Breast Cancer Awareness Month is kicking my butt. It’s October 2nd and I’ve already had enough of it. I am totally in favor of it. For other people. I am in favor of it for the people for whom it will help. It will save lives. I want them to do it. Them. Whoever the men and women are that have launched and maintained this awesome promotional campaign that is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I, myself, am quite aware, thank-you.
There is so much press and PR about Breast Cancer these days that I am actually starting to feel hip because I had breast cancer. It’s the chic cancer. It’s the edgy, trendy way to face your mortality. I now have an opening line for when I am chatting up Melissa (Ethridge) and Sheryl (Crow), thank God. “Oh, yeah. Breast Cancer. Been there, done that. Where’s the buffet?” It’s good that Breast Cancer Awareness Month has joined Halloween in October. Breast cancer is spooky too.
I go for treatment at my hospital and there is a plastic pink ribbon tied around literally every tree surrounding the hospital. The same kind of plastic strips the cops use to cordon off a crime scene. But bright pink. A different kind of crime scene. I go to the mall with Van and the kids to get my computer fixed and there are the same pink ribbons tied around every tree surrounding the parking lots, which take up acres. Inside the mall, there are HUGE-at least 30 foot-pink ribbon sculptures hanging from the ceiling like the balloons in the Macy’s Day Parade, framed by lines of festive pink Christmas tree lights. A bizarre celebration of a deadly disease. There are special offers to buy from this store and that store and a certain amount of the purchase price will go to Breast Cancer research. I am astounded at the breadth of this campaign as I walk through the mall and am dizzy thinking of all the phone calls and deals of which this all is a result.
Maybe now a few more women will get their yearly mammograms. That would be very good. A mammogram saved my life. But for me, every time I see a pink ribbon, it says, “Did you die? Oh-not dead now, but maybe dead later? Maybe recurrence? Remember this past year? Remember how shitty chemo was?” This, when really all I am interested in is a new operating system for my Mac from the Apple Store and to scout out a new dining room table at Crate and Barrel that will go with the furniture I inherited from my father who died three years ago of skin cancer that had metastasized to his brain. Can I just shop? Must I think about the silicone pillow that has replaced my right breast? About dying?
Today I got up at 5am to be on my friend Nelsie’s radio show. We had been talking for months about how I was going to do a segment on breast cancer when October came around. It was incentive for me to stay witness to this journey. I collected ideas, stories, jokes to tell the radio public from the mouth of someone who is right in it. From someone who is aware, very aware, of breast cancer. I rose and shone. 5AM. Green tea, stoned wheat thins, a little yoga, a review of my notes, and bingo. I did a great job. Told all my good cancer jokes right on cue, like the one about looking like an aging poodle as my head, bald from chemo, sprouted gray curls. I closed with thoughts of how cancer enhanced how I see myself as a mother to my little boys. I was strong, a warrior, a survivor. Poignant yet funny. Deep yet snappy.
Like the muscle man in the circus, I hit the target and rang the bell. But only a couple hours later, the reverberations from the bell of success have mutated into the din of a bunch of nervous monkeys, chattering nonstop but saying nothing. My mental ‘to do’ list is ticking things off in my head, but the sound is garbled, warped. I am unmoored.
A bike ride helps. I push up extra hills, deliberately exerting myself to get grounded, to find a thread of sanity again to hold. But it’s not enough. Not enough. I’m still swirling down a drain, my mind obsessively reviewing the radio show looking for where I must have screwed up to cause this much anguish. Even a half hour of hill sprints isn’t enough to anchor me so I decide to attack our lawn. I bee-line for the mower and fire her up. I push it onto the long moist grass and cut, controlling the grass, putting it in its place. The obnoxious buzz drowns out the monkeys. I want to mow forever. Then the coin drops and my body relaxes. I stop pushing and stand still with the mower handle still vibrating in my hands. OH! That’s it!
