Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy Read online

  “I always thought you were just downtown. The hat and short skirts?”

  Downtown seems so far away from my uptown doctor offices and the chemo that I just smirk. Downtown?

  I am wearing tighter sweaters to match my short skirts. The expander boob implant my plastic surgeon put inside of me is really too big to fit into my tailored suit jackets. It is also bigger than my left breast, so I need to even myself out with a falsie on the left side. I realize that my boobs don’t really look even in anything I wear except tight sweaters. I think the tightness and gravity pushes them together and down and makes them look sort of similar—maybe it is an optical illusion? I always wanted big boobs—maybe I should be careful what I wish for. How crazy that I have breast cancer, but my boobs are getting more attention. Every time I get a stare I want to explain that they aren’t real, but then I realize how needy I feel for attention, any attention, and I decide to take it. I am thinking that everyone at work must be checking out my ever-changing rack even if they don’t mean to. I know it’s true when the cutest producer on staff pulls me aside one day and confirms my suspicion.

  “Geralyn, you look really good.”

  “Thanks.” I am so glad that I started wearing concealer to cover the green tinge of my skin from the chemo.

  “No, you look really, really good,” he says, and stares at my boobs for a second to make his point.

  It is so high maintenance to keep pulling this off. Instead of asking my friends, “Does this make me look fat?” I am always asking if my boobs look even in the shirt I’m wearing, and if there are enough stray wisps creeping out of my baseball cap, and if my skin looks too green.

  It is not only my style that is changing, it is my substance. Somehow, losing my breast and hair have made me more daring, which has made me more seductive and even sexier. Living with the risk of dying is making me more and more and more risqué. Every time something goes, I try and amp up something else. It’s a distraction technique designed to thoroughly confuse the viewer, and it’s working. I have found some inner cleavage I never knew was there. It keeps daring me to keep going.

  I unplug my juicer, which is filled with parsnips and beets and wheat grass. My parents convinced me to eat macrobiotic when I was diagnosed and I have been juicing every day and trying to eat seaweed. I had a consult with a health guru who told me that caffeine, sugar, and alcohol make the tumor grow. But those are all my favorite food groups, and since I have been eating a special health diet I hold my nose through most meals. I decide to throw out every piece of tofu and seaweed from my refrigerator, and I order a bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll with a large coffee on the side. If my life is short, I need to taste it now. Mojo.

  And when I feel my mojo waning, I borrow some from my boss, Meredith. Mojo is Meredith’s middle name. I always seem to be strong at work, but one day I pretend that I need her advice about a story I am working on, but when my butt hits her sofa, I sob.

  “Meredith, I’m so tired. I’m so scared. I can’t take the chemo anymore. I feel like I’m dead already.”

  Meredith locked her door and blocked all her calls, even though the broadcast was the following day, and hugged me for what felt like an hour. My mojo is returning.

  I dance the Macarena at our office Christmas party. Mojo.

  I hire a personal trainer named Hakim and tell him I need to make sure I don’t lose my range of motion after my mastectomy surgery.

  “Hakim, please push me hard. I know I’m going through chemo but I can handle it. I need to work on my legs because I’ve started wearing shorter skirts.”

  “And oh, could my butt ever look like yours?” Mojo.

  On the anniversary of our engagement I want to be romantic and sexy for Tyler, but my mouth tastes like metal from the chemo and I really do have a headache (and a stomachache). I can’t find any lingerie that fits over my two different-sized boobs and I don’t want to wear the baseball cap to bed. I am feeling so not sexy it is ridiculous. I want to him to touch me so badly, but my chest still hurts from my mastectomy surgery. Actually, everything hurts.

  I consider putting on the wig and tight sweater with the falsie inside my bra—maybe I could have sex with Tyler almost fully dressed? I wish I could have sex with my clothes on. I want to hide but I also want to just be there totally with Tyler, like we used to, in the bed. I have been sleeping with a beret so Tyler doesn’t have to see me bald. And I’ve been wearing a bra with the falsie even under my nightgown just to reassure myself that I sort of match.

