My daughter, who has taken the day off from school, arrives in the pre-op room, her mouth agape. “Wait, what? I don’t get it,” she keeps saying. “So you aren’t getting surgery? What’ll I tell my friends?” Her phone is vibrating with dozens of text messages from classmates, wanting to know how the operation went.
I shrug. “Tell them your mother doesn’t have cancer,” I say.
“I love you,” she says, hugging me.
“I love you, too,” I say, tearing up. It’s our first step back to who we were before that fateful night when she came home early. For my birthday, a month later, I will come home from work to a cake she and George have baked from scratch, replete with pink frosting and a phoenix she’s made out of strawberries.
My daughter’s and George’s birthday cake, March 11, 2014, © Deborah Copaken
Back at Health Today, I ask an oncologist—an old acquaintance from high school who is happy to trade her unpaid writing for exposure—to write a weekly column on breast cancer, and it does well. I’ve made it through nearly five months of this game of musical chairs, and then I make it through the IPO and its self-congratulatory celebration at City Winery as well, and though I have no shares in the company—others with bigger jobs do and are suddenly rich, in no small part off the labors of unpaid sick people with pharmaceutical-ad-friendly illnesses—I start to breathe easier. I don’t love my job, but I’m putting everything I have into it, and that has to count for something.
On the Monday morning after Friday’s IPO, I head to the apartment of one of our newest bloggers to interview him about his multiple sclerosis and take dictation, as he’s not feeling well enough to type. He’s the husband of one of my oldest friends, who said he’d be happy to help me out and write a column. That morning, he recounts a disturbing story of disability discrimination. I shoot off a few frames of him with his wife and kids as well, to go along with his post, and then I head back to the office just before noon to download the images and edit the text down to a manageable length. As I sit down to do this, I see my boss, the editorial director, walking over to speak with me. She looks angry, but I’m not immediately concerned by this. These days her face is nearly always pinched into a scowl, and I’m excited to tell her about our new contributor. “Oh my god,” I tell her, “wait till you read the new blog post I’m editing. That man with MS I told you about, he has a doozy of a story about—”
“Where have you been?” she snaps, cutting me off.
“Taking dictation. From a blogger with MS. He can’t type. I told you this on Friday. Then I sent you an email about it over the weekend to remind you.”
“Oh, right,” she says. “Well, they’ve been looking for you. You better go talk to them.” Her eyes are oddly averted.
“Who’s been looking for me?”
“HR.”
“HR? Why?” I’d spoken to someone in HR a month earlier, to alert them to my upcoming surgery. Just make sure you get your work done while you recover, he’d said. This isn’t the most opportune time to be absent, what with the IPO coming up, plus he’d heard from the vice president that I’d been asking for money to pay our contributors, which had upset her enough that she’d filed a report. We don’t pay for blog content, he reminded me. I know, I know, I’d said, choking on the apology. I’m sorry for pushing.
“I have no idea why they want to see you,” my boss lies.
“Am I getting fired? Please, just tell me, so I can prepare.”
“Just go talk to them.” She quickly pivots and walks away.
The editorial director and I have actually become friendly over the past few weeks since my aborted surgery, or so I thought, going out to lunch together and sharing stories of single motherhood and postmarital dating. Her ex is in the picture, though, and sharing custody, so she’s able to spend part of the week with her boyfriend. That must be nice, I’d said, not having to jump on the subway and sneak in affection between Harold and the Purple Crayon and Jon Stewart. It is, she said, except her new boyfriend is kind of a dolt. Why stay then? I’d wondered. The same reasons we both stay in this job, she said with a shrug: inertia, need.
The ground under me drops out, as in a Gravitron, as I make my way to the HR department and take a seat. I can’t stop staring at the neck of the man who meets me there. It’s so thick, it spills out over his shirt collar like mozzarella tied with string. He’s the head of human resources, and he’s pointing at me, menacingly, his face frothed into a red frenzy. “You’ve been absent so often, we couldn’t even find you to fire you!” he says.
