Everyone wants to know how I found themalignant tumors growing inside my breastwhen I was 31 years old.
My left breast felt like a hard, tight water balloon.
It ached on the side near my armpit.
Getty / WIN-Initiative
Just to be on the safe side, she said, smiling.
Then a third one.
The technician wouldnt look me in the eyes.
Photo courtesy of Sascha Cohen
I was more interested in thewhy, and so was my oncologist.
Whats a girl like you doing in an office like mine?"
he asked when we first met.
I thought about this as expensive poison slithered and burned through my fragile green veins.
What I had done to deserve cancer?
If it wasnt poor health habits, could it have been karma?
I started making mental lists of what a fellow patient I know calls cancerable offenses.
I howled with laughter when my junior high drama teacher fell down some stairs.
I passed notes to my friends in high school that made vicious fun of other peoples outfits.
I’d lazily tossed dozenshundreds?of empty water bottles into the trash instead of the recycling bin.
Everyone’s a monster when theyre a teenager, with or without breasts.
Sometimes I let customers tip me with folded fives and tens placed directly between my boobs.
Bad girls, after all, get what is coming to them.
I’d watched enough TV to know that.
The pretty, promiscuous girl is the first victim in slasher movies.
Stand-up comics joke about dead strippers and dead hookers, the most disposable humans of all.
Samantha loses her haira clump falls into her hand mid-fellatio, in an especially chastening scenebut survives her disease.
Then there’s Jennifer North inValley of the Dolls.
This body, displayed for viewers in an earlier scene, tan and glittering, is an impossible body.
It is Chekovs gun.
Jennifer North’s worst nightmare was my reality.
To which I, too, almost said: no deal.
I feel like Im in the minority here.
(This is usually their children.
I do not have children.)
This way of performing breast cancer does not personally resonate.
I have a hard time relating to my self-abnegating pink sisters on the patient message boards.
She was the most fashionable of the fashionable, and her gowns allowed for an ample display.
The silence and stigma surrounding the disease stemmed in part from its association with sexual impropriety.
Last year, Alabama Senator Mo Brooks commented that healthy people are those who lead good lives.
You think: Im sorry, Im sorry, Im sorry.
You bargain: Ill change.
You wonder: Does my body belong to God, to nature, or to the soul inside?
Did I get sick because I thought I was the one who owned it?
The scar where my left nipple used to be is shaped like a long frown.
From cheekbone to hipbone I look ragged, moth-eaten, obviously imperiled.
These thoughts make me feel like a bitter witch.
After finishing chemo, we ordered genetic testing.
My breasts were just ticking time bombs.
It was essentially predetermined.
This is not alifestyle cancer, my oncologist clarified, sensing, as always, my anxious guilt.
you’re free to relax.
