by Linda Zercoe
At the Wellness Community I was attending guided-imagery workshops and taking classes in tai chi and qigong. While listening to the stories and trials of people in the group on a weekly basis, I realized that most of them weren’t as lucky as I was from the prognosis standpoint. Once again, I fell back on my old mantra—What do I have to complain about?
The group’s demographics ran the gamut—all types of cancer were represented and the average age was probably late sixties. I learned so much from these people. I was so impressed with their humor, their courageous spirits, and knowledge of alternative treatments, but most important, I was inspired by their hope. I became attached to many of them and was sad and frightened when any of them died, which a couple of people did during my tenure. And it was in the group that I finally cried—the first time since the surgery—when I had to tell them my story. I was usually just a bystander and a listener, certainly not a veteran of this war. What made my story unique in my support group was that I was so young, with a toddler and a teenager.
One man in the group believed he’d cured his colon cancer by doing coffee enemas and following a special diet. Some people swore by the Gerson diet or the macrobiotic diet, or they became strict vegetarians or drank essiac tea. One person was going to an alternative medical treatment center in Mexico, against her doctor’s advice. Their myriad journeys and different approaches to dealing with cancer and healing were an eye-opening education for me. I had always been tuned out to such basic lifestyle issues as healthy eating, getting plenty of sleep and rest, centering myself spiritually, and other basic survival techniques. But now my needs were reduced to exactly these, the simplest of needs.
The commonality of the group was that the individuals were just regular people from all walks of life sharing the experience of living with cancer. Some people in the group had very advanced cancer; others, like me, were supposedly cured. The group forced me to look at my prognosis, which was excellent. I still felt, however, as though I had been hit in the head with a two-by-four. It was a huge wake-up call.
In Doug’s support persons’ group, they had their own issues to deal with. I remember thinking that he seemed to have sympathy for some of his group’s loved ones but was in his own denial about cancer hitting so close to home. I felt like he was going through the motions but still denying and keeping a distance from his deepest feelings of fear and potential loss.
After reading about the gasoline additive MTBE leaching into the water supply, I signed up for purified water delivery. Seeing the five—
gallon jug in its porcelain and wooden stand gave me some comfort, even if Doug insisted that the water wasn’t any better. I didn’t care.
I can’t imagine I was much fun to live with at this time. I was tired, stressed, depressed, mourning, and mostly sad. Family life, though, goes on. The kids would ask Doug, “What’s the matter with Mom?” His regular reply was, “She’s in a bad mood.”
How do you get from what I had just been through and how I was feeling to being in a bad mood? Is that like a bad hair day? I felt like Doug minimized everything. Perhaps that’s how he survived. I would share my heart, my soul, and deepest fears with him to either see him tuning in to the television or actually falling asleep as I was talking. I’d become just another talking head like the ones on TV.
One night, in a flaming rage of utter frustration and bleakest despair, I wanted to murder him—I actually had a chef’s knife in my hand. Fortunately I took my fury out on the knife block instead of him. But I could understand the passion of murder now. After that episode I still didn’t feel any better. In fact, I found I didn’t like myself anymore at all.
Things hit an all-time low when he proclaimed, “I never would have married you if I thought you would be so needy.”
Thanks a lot, pal! Now my anger found an object. I was furious at myself for deciding to marry him and, more important, I was furious with my husband, just because.
Winter became spring, and the grass turned green. California looked like Oz. That spring Doug and I went to Hawaii for the first time. We actually had a wonderful time—except for the suitcase-throwing fight. I loved everything about Hawaii—the warmth, the smells, the flowers, the trade winds, the language, and the music. It felt like you could see heaven watching the sunrise from the top of the volcano on Maui called Haleakala.
I fantasized about moving there and becoming a beach bum. I thought, Why do I seem to want to be everywhere except where I am? Nonetheless, I realized finally that life could still be good, even after breast cancer. What was amazing to me was that all this could be had with only a five-hour plane trip and a few thousand dollars. I felt so fortunate to be there. I was starting to heal.
The school year ended with a myriad of dance recitals, concerts, nursery school open houses, and whatnot. Spring turned into summer. The summer was relatively uneventful, except for the boy I caught trying to fondle Kim in the backyard pool—he was immediately picked up after a call to his father and then never seen again. Doug was traveling all over the country and never home. The nanny took the kids to the zoo, water parks, the beach, swimming lessons…. It was a full schedule.
For me there were too many follow-up doctor appointments and tests along with the associated anxiety, then relief. Except for another week off with the kids at home, I worked. I got a bonus and a raise. We skipped our weekly meetings at the Wellness Community, mostly due to exhaustion. In the fall, Kim started eighth grade and Brad another year in preschool. In October, Doug and I went to Palm Springs to rekindle our relationship yet again. That trip was a disaster. We fought all the time. We could still be so angry and needy.
When we returned home, I noticed our Mary Poppins nanny was starting to act a little strange. Some of her stories about where she and the children had been and what had happened didn’t make sense. I began to have the feeling that she was lying. Things escalated until Thanksgiving weekend, when she told us in tears that the reason she hadn’t returned our car was that her brother was in a horrible accident and was admitted to the trauma unit of the local hospital. When we tried to check out her story the following Monday, unsuccessfully, we confirmed that it was all lies. I confronted her, and she told lie upon lie in response. I fired her.