  I put on some perfume. And I line my lips with lipstick. I can’t even feel Tyler’s hand when he puts it on the bright red diagonal scar across my chest. In fact, I have been walking into strangers with my reconstructed right boob because I cannot feel where it starts.

  But the great thing about sex is that it’s like riding a bicycle. I know that Tyler still loves me—my laugh, our conversations—but will he still be turned on?

  Yes, yes, and definitely yes. I cannot believe that Tyler wants me so much.

  The way he is kissing me and touching me, I know that it’s not my hair or my boob that ever made him fall in love with me. It was my mojo. It was always there, just waiting for me to meet it.

  After Tyler and I have sex again I feel so hot that I still can’t get that Shania Twain song out of my head: Man, I feel like a woman!

  Mojo.

  10

  Busted!

  The invitation to my ten-year high school reunion arrives just as the last substantial wisps of my hair have fallen out and there is almost nothing peeking out of my baseball cap. Besides my baldness, I am more worried that if I go to the reunion my classmates will notice my boob job. It is obvious.

  I had been an A-cup in high school. As in lots of A’s. I was smart—or always tried hard to be. A goody girl, that’s what my brothers called me. Now I was a D-cup. As in Duh! Something has changed!

  I know that I seem conceited thinking everyone will stare at my new rack. Although there are only two letters between A and D, there are a lot of stares. B—boy, she changed! C—can’t be real, she must have had a boob job. I could reveal the reason for my boob job before they judged the cover of my book—double D. I have been going through breast cancer reconstruction, and it is obvious.

  I never understood why they called it breast reconstruction until I went to my first appointment to have my implant “expanded.” I should have worn a hard hat. Expanding is a polite way of saying that your plastic surgeon is going to pull your skin so hard that you’ll want to scream “motherfucker!” as loud as you can.

  My plastic surgeon, Dr. P, takes a needle to locate my “port” switch inside the implant, and then fills my implant with so much saline solution that my skin stretches like a balloon about to burst. Can skin burst? I think my new boob is going to explode right there in her pristine Park Avenue plastic surgery office. I imagine bits of my skin and implant flying around the room and landing on her diploma. It hurts and presses against my ribcage. I must have gained five pounds from all that saline! The night after my first of four expansion procedure “blow-ups” I make up my mind. It is 4 A.M. and I am pacing the hallway of my one-bedroom apartment. Tyler is on call at the hospital. I am taking another Tylenol with codeine because my chest is pounding from being so overinflated. I am worried that all my expensive suit jackets that I bought when I got my job at 20/20 won’t fit over my new rack.

  But I decide that if it hurts this much to rebuild my breast, I am going to hurt to look at. My breasts will have to be large, round, and worth the hell I am going through. At my next expansion I tell Dr. P to bring it on, blow me up, and please make me look like Baywatch. I am going to get some cleavage out of this. Thankfully, she has never seen Baywatch. I try to explain the idea of it—big, gigantic, fake, implant boobs.

  “Geralyn, my work is natural. When we’re finished I want you to look like you have not had work done. You’re a petite girl and I just can’t make your breasts that large.” I reluctantly agree a
nd resign myself to having tasteful breast implants. Reluctantly. If my breasts might kill me, then I want them to stop traffic.

  The hardest part about reconstruction is finding a bra that fits. My left breast is still an A, but my right construction site is a double D from all the inflating. I have had to find a falsie to pad the left real boob so it matches my right side. My chest always looks like it is sloping down on the left side (thank god assymetrical shirts are in!). To further complicate things, I only have one nipple, so when I get a headlight there is just one, which is so obvious. I need padding so my left nipple doesn’t show. I cannot believe the little luxuries that I used to take for granted. Like wearing a bathing suit: Now the falsie just floats around once the water creeps in. My seven-year-old cousin Alissa had to hold her towel up for me as a shield when we went swimming together recently. She knew I was nervous that the falsie was on the loose. What would happen if my falsie went wild at my high school reunion? That would be memorable.

  Yes, I have a good reason to skip my reunion. Actually two: I am missing my hair and a breast. But I need to show up because I am scared that I will not live to attend the next one. I need to be accounted for. Even if they whisper my fate and the C-word in ten years, at least I can be here now.

