Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy Read online

For anyone who does not believe this, that is why I am wearing lipstick.

  In the sterility of the operating room I am laughing.

  In the blood and gauze I am dancing.

  Under anesthesia, with a tube forced down my throat, I am hopeful and maybe even a little sexy.

  And slightly in control, just knowing that my lipstick might last.

  6

  Peep Show

  All I can see when I try to open my eyes is the white bandage where my right breast used to be. This is the moment I’ve been dreading: I have woken up after my mastectomy surgery and a piece of me is gone. They are screaming at me to breathe as hard as I can in the recovery room at Mount Sinai Hospital. The recovery room is like a low-budget porn movie—lots of moaning, bad lighting, and way too much directing.

  “Open your mouth—wider. Wider. Wider!”

  They gave me too much anesthesia for my surgery and I feel like I’m slurping up air. I still can’t breathe, even after they have rolled over the respirator and put the mask on. In between all the chaos a sassy nurse comes over to me and screams that I need to breathe—b-r-e-a-t-h-e harder.

  “Open your mouth!” Then, just when I think she is about to yell at me again, she starts to smile. It’s the lipstick.

  “Girl, what kind of lipstick are you wearing? That shit stayed on for your six-hour surgery!”

  Good thing my lipstick is not fading, because I am.

  But I can see Tyler hovering above me. He is reading me the affirmations my hypnotherapist suggested: “You are cured. You are so proud of your decision to have the mastectomy. Your body knows exactly how to respond to the surgery.”

  Tyler looks as in love as he did on the night he proposed to me in a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park. He hid two champagne glasses and a bottle of champagne under his trench coat. After I screamed “Yes!” and we downed the bubbly, he wanted to smash our glasses. As we threw our glasses and the glass shattered, Tyler grabbed me and said, “Geralyn, this moment can never be undone.” I remember those shards of glass shining on the New York City sidewalk under the street light. Now I feel like this surgery has smashed me into tiny pieces that can’t be glued back together. Everything hurts so badly. Tyler looks so scared in his surgical scrubs and so brave for me somehow. It is so strange because I have seen him in scrubs at home many times, but never in the hospital.

  I must have blacked out because when I wake up again I know that I am out of the recovery room—I don’t hear the moaning all around me. I am now in the hushed dim of a hospital room instead of the bright stadium lights of the recovery room. I can hear the sadness in the air and it feels so loud that I want to reassure everyone that I will be okay. There is a small crowd. My parents, brothers, in-laws, and friends have been sitting here in the darkness waiting for me to wake up.

  Robin starts to cry and my mother-in-law tells her not to cry in front of me and to leave the room. My dad is sitting and thinking hard. He looks like he is about to take a swing on the racquetball court. I strain to lift my head up and they all begin to come into focus and I can see the anticipation in the room. I try to say something but my voice is hoarse from the tube that has been down my throat during surgery.

  “I feel so much performance anxiety. Please, someone else speak.”

  That makes everyone laugh and we begin to talk about everything except what we’re all thinking about: my wound. No one will talk about it.

  A young doctor comes into the room to change my dressing and everyone leaves. I try to turn my neck as far away as I can when he starts to peel away the thin white layers of gauze that I feel are wet and blotched with fresh blood. I close my eyes and remember never being able to look when I got shots when I was little. I can’t look. Not yet. The doctor also unscrews the plastic drains that are sewn into my chest to catch my oozing wound fluid. He empties the fluid, screws back the drains, and checks my morphine pump. He scribbles something on my chart and quietly disappears into the bright white corridor outside my room. It would be strange to chitchat and I am way too tired to be nice or flirt.

  That first night, my chest is burning and pounding because the anesthesia is wearing off. I tell Tyler how much it hurts and he tells me it’s normal and to keep pushing my morphine pump for more pain meds. I keep buzzing for the nurse, but she just keeps screaming at me over the intercom that a doctor is on his way. This is definitely not General Hospital. Finally, four hours later, the pain resident comes to visit me. Tyler didn’t want me to bother him. Tyler knows the pain resident because I am at Mount Sinai where Tyler is doing his training. His friend is confused and asks if we just had a baby: Unfortunately, breast cancer and maternity patients are on the same floor in the Women’s Pavilion.

