The hardest loss of breast cancer

Why I'm up AGAIN at 6 am. Nightmares. I am dancing, and I even went out salsa dancing on Tuesday night - it helps. Trouble is I'm getting really physically exhausted.


I'm going through something really emotionally hard at the moment, and it's giving me bad dreams. wertperch and I have never told anyone else much about this, but back in 2005 when I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I was pregnant; probably conceived when I was in England. When I wasdiagnosed, the doc said there was no way I could postpone chemo for 7 months, and also no way a fetus would survive the chemotherapy. Probable miscarriage, undoubtedy birth defects, yucky stuff. Adriamycin, in particular, is a class C teratogen. In other words, it can cause severe birth defects. In addition, the pregnancy hormones at the time were causing the cancer to progress faster. I had an estrogen positive cancer, meaning estrogen made the cancer grow more quickly. I also had the most aggressive cancer cells , by staging. Very mutated, growing very fast. "We're going to take a big ba, and we are going to hit you as hard as we can." My doctor said it was pretty much a choice - if I wanted to hang on to the baby, the cancer would probably kill me first. Kevin and I talked about it, and he said I want you more than I want that baby, and Tessie and I need you more. It was a pretty black and white decision at the time.


So I had an abortion. A D&C, about six weeks into the chemotherapy. It was actually about a week after wertperch and I got married, in May of 2005. My doctor kindly postponed it a week, so I wasn't in physical discomfort during the wedding. (Keeping in mind that I was flooded with chemotherapy drugs at the time.)

Well, yesterday the imp saw me crying, talking to a friend in ballet class, and she asked me why - so I told her. And she is furious with me - for not telling her, for not having the baby, for not getting her opinion at the time, for potentially having the baby and dying and leaving her. I realize this makes no logical sense, but it's also a huge loss for her. She wants a baby brother or sister more than anything else in the world. Remember, she was 6 at the time.What is the right time to tell her? There isn't. There never was, and there isn't. And it's bringing up this incredible amount of sadness and loss for all of us, on top of everything else.

Kevin and I wanted that baby so badly, I haven't the words to express it.

The part they forgot to tell me was that chemotherapy destroys both ovaries and eggs. If I had known ahead of time, I potentially could at least have harvested some eggs, in the hopes of carrying a pregnancy later. The chemotherapy made me perimenopausal, so now there's no chance of getting pregnant - and the odds of having bad birth defects if I did are really high. I think the doctors didn't offer it because since my cancer was estrogen positive (then) pregnancy hormones would be bad, no matter when. Now that the cancer has mutated, it's no longer an issue, but it's pretty moot at this point - I'm 45, the ovaries are toast, the eggs, well, what was the old ad? This is your brain on drugs? Chemo kills fast dividing cells, and it doesn't differentiate between those we want, and those we don't want.

Needless to say, I had a rough night. Bad dreams, where I was at an adoption agency that more or less resembled the DMV, and they pretty much just said, your paperwork is not in order, so you can't have that baby. Sorry. They took a picture of my license plate, and the tags were expired, and they would not tell me what paperwork was missing - I "was just supposed to know that". Sorry. Then they'd send me to another line, where every clerk looked like Roz from Monsters, Inc., and they all went on coffee break when I got to the front. You know the drill.

Kevin and I didn't talk about it at all until at least a year later - we were so overwhelmed with all the other emotional repercussions, I think we just set it aside, and left it for later. I finally told a close friend who was struggling with infertility about a year or so ago. Secondary infertility is different from primary infertility, but it's still real, and it was still a loss. Of a very, very wanted baby.

So I'm sad this morning. Weepy. Maybe making a quilt might help. I could make a little baby doll quilt. I think I need to grieve, and acknowledge the loss somehow. Her name would have been Caroline Grace, or Helen Grace, if a girl. Wertperch and I never decided on a boy's name.

I don't, these days, have a lot of fear of death. I'm physically so strong, that any chemical, any radiation, any star wars technology they throw at me, I seem to just sort of bulldoze my way through. I don't suffer a lot from the emotional baggage during treatment, I seem to save that up for when I'm between bouts of chemo. But oh, I wanted that baby.

That baby is the biggest thing I gave up because of breast cancer. Losing a breast was a piece of cake in comparison. Breasts are mostly decorative, and the fake ones nowadays are pretty good. I can even adjust the size, depending on whether I'm doing yoga, or going out salsa dancing, and looking a little more bimbo.

Reconstruction is just not really an option. MORE surgery? Elective surgery? That puts me back in the hospital for a week? I'm more likely to visit Machu Pichu. I think I'm much more likely to get a tattoo of a tough old wisteria over the scar than let them cut me up even more. But I don't know what tattoo to put over the other scar, the invisible one.

Baby, we miss you. I'm sorry.

This post is for Sarah, and for Grace.

