Brooklyn, summer 1996.
I said, “Bad news first!”
But he had his own script.
“The good news is that you are healing well from the biopsy.
The bad news is…” You know what came next.
My first thought: You talkin' to me?
I’m too busy to be sick.
I’m a compulsively exercising, breast-feeding, breadwinning, black mother of two!
An SBW, strong black woman.
I have no risk factors, no family history of breast cancer.
And not one of the women in my pamphlets is black.
Then: All right!
I’ll admit it: I’m a lapsed vegetarian.
But I still scramble, bake or blend tofu to make it taste like something other than prechewed gum.
I should have had more cheap wine and barbecue pork rinds!
But in my head it sounded like, “You are going to die a horribly painful death.
Right here in my office, before I get through talking!”
I imagined aNew Yorkercartoon.
Panel one: Doctor tells patient, “You have cancer.”
Panel two: Patient drops dead of a heart attack.
(Always better than feeling scared, right?
)This is my fault.
I didn’t eat right, didn’t exercise enough.
I had too many negative thoughts.I felt guilty and ashamed.
The next morning, I woke yearning to see the faces of black women who’d survived cancer.
Surely there was someone, but people didn’t talk about those things.
I went to the library and sawCelebrating Lifeby Sylvia Dunnavant sticking out on the shelf.
Inside were images of black survivors.
Their stories filled my spiritual arsenal.
That’s wrong.Even in this, I judged myself.
I asked for a mastectomy.
Part of me felt that the more it hurt, the greater my odds of redemption.
A month later, I began chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
In the months after my surgery, I was blessed with the generosity of friends.
I had such and such done, and I’m fine now.
You’ll be OK, too," they’d reassure me.
My mother was a constant comfort.
It all went welluntil it didn’t.
Three years later, in 1999, I discovered a pea-sized nodule on my mastectomy scar.
Although I’d been informed that reoccurrence was a possibility, I couldn’t believe it.
I gave the beast a whole breast!
Why wouldn’t it leave me alone?
Why was I such a failure at “beating this thing”?
(“You should drink your own pee!”
one quack in Mexico told me.)
I was the poster girl for not letting my disease hold me back.
Sure, I was profoundly tired, but I was used to that.
Women in my family ate tired for breakfast.
I had no idea how to take care of my own emotional needs.
I used to fetishize every appointment.
Then I’d bob back up and will my life to resume.
Some of this acceptance came on the set of a short-lived TV show in March 2004.
I’d had a headache and felt woozy for a week.
I thought perhaps I’d had a chemo reaction, on top of keeping long hours.
But it was only a five-day shoot, and I wanted to work.
About 20 minutes after the director announced, “It’s a wrap!”
I went back to my trailer and had a seizure that threw me to the floor.
A beautiful actress I barely knew midwifed on the way to the hospital.
She assured me that as a mother of four, she couldn’t be disgusted by anything I did.
“Let your body do it,” she intoned.
Waves of shame rose and subsided.
In the ER, a CAT scan revealed a few small brain tumors that had caused my seizure.
The eight-week recovery that followed forced me to sit down, shut up and stay home.
If I accomplished nothing, I thought, what right had I to survive?
It felt like the end.
My body gave me no choice but to sit with those thoughts.
No getting up and getting busy when I got scared.
No shouting slogans (“I’m happy, healthy, whole and complete!")
No one blamed me, but I blamed myself.
Over time, I let that go, too.
I wasn’t instantly struck down!
I washed one damn dish at a time, and when I was tired, I learned to stop.
If making the bed took an hour and a half, so be it.
Today, my brain tumors are gone, but others keep popping up in my body.
It seemed that I’d feel sick and terrified every day until I died.
But that wasn’t true.
I learned to let my anxiety ride.
No one blamed me, but I blamed myself.
I had to let that go.
I’m currently in a clinical trial for a new drug, and I feel well.
My younger child is 11, and we shoot baskets before school.
I have ups and I have downs, too.
But a sense of shame no longer rules me.
I had to make this feeling manageable because the guilt and self-recriminations were just as damaging as cancer.
My illness may be chronic, but at last I can say my shame is in remission.