  “No, my wife just had a mastectomy.” And I can hear Tyler’s voice drop.

  The resident checks out my pump and tells me it has been blocked for hours—no pain meds for all that time. What the hell is wrong with my husband? It is the first signal that he should not give me any medical advice. He is a knee doctor, not a boob doctor and I am his wife, not his patient. Why is he so insensitive to my pain? He tries to make it up to me the next day by bringing me sushi for dinner. The sushi is so soft and does not hurt my chest when I chew it.

  I spend the next day, my first day without my breast, in bed. Everything hurts. It hurts when I breathe in to smell a beautiful bouquet of red roses. It hurts when my friends sit on the corner of my bed to be near me. It hurts especially when I need to roll over to pee in my bedpan. When I take a sip of fresh-squeezed carrot juice to help get my energy level back up, I feel the wound beginning to ooze.

  I get some good news: my lymph nodes are clean. I have never seen my parents so happy. They are jumping up and down and hugging the nurse and it looks like they are in a Megabucks Lotto commercial. Clean lymph nodes . . . the things we took for granted before this happened. The nurse reminds me that my right arm will be very prone to infection because I do not have lymph nodes anymore on that side. No blood drawn on that side, no blood pressure on that side, and no manicures. I know I will cheat. I can’t walk around with just my left hand polished. I am already going to be missing my right boob and I’ll need other things to match.

  The next day I am determined to be glamorous for my visitors. I will not pee in the bedpan. It takes me about twenty minutes to get out of bed, still attached to my IV pole, without moving the drains and tugging on the stitches holding together my skin. I do manage to pee on the toilet but I can’t reach to wipe and need to call a nurse. I ask her to help me put on my white waffle cotton robe—it bulges slightly but fits over the quart-sized plastic drains that look like milk cartons. And I take out my jewelry bag. I knew I wouldn’t be able to take a shower after my surgery because my wound would have tape all around it and wouldn’t be able to get wet. Since my hair would be greasy I brought jewelry to make up for it. I decide to wear my freshwater-pearl chandelier earrings because the white looks nice with the white cotton robe. And it matches my bandage.

  As if on cue, three dozen perfect, creamy white roses arrive in my room. “Thinking of you, Barbara Walters.”

  My mom, dad, and brothers do not leave my bed. My mother-in-law Marie, my father-in-law Gerald, my sister-in-law Leslie, my Uncle Marty, Uncle Steve, Aunt Marilyn, Aunt Pamela, Uncle Bernard, Aunt Nancy are all there. My friend Suzanne makes sure that I have fresh doughnuts every morning. My friends sit on my bed until the staff tells them they have to leave because visiting hours are over. They answer my phone and laugh: “Geralyn Lucas’s room, how can we help you?”

  But when my gynecologist—the one I first showed my lump to—comes to visit me, her visit reminds me of the sadness of where my life left off.

  “Geralyn, I am so sorry this happened. Please don’t get pregnant. It will be too dangerous for you now.”

  I need to see Dr. B’s face to feel some hope. He told me that I will get my life back, that it will be a hard year, but then things will return to normal. Dr. B is supposed to come
see me today and I need to look my best for him. He will probably feel guilty to see me in so much pain, knowing he has cut off my breast. But I feel a strange closeness with him, since he has cut me open and stitched me back together. I can’t reach to brush my hair—it would pull the stitches too much. I can still tilt my face down to apply my lipstick. But I can’t reach my arm up to curl my middle finger and make the perfect lipstick arch between my lips. It would hurt my drain stitching too much.

  When Dr. B arrives he immediately clears the room and sits down softly on the corner of my bed. He must know after performing so many surgeries how much a little bed pressure can hurt a wound.

  “Geri, wow you look like you’re feeling well.”

  It is quiet and the only noise is the beeping of my pulse monitor. It starts to quicken because I know what he is about to say.

  “Have you looked yet?”

  “I can’t.”