An early promotion to crone

Dear you,

Why is it so difficult to pick up writing when we've been away from it for a while? There are times that words seem to flow out endlessly, that I can't find enough hours in the day to put pen to paper (or less romantically, fingers to keyboard). And then there are days, weeks, months, when the spring dries up, and when confronted with that endless blank white paper, I run screaming. I knit, I draw, I cook, I arrange the sliced tomatoes beautifully on the plate, fresh basil, green olive oil and brown vinegar, but I have no words.

In Something in Season, Brendon talks about the fallow time for writing - perhaps we all need a winter, for the overtaxed soil of our wordminds to just absorb the world around us, but not attempt to put anything out. People ask me why Jim's salad is so good - my answer is often that his farm has been organic for over 30 years. The soil is happy, which I realize is ridiculous anthropomorphism. But places always have a tangible feeling to me - happy, dry, ancient, fierce. One of the reasons I love walking around on the Laurentian shield - this ancient piece of rock, even the trees seem young when compared to the bare rock bones of the earth where they emerge.

I know, I know, I'm hopping all over the place. One of the hazards of not writing for a while, I have too many loose and feathery ideas floating around in my head, and they are all interconnected, but I have trouble sticking with one theme.

Have you noticed that even though it's still summer, it's a new season? Remember, my year has five - summer is ending, harvest season has begun. That sneaky tang in the air, the promise of crisp apples and cooler nights.

So how am I going to connect a fallow wordmind, overtaxed soil, and the granite underneath the great lakes? I'm probably not - I know you will fill in the interstices.

It's odd being a cancer survivor. There was a time that I literally felt as though I was most of the way on the other side of the veil. I know it sounds odd, but there were times that I felt closer to dead than alive.

There was a day I remember, in the middle of chemotherapy. We were visiting friends up in the Capay Valley, enjoying their new pool. Wertperch and the imp were cavorting in the pool... I was looking out from the porch. I couldn't have been more than 100 feet away. But it was as though there was a scrim in between us. I stood there, unable to walk the distance to the pool, and I wondered to myself if I would ever get to be alive again, like they were.

This is the walking death of cancer treatment. The euphemism is "quality of life", but you know what I mean. The treatment kills you part of the way, just hopefully not all of the way.

It's only within the last few months that I realize that I have come back to the living. I was down visiting a very old friend, Therese. (Our Tess is named for her.) Well, visiting might not be the right word. She was at the beginning of an extremely hard labor, which eventually produced the fabulous Eigel Marcus, but that's another story.

Her house is perched on a steep hillside in Berkeley, and cell phones don't like it. I had walked upstairs and outside to give wertperch an update, and it was a gorgeous Berkeley day - it had been kiln hot in Davis, but Berkeley has perfect summers - seventy, clear, breezy. I leaned back and closed my eyes, soaking in the sun and the wind fingers caressing my face and arms. After I was done on the phone, I just sat there, pure lizard on a rock pleasure. And I realized, my friend, that this was the first time I had just felt good to be in my body in as long as I can remember.

This might sound small or trivial - it is not. Cancer is a breeze - it's the treatment that feels like hell. I had staggered along for long with side effects, and side effects of the side effects, that it was a real revelation to just feel…normal. I had gotten used to things like, oh, yes, you have fibrosis in your shoulder from the radiation, and did you know that you are going to be more prone to carpal tunnel in your right wrist, because of lymphedema? No, and I wish someone had told me this before I began a marathon drafting session that made my hand swell up like a balloon.

The difference between health and not-health ...'ease and dis-ease', if you will... is fairly subjective. I'm starting to whomp this excuse for a body back into shape - swimming and tromping around barefoot in the woods helps.

But I also understand the urge to leave the body behind that must come to everyone at a certain point during this sort of treatment. Robertson Davies refers to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. At some point it's not only that, but the foul rag and bone shop that makes up a body, that is this organic miasma that still takes breath and weeps and loves, and that I longed to leave behind. It's burned and scarred and sliced to pieces, yes, I'll confess, I am a witch, please drown me!

On the other hand, and this is where I was convolutedly leading to, I've had this early promotion to crone. Chemotherapy mostly put paid to menses, and tamoxifen has shorted it out the rest of the way. So I get to be a crone, at 43.

Granted, you know that any woman worth her salt is all three: mother, maiden and crone, but there are certain benefits to cronedom that mothers don't seem to get to share. Name me a female archetype that gets to have a trickster side. Crones are much more likely to have a Coyote aspect than moms. Young girls can have a trickster element (Pippi Longstocking, say), but not "matrons" (and isn't THAT an awful word?). I get to be wise and scary and eccentric and fierce and witchy instead of only nurturing and charming and mothery. Kevin has always been perfectly aware of my witchy side, but it seems to be becoming more visible. I don't remember 10 years ago wanting to be slightly scary - now I understand where that scary old lady thing comes from. It's FUN to be the witch next door.