I remind this massive man with the finger in my face that in the hours after the company went public, which is when he says he first couldn’t find me to fire me, our computers had crashed from the sudden interest in our brand, and all of us in editorial were told to go home and finish working on our own computers. I remind him that my sole other absences—aside from this morning when he said he wanted to fire me, when I was taking dictation from a new blogger with MS—were spent at Sloan Kettering. I show him those well-documented absences, nine in all, mostly half days, blocked out on my calendar between December 2013 and February 2014, when I would edit from the hospital waiting room instead of from my desk. Never once, I tell him, did I shirk my responsibilities. Despite my absences, my work was never late. I made sure of that. And I grew our contributor base and organic traffic all the same. Surely a health organization understands that workers sometimes have to go to a doctor when they get sick. I ask if I will receive severance. He shakes his head no.
I start to beg. I’m a single parent, I say. My family’s sole wage-earner. Please. Just a month or two of severance, so I can have time to find a new job and still pay rent and my son’s college tuition bills. There’s also a growing stack of bills from Sloan Kettering I’ve yet to pay off. Please!
No, he repeats. You have fifteen minutes to gather your things and leave.
Skip Notes
* Later at home, I will do some research and find only one old study from 1994, suggesting that oxytocin could play a role in breast cancer reduction, but I could find no further follow-up. Then, just as I was wrapping up the final edit of this book, a new article appeared in Oncogene: “The oxytocin receptor signalling system and breast cancer: a critical review.” It’s the first article I could find that addresses the possibility of oxytocin’s role in breast cancer reduction of the non-lactating breast. As with most studies of women’s bodies, there’s been a dearth of data. “The effects of OT [oxytocin receptor] on non-lactating mammary gland remains poorly explored since most studies have focused on OT’s role during pregnancy and lactation.” In other words, though we know women who breastfeed their children have a lower incidence of breast cancer than those who don’t, no one has actually studied the effects of the oxytocin triggered by sexual arousal and sexual activity on neutralizing cancer cells, but perhaps they should. Especially since a study in Sri Lanka of the incidence of breast cancer in sexually active women versus celibate women, all of whom did not have kids, thereby removing lactation from the data set, showed that “breast cancer incidence was lower in the sexually active group than in the celibate group.”
FIFTEEN
Inwood
MAY–AUGUST 2014
The palpitations begin their nocturnal visitations every night at around 3 a.m. Which is just so dark-night-of-the-soul cliché that I refuse to believe they’ve become a daily feature of my life until they’ve been striking for several weeks.
I am not, by nature, anxious. When I was four years old, I got stuck alone in an elevator and, certain all would be straightened out soon enough, I sat on the floor picking a scab off my knee. While getting mugged at gunpoint, I asked the mugger if I could just hand over my cash instead of the whole wallet because, you know, what a hassle at the DMV. When my older son’s toddler forehead collided with a broken bottle on the sidewalk, I stepped into an ambulance cradling
his skull with the shard of glass still protruding from its center, telling him, softly, “You’re okay. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine,” having just handed over my baby daughter, who was not allowed in the ambulance,*1 to the super.
But being a forty-eight-year-old, suddenly unemployed, severance-denied solo parent in need of expensive medical tests in a gig economy has shattered any claim I’ve ever had on innate calm.
The nightly awakenings are more than rude, they are sweat-soaked and terrifying: a nightmare that only worsens when you open your eyes. I can’t catch my breath. I clutch my chest, inside which my heart makes its normally quiet and obedient presence known, motherfucker, like a prisoner banging a tin cup against my rib cage.
PVCs—premature ventricular contractions—I’ll later find out they’re called. But not for another two years, when they become so insistent, I’ll collapse at work. For now I just call them my beat-skipping thing.