Subsequently, I found out she had used one of my credit cards. We reported it to the police, and the officers that were sent to the house told us that she also had two bench warrants for her arrest stemming from having previously jumped bail and failed to appear in court after a drunk-driving incident. Shortly after that, I discovered that she had been refilling my prescriptions for sedatives and sleeping pills and had forged my name repeatedly at the pharmacy. She had used all my leftover pain pills from when I had the surgery, which I thought I’d hidden pretty well. We found empty bottles of our wine and liquor under her bed. I remember thinking, No wonder she was never frazzled! I was especially creeped out when I found my clothes in her closet.
It’s funny what you can find so easily if only you spend the time to look. I felt like such a fool. Doug and I had checked all her references before we hired her. In hindsight, we realized that her references were probably her friends. We trusted her with our children. She drove them everywhere. She had infiltrated our lives completely and rifled through our things. I was terrified of what she might still do using my identity to rack up new fraudulent bills, but we never heard from her again. Of course, Kim and Brad were actually mad at us for firing her. They really loved her.
Once again, Doug and I took turns working from home until we left for North Carolina, where my parents, brother, and Alane now lived, for a family reunion and Christmas. At the family reunion, we had professional photographs taken. We all looked so happy, young, and healthy. It was almost a year since the breast cancer, but I still wasn’t myself, whatever that was.
Everyone said, “Oh, you look great!” Great, I thought. Doug was looking for normal. Where was Linda? Inside, I was in shock and denial, angry and sad—all at the same time. Why di
d no one seem to understand this? Well, I thought, at least this Christmas would be better than the last one.
Doug, not one to dwell on the past, just wanted our old life back. “Thinking and talking about all that has just happened,” he would say, “only makes me feel bad—and who wants to choose to feel bad? Let’s just focus on moving forward and planning the future. All I want is a normal wife, a normal family, a rewarding career, and a normal sex life.”
Chapter 11
Still Looking
January–October 1995
We started the year of 1995 as usual and hired a new nanny. She was a local college student. I was getting so sick of this. Why did we have all these problems finding good childcare? Besides, it was costing a fortune.
In any case, I tried to take it in stride. My department at work moved to a new location so I had to drive to work every day instead of using mass transit. If I didn’t leave the house by 6 a.m., it took an extra hour to get there because of the traffic. Since the new nanny lived out and didn’t arrive at our home until 7 a.m. Doug and I had to negotiate daily to determine who would be able to leave for work first. I usually lost the race out of the house since I didn’t easily wake up after lying awake most of the night.
At the beginning of the year, I got a bonus and restricted shares of stock. Work, at least, was something in my life that was going well.
That winter, in the mornings on my drive to work I began to notice that my fingers would turn white with straight horizontal lines, then blue, and then eventually become hot and red. I thought it had something to do with holding the steering wheel. Then the pattern began happening at random times throughout the day. I went to my see my primary care doctor and found out this was symptomatic of an autoimmune disease called Raynaud’s syndrome and that stress didn’t help, since it contributed to the vasoconstriction, or tightening, of the smaller arteries called arterioles, the blood vessels just before the capillaries. The Raynaud’s hallmark for me was the arteriole spasms and constriction of blood flow to my fingers and toes. My doctor ordered some blood tests and told me I needed to reduce stress.
Ha, ha, I thought, How does any person live without stress? I thought that my body was trying to tell me once again that I had better start to figure out how to do things differently. What was I supposed to change? I couldn’t stop working, being a mother, being mad at the world. I was so ineffective at dealing with stress that I was causing this Raynaud’s myself. I started taking cayenne pepper supplements in the morning, since I read that it would help dilate the blood vessels.
Around this same time, I read an article about stress in a magazine at work. It described the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. The scale had a long list of life events with associated points ranging between 10 and 100 for each event. If your score totaled 150 to 299 “life change units” per year, Holmes and Rahe predicted a 50 percent chance of illness. If your score was greater than 300 units, then you had an 80 percent chance of illness. My points were well over 150. In fact, they had been that high or higher for each of the previous twelve years. I thought, OK, now what do you do with this information? Well, what would an idiot do? I decided that maybe I should study for the GMAT exam and go back to school for my MBA. I was a spinning top, out of control, running from my life. Fortunately, I needed a root canal and a crown, which temporarily derailed that plan.
Up to this point, Doug and I were still going sporadically to the Wellness Community, but that was about to end. How much time can you spend on counseling? Months before, at my urging, Doug had started participating in a weekly men’s therapy group that I referred to as “Executive Men with Hearts of Stone.” It was facilitated by a PhD and recommended by his first therapist. I was hoping, praying, that he would learn empathy as defined by me—be a soul mate (the term du jour) and learn to really roll around in my sadness with me.