  He walks to the door and locks it. He walks over to the bed and pushes the white waffle bathrobe to the side and opens my blue surgical gown and his face drops a little because he sees what I feel: fresh blood seeping though the gauze.

  “Don’t move—you need to have this dressing changed and we’re going to take a look.”

  I turn away and close my eyes again. I have been closing my eyes every time a nurse, a doctor has changed the dressing.

  Dr. B is wiping off my wound, asking if it hurts, telling me that he is almost ready for me to open my eyes. I remember all the times I opened my eyes when I was little, anticipating surprises—wonderful presents. I try to imagine what I will look like and Dr. B answered my question:

  “Geri, open your eyes. You look beautiful. It’s okay.”

  Before I open my eyes I remember the bizarre photo album in the office of my plastic surgeon. Dr. P was the last doctor I went to see before I decided that I could have my mastectomy. Her photo album convinced me that I could do it. I had needed to see what it was going to look like.

  She is an expert in breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. She took out a photo album unlike any photo album I had ever seen: disembodied torsos of reconstructed breasts. Really, they looked like mug shots of breasts—bad lighting and the breasts looked so serious, like they knew they were posing for a reconstruction photo album. They looked better than I thought reconstructed breasts might look, I guess, but just so much blankness where the nipples should have been. And that was when I realized that having a mastectomy meant having my nipple removed as well as my breast. No one had told me that part.

  A breast without a nipple? It just wasn’t right. Like a pizza without pepperoni, a cake without icing, a sundae without a cherry on top. Dr. P must have read my mind and kept flipping the pages until we arrived at some tight shots of nipples. I am confused but she explains that she made those nipples. Nipple tattoos. She folded skin on the reconstructed mound to make a little pucker and then tattooed it a nipple color.

  I think I was even more surprised when Tyler told me that there’s a doctor at Mount Sinai who is famous for his nipples. Strange specialty. Especially when introducing oneself at a cocktail party. But now I was relieved that there were experts in this type of thing. Maybe I could be whole again. Maybe I could get a fabulous reconstructed breast and even a nipple. Maybe I could pass.

  Dr. P explained that there were choices on how to build my new boob: traditional implants or a tummy tuck where stomach fat was used to build a new breast. (After some serious pinching Dr. P told me I didn’t qualify because I was too skinny.) Another option involved a “donation” from another part of the body. The only fat source I had was on my butt and yes, that was where she would take it from. How strange. If I was going to lose my breast, why would I want to lose my ass, too? I still want to be a piece of ass. It just didn’t make sense. Especially after I asked what my ass would look like after the donation? There was even a photo in the book to show what that looked like: like a shark bite.

  Dr. P told me that she would insert a special breast implant called an expander when my breast was removed. It is a temporary one, a place holder boob that she will keep blowing up with fluid to stretch the skin so that when she switches in a regular implant my skin will slope and look like a natural breast.

  I was just so relieved that there would be a mound there when I woke up.

  After I saw Dr. P, I needed to ask Tyler what would happen to my breast after it was cut off of me in the OR. Would it just be thrown away? Would my nipple end up in some garbage dump somewhere? Tyler reassured me it would be refrigerated in a pathology lab, and somehow the idea of my nipple in some large refrigerator in a Tupperware container marked “Lucas-nipple” was an odd comfort. He probably made this up and I am so grateful. Like a kid who needs to believe in Santa, I need to believe my nipple is not just being thrown away.

  But now I will see the reconstruction results on me and not in that breast book. Dr. B has finished removing the dressing and he’s begging me to look. “Geri, come on, open your eyes.”

  When I open my eyes all I can see on my chest is a bright red line that looks like I took a Sharpie indelible marker and drew a diagonal line exactly where my right breast used to be. There are stitches that look like black spiders climbing up the red line, and except for the red line down the middle, it is a regular smooth skin mound that sort of looks like a breast mound. I try to remember what had been there only days before but I can’t.

  I think about the Tupperware to calm myself down. Dr. B and I look at each other. I just nod and I feel relief that the curtain has been pulled away. Dr. B readjusts the bandages and tapes them back over my mound. No more hiding. No more mystery. This is my new breast.