This anxiety isn’t about whether I did a good job on the radio. The anxiety is from hearing, during this friggin’ Breast Cancer Awareness month radio show, that a woman dies of breast cancer every thirteen minutes in our country. Does that mean I have 12 left? It is from seeing a thousand pink ribbons and from talking about my cancer on the radio for God’s sake, being the featured guest contributor for the segment on breast cancer. “Next up, hear how a mother of two survives breast cancer…stay tuned” and it’s me. I’m the mother of two. The two are in the house right now waiting for me to finish mowing.
I sit heavily on the lawn chair by the garage. Though my heart is broken, at least I have returned to myself, to sit by my side, hold my hand and breathe my breath. I will take this pain over free-floating anxiety anytime.
I leave my grassy rain boots outside the back door and slip inside to the play room where a feverish 5 year old Theo is watching TV. Gus is crashed out on the sofa. Out like only two year olds can be. I climb up onto the dark green knock-off La-Z-Boy with Theo.
“Wanna watch SpongeBob together?” I surprise him with this rare offer.
“YAH!” he raises his high voice higher with joy.
“Do you know when I got this chair?” I ask him, with a smile.
He looks at me, dark brown eyes clear with fever, waiting for the story.
“I got it when you were born so I could nurse you in it.”
We both smile and keep our faces close. We hold hands. Theo strokes my hand. It’s perfect and special and I am lucky. Loved, cared for.
I take the remote and punch a few keys to get SpongeBob. And while Theo watches the antics of Bikini Bottom, I float in the aliveness of this fresh, hard-won serenity, of touching his insanely soft skin, smelling his salty hair; this pause in the scrambling dance that I have to do to shake down the acceptance of my breast cancer.
***
A few days later, shopping for a new car, we navigate through two dealerships and three test-drives and end up at the Panera Bread Company for lunch. I see on the front door a large photographic poster announcing that they are now serving BAGELS IN THE SHAPE OF RIBBONS FOR BREAST CANCER. Someone is in some kitchen somewhere deftly criss-crossing raisin bagel dough into the classic awareness-raising ribbon shape. So it’s no longer enough that I have to SEE the ribbons everywhere, I now am suppose to eat them. My awareness is reluctantly being shoved to new heights.
After lunch, we drive up the street to the animal emergency hospital where our red bone coon hound, Cyndi-Lou, the sweetest girl of our home (besides me ), is locked inside a Lucite oxygen cage fighting for her life after being whomped by a car that then drove off, leaving her to limp home and collapse in the kitchen, her mouth in a strange smile of pain and shock.
“She has sustained serious trauma to her chest,” the vet told us. That makes two of us. “As much as she could stand without dying.” Yes, I know what that’s like. We stroke her short, rusty fur and coo at her through the boy-in-the-bubble hole of the cage.
Home again at the end this VERY stressful day of pain (my reconstructed breast hurts me), parenting stress ( dragging a four year old through a grown-up day), and doggie hospitals with four thousand dollar invoices, I am in our kitchen, making chamomile tea looking to let it all go, when I glance over to the English Muffin bag that Van has brought home from the A&P. “JOIN FORCES FOR THE CURE” is scrawled across the plastic bag, with the now unmistakable bright pink ribbon swirl on it. They have reached virtually every single company in the civilized world!
I turn on my heel and go upstairs. I’ll join forces with my bed and start over in the morning.
***
Patience Moore is a recent MEWS member and a singer/songwriter/producer who won five awards for her family music project Buckaroos Sleep Too! She is currently writing a memior about being diagnosed and treated for Breast Cancer in 2005 called Top Ten Reasons to Get Breast Cancer. She will be joining NJ LIFE and LEISURE with a new column called " That's Life" beginning in the November issue. Patience also teaches elementary school music and private voice lessons. She lives in Montclair with her husband Van Manakas and their sons Theo and Gus.
(PatienceMoore2@Gmail.com www.PatienceMoore.com)