  My life has become about showing up, because if I die I won’t have a chance to. It’s a way of proving to myself that I am still alive. Showing-Up Syndrome started with going to my friend’s wedding in Sun Valley, Idaho, even though it was only one day after my first chemo. After I spent the night vomiting on my bathroom floor, I had to get on a plane—I had promised her I would. Tyler thought I was crazy and wanted me to stay in bed. He thought it was ridiculous to fly out Saturday morning and fly back Sunday night because it was such a long flight to Idaho. On the way to the airport, the cab driver asked what airline we wanted, and that is when I saw the signs announcing which airline was located in which terminal. Terminal. I had not heard the word since my diagnosis and I started to shake and sweat. Terminal. Please, please, please do not let me be terminal.

  But I couldn’t tell Tyler how scared I was because he was grumpy the entire flight. To add to his bad mood, we had a mechanical failure and were diverted to Atlanta. My life felt like one big mechanical failure. I, too, am experiencing engine trouble. When we finally arrived at the wedding, we had already missed the ceremony and most of the party, but I did get to see my friend in her gorgeous Vera Wang wedding dress being skated around the ice rink on a chair by her hockey-playing groom and his groomsmen. I got my picture taken with the bride and I felt I had accomplished my mission because I was somehow there. I will be in her photo album. Even if I die, my picture will be there.

  On our return flight, when we landed, I was so scared to face the Terminal sign again. And there was more bad news blaring in our terminal on CNN airport televisions. Linda McCartney had just died of breast cancer. I had been obsessing about dying anyway, but this news put me over the edge. How could someone that healthy (Linda was a vegetarian), that fierce, that rich die of cancer? If anyone could have “beaten” cancer, Linda McCartney could. I was starting to realize that cancer plays by its own rules.

  That is why I need to show up at my reunion—I need to be accounted for today because I might not be here tomorrow. But I definitely don’t want to tell everyone from high school that I have breast cancer. That I am in treatment, doing chemotherapy, and undergoing reconstructive surgery. I am embarrassed. I still feel like a freak for being so young and having breast cancer, and it is mortifying to have to say the word breast to people I have not seen since high school—how immature is that?

  I also need an escape now. Everyone at work knows and I have basically become the Cancer Girl. I am nostalgic for the me before the cancer. And, I am also being practical: I am not sure my high school class can handle it. My high school class was high school shallow. The cool kids did drugs and were pretty mean to the smart kids, who studied and were pretty mean to each other because they weren’t cool. Do I trust revealing my cancer to this group? Have they grown up? Will they pity me? Will they look at me with the are-you-going-to-die question mark on their face?

  And there are logistical considerations. Will I need to tell the whole story again and again or will it spread like a virus after one person is infected with the gossip? Geralyn has cancer—other people have a baby, a husband, a big job, a red Porsche. It feels cruel and unfair. I know that I have accomplished so much more than a cancer diagnosis, but how will they know? Cancer is the headline. Anything else I say will get lost.

  My high school class voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I was managing editor of my high school paper, The Merionite. That was high school, but my life has gone on, too, even though it is stalled right now. I graduated from U of P and Columbia Journalism School. I’m married to a smart and good-looking doctor. I’m a producer at ABC News. I am convincing myself that I am not only a cancer diagnosis, and that I deserve to be more at my reunion.

  I decide that I will reveal to my classmates the truth that they hadn’t seen in high school: I have become cool. But I’m scared of getting caught. I’m scared they will realize that I am hiding my cancer.

  To pull off my ruse, I need to keep dressing the part of my new cancer chic. I call my friend Rebecca and explain my dilemma to her: I need to find a shirt that is really daring, but also makes my boobs look even. So many of the shirts I have been wearing make me look uneven. I am sloping downwards on the left side, too high on the right. Rebecca becomes my accomplice and tells me to meet her at Bloomingdale’s. We find a chocolate-brown satin shirt. The shiny texture surprisingly covers the bump from my falsie nicely. My boobs just look big and firm. There is no plastic Jell-O jiggle from my falsie when I walk because we also bought an 18 Hour support bra (I always wondered who needed those things). I pick a brown suede baseball cap and stacked brown men’s shoes. I wear extra-tight khakis and I tie a sweater around my waist for effect. Rebecca is totally into the stylist role and even tries to trim the straggly micro-wisps that peek out from under my baseball cap.