  Now I need to show Tyler.

  After five days in the hospital, they send me home with the plastic drains still sewn into my chest. I need to keep emptying them every few hours and keep measuring the fluid coming out to make sure that I am not bleeding too much. I want to leave the house, but I don’t own any shirt that fits over these milk quart–sized plastic containers. Tyler lends me his Tulane sweatshirt and I put on some lipstick and finally leave the house for a sushi dinner with my parents. It feels so good to be out of the hospital and to eat my dinner off of Japanese pottery instead of a plastic tray and plastic containers. But every bite of food and every swallow feels like it is pulling the milk quarts down on my chest and pulling my skin, and what would happen if my drains fell out in my favorite Japanese restaurant?

  Tyler has not seen my chest yet. But tonight when he gets out of the hospital he is going to snip the milk quarts out of me so that I don’t need to visit my plastic surgeon for that part—after all, he did a breast cancer rotation during his training.

  It will be the first time he has seen my breast after my mastectomy. It is so humiliating that this will be his first look. I want to be able to clean it up for him first, dress it up a little. But it’s hard to find a negligee that will fit over the milk quarts. My hair is greasy, too, because I still can’t take a shower and get the dressing wet. What will he think when he sees this? I know he has seen a mastectomy before in his training, but he has never seen it on his wife.

  Tyler is concentrating so hard when he is snipping the stitches off my chest that I can’t tell if he is shocked or just in surgeon mode. It is still raw and burns. The strangest part is that I can’t feel his hand moving along my new breast as he is snipping. There is no sensation. I am trying to remember what the nipple felt like there, when it used to feel so good.

  I don’t know what to expect. It is almost like a doctor-patient moment and it feels very professional. He finishes snipping the especially hard pieces of string, caked with my blood, that have kept the milk quarts on my chest.

  When he finishes he puts the scissors down and wipes off the wound. He is looking in my eyes and I notice that his eyes have changed from a medical, surgical look to an “I want you” look. Tyler smirks and his hands have moved from my wound. I notice that I have started to bleed a little where the stitc
hes were. Tyler does not miss a beat.

  “Geralyn, let me put on a fresh bandage so we can have sex.”

  I need to put on some lipstick.

  7

  Cocktails

  When I see the IV bag with a skull and crossbones on it wheeling towards me I realize that I am actually about to get poisoned. I am sweating as my oncologist, Dr. O, begins to explain the chemo “cocktail” the nurse is about to push through my veins. But I finally hear a word I can hang on to in this white sanitary place: cocktail!

  A strange thought pops into my head: When was the last time I was actually at a bar drinking a cocktail? I could really use a very dirty martini, Absolut vodka, extra olives on the side, right about now to help my courage kick in.

  Funny, I was never daring in the cocktail department. I was president of Students Against Driving Drunk in high school. I never had a fake ID. A Sea Breeze was as cool as I got. I could never say “Sex on the Beach” or “Orgasm” with a serious face to a bartender. Now I’m having a poisonous cocktail.

  First day of school, first kiss, and now first chemo. I’m not sure what the dress code is for first chemo, I mean I know this is not a time for appearances, but I do want to look good facing this assault. I have worn lipstick and my favorite crimson suit because I have just come from 20/20. I am also wearing the beautiful antique Murano glass necklace that Tyler gave me the night before my mastectomy. One of the glass globes is pinkish red, and it highlights the crimson of my suit and the red of my lipstick perfectly.

  Tyler can not be here because he has to be at the hospital with his patients. So my mom has taken the day off from her job as an elementary school guidance counselor to come with me to my first chemo. My mom used to love telling me that my first word was out. I’d stand in my crib and point and say “out.” Right now I would do anything to get the hell out of here.

  I am being so mean to my mom that it’s reminding me of when I was in high school and I took out all my frustrations and anxieties on her. The other patients keep shooting me nasty looks like, “Be nice to your poor mother—look at the hell she is already going through and you being snotty is making it worse for her.” My mom is being so cool, just there as my pincushion as I am about to get this huge needle.