In March, I began having some problems with my reconstructed breast. A hard spot had formed on the side and it was painful, pulling. I went back to the plastic surgeon and he told me that it was not a big deal to fix. I had corrective surgery as an outpatient and bounced back to normal pretty quickly. Anesthesia was becoming the only time I was able to really rest—imagine having to be knocked out just to relax.
I thought I must be mentally ill. I decided to see the therapist who was in charge of my group at the Wellness Community. The fact that she was always asking “So tell me, how this is helping in your recovery?” really appealed to me. She had plenty of great suggestions and was helping me to deal with difficult people—just about everyone in my life, I told her. She urged me to start keeping a journal. She asked me where was a place I could go that would be healing. I knew it had to be somewhere warm and near the ocean.
The beaches in Northern California are not warm, ever. I wanted to go to Hawaii again or some other tropical island. Instead, Doug planned a family RV vacation to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons for the following summer. That was what Doug wanted to do, and he asked, “When is it ever about what I want anymore?” I felt guilty about being so self-absorbed, and he was right, I was being selfish. He thought maybe now we could start to live again. Things were looking up. We were getting along so much better. I had hope.
I received a letter from Commonweal, the cancer retreat I had applied for, notifying me that I had been wait-listed. Our nanny gave notice at the end of her school term. She was ready to move on. We interviewed several nannies again and hired another. She was the mother of two teens. She told us that she was on a diet and ate only raw carrots and boneless, skinless chicken breast. She insisted that she was never late.
On her first day she arrived at our house thirty minutes late, carrying bags of potato chips and a box of white powdered donuts. On her third day, Kim came home from school and found Brad watching Barney on the television in the family room in wet underwear while the nanny snored loudly, lying on the floor behind the living room sofa. In hysterics, Kim called Doug at the office, and he immediately left work, came home, and fired the nanny. We spent the next couple of weeks alternating working from home again until we found a new nanny. I wondered when the screaming roller coaster would end. We needed a break.
We found and hired yet another nanny. Her name was Jill. She was in her early twenties, from Colorado, and was to live in our home, complete with her two cats. We had the now-standard criminal background check performed on her as well, and she did fine. The children really liked her and she came highly recommended. She was looking for a family she could work with for one or two years. And we were looking for continuity, especially since Brad was going to start kindergarten and Kim, high school in the fall. Jill was responsible, and she truly tried her hardest every day.
Early that summer I finally had a Pap test, the first one I had time for since moving to California, even though it had been on my calendar as a to-do for months. The doctor called me and told me that it was abnormal, but not alarmingly so. He wanted to take some samples of my cervix. It could be done in his office. Lyn went with me. I was not particularly concerned, but it was just one more thing. It was hardly a pleasant experience, but considering what I had been through, it also wasn’t that bad. While I was waiting for the results, we celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday.
For my birthday, Doug bought me a Victorian dollhouse kit. Our own house was dark inside, dated by almost two decades, and needed a lot of work. We had already been living in it for two years but we never seemed to have any time to focus on fixing it up. I was excited about the dollhouse. I could build and create a fantasy house. It was 1:12-inch scale, something I could manage. I always loved having projects. I thought this would be something the kids and I could do together. It was a perfect gift.
That night while I was taking a shower before bed, without even trying, I found a new lump near my armpit in my other breast, the left one. I knew it was not there the day before and I would know, since I was now checking obsessively. The doctor had just done a breast exam earlier that month. I had just had a mammo
gram, even magnified views. I don’t know how I found it. Maybe my unconscious was guiding me to find this lump. I told Doug. He felt it. We went to bed in tears. I think we both knew—Here we go again.
That weekend Lyn came over and I asked her to feel the lump. She did and was upset as well. I think she knew it wasn’t good news. Four days after finding the lump, I had another mammogram, which of course now showed a questionable area later documented as “highly suggestive of malignancy.” No surprise there. Once you put a metallic bead on a palpable lump, well what do you know? There it is on the film for all to see! Did they even look to see if they missed it when reading the last set of films?
The next day I was on a plane for a business trip to New York. I thought, Is New York now to become a place to feel dread rather than energized? I realized at this point that I had a new habit—holding my breath.
When I saw the surgeon the following week, I told her that if this breast also proved to have cancer that I wanted both this breast and the reconstructed breast removed. I was sick and tired of dealing with these breasts. Who would have thought that my little titties would be the cause of so many problems? While she understood my reaction to the news of my other breast possibly having cancer, she strongly urged me not to have such a radical surgery. The next day I took a scheduled stress management class at work. Do you want to hear about stress? I thought. What a riot!
Three days later, just two weeks after my birthday, one and a half years after the first mastectomy, I had a left breast lumpectomy. The pathology confirmed that I had invasive cancer this time. This was a new primary cancer, not related to the other breast. But according to the surgeon, when we met three days later, they got it all out. Thank God.
She told me I did not need to have another mastectomy. However, I would need chemotherapy, radiation, a lymph node dissection and biopsies, a metastatic workup, and assorted other assaults. Also, since they had such a hard time starting an IV for the lumpectomy, she recommended putting a Port-A-Cath into my arm to facilitate the chemo treatments. The good news really wasn’t that good.