Anxiety is one of the four major risk factors for PVCs, which are harmless when they happen occasionally, but when they become a chronic feature of your heart’s mechanics, they can lead to permanent damage from cardiomyopathy and arrhythmia. I try to will myself to breathe through these nightly episodes but end up pacing the floor instead, perseverating. The accompanying brain swirl, during these nightly awakenings, is always the same and always as maddeningly circular as my floor-pacing, in the way all money panic spirals down through the catch-22 funnel of not having any:
My lease is up in two months. I should really move to cut down on my rent. I can’t rent a new place if I can’t show monthly income or at least cash in the bank. It took me six months to find the last job. I’ll be homeless at that rate. I have to let go of Brittany. Then she’ll be homeless. Plus how can I go to work, once I find a new job, without Brittany?
The Commune has two new members: a fellow middle-aged, newly separated mother, introduced to me by a friend, and her son. The woman moved into my older son’s room after George grew weary of the lack of privacy and noise of communal living. Her teenage son floats in and out of my tiny once–writing studio formerly occupied by Brittany. Brittany now sleeps on the floor of the family room.
This brings human membership in our commune up to seven. In a three-bedroom apartment, in the top half of a narrow Harlem rowhouse. The newly separated mother, already thin, is shrinking thinner. Hannah, after several months of spotless attendance at school, has started to backslide in other ways. So now my brain swirl has drawn these other souls into its vortex as well, picking up speed and draining down through my heart.
How can I tell a woman who’s in the middle of her own moment of inflection that I can’t afford to keep paying this noose of a rent, even with what she’s paying to live here, so she’ll have to find new digs, too? That’s not fair to her or to her son, and it’s a betrayal of her trust. I promised her safe harbor while she figures out her next move. I’ve promised Hannah, who’s a truly good kid at heart, the same. They are counting on the Commune as a place of refuge. The woman actually went out and bought new furniture for her room and made it adorable and cozy. How can I tell her that, now that I’m out of a job and can’t find a new one, we all have to leave? How can I tell Hannah she has to go, when she’s made so much progress living here? I’m a monster, I’m a monster, I’m a monster…
And then, as the internal winds intensify, all the normal concerns of marital rupture rear their delightful heads: debt, destitution, desolation, darkness, depression, day-to-day survival, and the divorce process itself, as yet uninitiated. And once that D-bag of distress gets sucked into the maelstrom of circular thought, my brain short-circuits into sparks and smoke.
I need an MRI, to make sure the breast lump’s gone. MRIs without insurance are $6,000. COBRA’s $2,000 a month. Where will I get the extra $2,000 a month? I have to find a way to control these panic attacks, maybe with medicine? Talk therapy? Shrinks in New York cost $300 a session. Oh, well. Another college tuition payment is coming up soon. How will I pay for it plus a second college tuition in a year? I need to stop the clock and get officially separated from my husband so we can disentangle our joint credit cards and shared bank account, from which he continues to draw down my cash, but how do I do that without hiring a divorce lawyer? Can I just take out the meager remaining balance from the account and start a new account, or are there legal ramifications to that since money I earned from my job is still considered his joint marital asset? And where will I find the $30,000 retainer to pay a divorce lawyer to help me sort out all of this? Or the $4,000 to move? Or the $39,000 to pay off the debt? Or even $200 for next week’s groceries? Plus the kids need shoes, haircuts, field trips, therapy, school supplies…aaaaggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
I research “mindfulness,” to help quiet my thoughts. I take advantage of an offer for one free meditation class, then another. “Notice and accept your thoughts without judgment,” they tell me, “and focus on your breathing. It’s all just brain chatter anyway: irrational fears coming to the fore.” No! I want to shout between breaths. These are not irrational fears. They are real, and they are destroying me. You cannot meditate away an empty bank account when you’re the sole human in charge of the health and welfare of three children. That’s an actual problem requiring immediate attention.
