refuge in its shadow and prayed to it that our circumstances would not change—it would continue to be its old self and I’d remain the healthy bartender across the street—and that my voice mail would contain nothing but good news.
“Hello, Viva. Your appointment with the surgeon is at 10 a.m. next Friday.”
My stomach sank and my hands started to shake. There was only one reason to see a surgeon: to get something cut. I frantically dialed my nurse practitioner, hoping to reach her before her weekend started. When I got her on the line, her voice held so much sorrow and empathy that I knew I was in trouble. Ductal carcinoma in situ Stage Zero, she said, and that she was sorry.
I walked back into the bar, told my friends I had cancer, then tried to hold it together while they fell apart. Somehow I made it through my shift. I drove home to my brother and mom—fresh off the plane from Minnesota—and chitchatted with them till they went to bed. Then I retreated to my back porch and, finally, wept.
h3. Surgeon’s Girl
I’m an optimist. I believed that whatever cancer had set up camp in my body could be easily eradicated with a little knife-and-putty action, much like getting a cavity filled. It turned out I was wrong. Thank God I had my friend Trina with me when the verdict came down.
Trina is a fiery, perpetually smiling redhead who will do anything for her friends. Diagnosed with Stage 2B breast cancer in 2007—at age thirty-three and less than a year after giving birth for the first time—she’d been through a double mastectomy, chemo, radiation, and the attendant psychological vicissitudes. She took the morning off of work to drive me to my appointment.
In the surgeon’s waiting room at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital, I picked through the available literature. Everything was pink and addressed to “survivors.”
I already hated the language surrounding cancer. It was the language of war: “battle,” “fight,” “survivor.” Honestly, I didn’t feel up for it. I was exhausted from overwork, nursing a broken heart, and literally world-weary after two decades of living with depression. What if I didn’t want to fight? What if I didn’t want to join the survivor clique?
“Do you call yourself a survivor?” I asked Trina.
“Fuck yeah I do! During much of chemo, it was all I could do to get through the day,” she said. “I lost my hair, both breasts, I have crazy scars. Hell yeah, I’m a survivor.”
A chipper young assistant led us to an examination room. She was so sunshiny and lovely that when she told me she had had exactly what I did—DCIS Stage Zero—and had gotten a double mastectomy, I didn’t succumb to shock. After complete breast reconstruction, she was clearly pleased with the results. “No more mammograms, I don’t have to worry about a recurrence, and although I wasn’t unhappy with my thirty-five-year-old breasts, my new breasts look like they’re twenty years old,” she gushed. “And they’ll look that way forever!” It was difficult for me to share her enthusiasm.
Judging by the online research I’d done, my surgeon, Dr. Nathalie Johnson, was one of the best breast surgeons in the Northwest and had received the proverbial Golden Boob Award at every breast cancer banquet and function. When she walked into the exam room, she exuded warmth and strength. She was also gorgeous, her dark brown hair graying slightly at the temples, her skin golden-brown, her smile huge. I immediately felt that I could trust her, and that I would do whatever she said.
Until she said: “Double mastectomy. That’s the treatment I recommend for women under thirty-five.”
I felt my eyes well up. Even after the assistant’s preamble, I had not expected to hear the word mastectomy . It was a huge blow, not necessarily because it meant losing my breasts, but because it suddenly put childbearing—something I’d always dreamed of but that wasn’t quite on the radar—front and center.
“What about nursing?” I asked feebly.
“Many women who haven’t had mastectomies are unable to nurse,” offered the assistant. “Just convince yourself that you’re one of them and make peace with that.” Trina and Dr. Johnson agreed; both confessed they’d had incredible difficulty nursing.
We reconvened in a conference room to discuss my options. I was lucky to have options—the cancer had been caught early—but that didn’t make the decisions any easier. The assistant gave me the phone number of a gal my age who’d recently undergone a mastectomy and reconstruction, and for the first of many times I heard the words: “She’s like you—she’s single.”
Yes, I was single. Trina was wonderful, but she was going home after my appointment to her princely husband and beautiful children. I would be sleeping alone. Probably forever, now that I was scheduled, in two weeks, to lose both of my breasts.
Published: March 2009