  I am an imposter, scared of being caught and judged. Isn’t that so high school of me?

  I can tell I’ve put on too much makeup when I see my reflection in the mirror behind the bar after I walk into the restaurant in the Philadelphia suburbs on the night of the reunion. That wasn’t part of the cool plan—it’s just that my skin is really green from the chemo. I have never pencilled in my eyebrows before—but they, too, have thinned, and now I realize I’ve made them too dramatic. But wait, this is dramatic. This is Terms of Endearment, Steel Magnolias, and I could be up for a Golden Globe.

  I have only two co-conspirators in the room, my closest friends attending, Jessie and Julie, who have been so supportive since I was diagnosed. I smile at them and know my plan is working when Randy tells me he had a crush on me in seventh grade. Rob can’t stop staring at my new rack and is suddenly interested in me even though he never seemed that interested when we spent an entire year together on the student government executive committee. He suddenly wants to know all about my life.

  C for cool is going smoothly. Tyler is in the room and I feel like I’m showing him off like a trophy because in high school I always thought that guys weren’t interested enough in me. I was too smart, too serious, and maybe my boobs were too small?

  No one is even suspicious that I’m not having a drink: In high school I was president and founder of a Students Against Driving Drunk chapter. A few classmates are teasing me that I still don’t drink. (If they only knew about my chemo cocktails.)

  I am giddy and I’ve forgotten that C is for something else until I see Ted. He sat behind me in homeroom for four years. He always hid my pocketbook. He picks up with the lame flirting where we left off ten years ago.

  He is teasing me. “You think you’re so cool—so bad. You live in New York, look at your hat!”

  Suddenly, he is reaching for my hat.

  “Stop! Ted! I have cancer, I have no hair under th
is.”

  A drama is unfolding. He is crying and fleeing to the bathroom, and two girls follow. My cover is blown. I need to get out of there quickly. I run over to Tyler and Jessie and Julie and tell them that I need to go because I’m exhausted, and I am. I am not sure if it’s the chemo or the energy I’ve put into being such a faker.

  When I say good-bye to Jessie and Julie I don’t know how to thank them. Despite all the high school drama we lived through together, I love Jessie and Julie most for being there with me tonight. For supporting my decision to fake it and never judging me. Tyler did not understand why it was so important to me to fake it, and he really wanted no part in it. He just stayed in the corner with Jessie and Julie’s husbands. I wish he had understood and had stayed by my side, held my hand, been my co-conspirator. He is always curious about why I even care about what other people think. I think if he had been me he would have walked into that room and told everyone. But I just couldn’t admit what was happening to me.

  I am so exhausted from the reunion that I cannot even eat Thanksgiving dinner when I get back to my parents’ house where I grew up. My mom and dad and family friends are there and everyone wants to ask me about the reunion. All I can think about is a nap. But once I am in bed upstairs, I feel so disconnected, like pretending at my reunion that I don’t have cancer. Showing-Up-Syndrome is starting to feel so shallow.

  I am in my old bedroom, still painted yellow with all the yellow fake country French furniture from my childhood. Under my blankets with my hat still on in the dark and cold, I hear everyone downstairs, singing “Happy Birthday” to our family friend, the song I’m so scared of now.

  The sounds of “Happy Birthday” are just hanging there in the darkness. I hate that song so much now because it is reminding me that I might not live. That I had to have a mastectomy a day after my birthday. And now I feel that life is happening without me already. It’s like I already died. I always wondered how my family would be without me. Would my brothers be okay? Would my parents drown in their grief? I am relieved that they can go on, but selfishly, I want there to be sadness downstairs, too. I feel like a ghost in my own life. Why am I even trying to be a part of things when I am not really even here?