Sometimes, when the anxiety-triggered palpitations strike during the day, I faint. I’ve always been an occasional fainter, but my fainting episodes are becoming regular enough now that I’m constantly gauging my environment for sharp angles. “Mom’s down again,” I hear, upon coming to, followed by the upside-down head of one of my offspring shouting above me: “Mom! Mom! Can you hear me?”
I call ADP, the company managing my COBRA account, and ask if I can pay my bill quarterly instead of monthly: If that money is sitting in my account, I will spend it on food, and right now health insurance is more important than food. No problem, says Christy, the nice woman on the end of the phone. I send ADP a check for $5,292.87 for the quarter. ADP cashes the check. Then they immediately cancel my COBRA coverage. Apparently, the check arrived in their office a few days late. I appeal. My appeal is denied. Without any money left over to hire a lawyer or file a second appeal, this is the end of that. It takes another month to get my money back.
Sloan Kettering calls to set up the MRI my oncologist ordered, to make sure the lump is still gone. I tell them I’m sorry, but I don’t have insurance anymore, and I can’t afford the $6,000 they charge out of pocket. I need to keep that money in my account to apply for a new apartment.
I take advantage of this tiny pocket of time with the cash sitting in my bank account to search for an apartment closer to my son’s school, located in what has been called “Manhattan’s last affordable neighborhood”: Inwood. After a dozen unsuccessful visits to dark, two-bedroom hovels in my price range with either mouse droppings, no closets, awkward layouts, or one-bedrooms listed as having two (“You can just turn the living room into a bedroom!”), I talk my way into a brand-new building, still under construction and not yet listed, which has just gone up directly across the street from my son’s school.
“$4,500 dollars a month! For a tiny two-bedroom!” I’m yelling into the phone to Santi, after visiting an apartment with brand-new appliances but barely room for beds and definitely no room for dressers. “In Inwood! Can you believe it?”
I’m yelling this loud enough to be heard by the fifty-or-maybe-sixty-something man sitting on a bench in front of the bar next to the coffee shop where I often go after school drop-off to scour the latest job listings and write cover letters. “You lookin’ for an apartment?” he shouts, running to catch up with me. His accent is pure Bronx. He’s out of breath from the half-block sprint. His pale skin bears the marks of the ghost of teenage acne past, and his slicked-back hair is bottle-dyed black. He snuffs out a cigarette, standing close enough that the stink of morning booze is unmistakable. “I gotta three-bed, two-bat
h just around the corner. $2,300 a month. Wanna come see it?”
When you’ve been mugged and assaulted as many times as I have, the amygdala’s don’t-fuck-with-me wall immediately goes up the minute any stranger enters your airspace. “Excuse me?”
“Who’s that?” says Santi, still on the phone.
“This dude who just stopped me in the street claiming he has a $2,300-a-month three-bedroom to rent…No, I’m not kidding…I’ll be there in a second,” I lie. I want to show the stranger that someone will notice if I don’t show up.
“Sorry,” says the man. “I didn’t mean to butt in to your conversation. I just overheard what you were saying, and there’s this beautiful place around the corner you should see. Wanna come see it?”
“Are you a broker?” I say. “Do you have a card?”
“Um….” He pats the pockets of his pants several times to no avail. “Hmmm…I’m not really a broker,” he says. “I just help out the landlord. You know, to find tenants.”
“Isn’t that the definition of a broker?”
“Do you want to see the apartment or not?”
I’ve seen enough police procedurals to know that this scene will not end well for the woman playing me. “No, thanks,” I say. “I’m in a rush.”
“Well, take my number anyway,” he says. “In case you change your mind.” He holds out the sole crumpled business card he’s finally located in his jacket pocket. It has no name. Only a phone number and the name of a company I’ve never heard of.
I hesitate. Then—I mean, $2,300 a month for a three-bedroom in Manhattan—I take it. These days, the average rent for a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment is $4,208. (Yes, I know, this is crazy, but this is the city where most of the media jobs and companies who might hire me have their offices.)
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