A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles

by Mary Elizabeth Williams

  “Okay,” she says reluctantly. I suspect the most expensive part of my cancer treatment will end up being all the bribes I’ll have to give my kids.

  After the children are sufficiently reassured and sent to bed, I climb into my own and turn on my laptop. Less than an hour later I have poured out the story of the past two days—the shock of the news, the hope for better times to come. I read over what I have written, and impulsively send an email to my Salon editor, Thomas. “You can publish this if you want,” I say. “I just needed to write it.”

  I then send an email to my college roommates Debbie and Jill, and Jill’s wife Michele. It reads: “So I have a malignant melanoma on my scalp and am having surgery next week. Once we biopsy my lymph nodes, I’m probably starting chemo. I still fully plan on continuing to play with you guys as much as humanly possible. But you three are right up near the top of my list of most important people in my life and I wanted to let you know what’s going on. And to tell you this means you have to buy me drinks. I love you.”

  After work the next day, I ride the subway downtown for a last day of camp dinner, one week ahead of schedule. As Jeff and the girls and I pick over the last of the Chinese food, I look out the window of Sammy’s, savoring the way the waning sunlight hits the brick buildings and the beautiful people strolling by. I love New York City best in the late summer, when it’s hot and sticky and all the publicists and shrinks have left town. But now I’d really love to see it in the fall. It’s been only two days, but I’m already grieving for the person I was on August 10. Her unquestioning ability to plan things far in advance, her unshakeable certainty of her own future existence, her ability to walk down Broadway on a bright summer day with no hat and no fear. She was obliterated in the span of a phone call. I wish I’d had a chance to say goodbye.

  By the time the kids are asleep, I’m exhausted, but I can’t resist checking on Salon. There on the front page is my face, looking wry and skeptical, above the words “My cancer diagnosis.” I have a headache just considering the implications of what I have just irreversibly done. But since the news is out anyway, I do the next logical thing. I click on the share button at the bottom of the page, and send it out via Twitter and Facebook. In one small motion of my finger, I inform a legion of friends, a pack of colleagues, a fair number of total strangers, and perhaps even, somewhere, my own parents, that I have malignant cancer. That, folks, is how you rip off a Band-Aid.

  CHAPTER 4

  Off the Top of My Head

  August 15, 2010

  My last Sunday with an intact head is a glorious one for the family to go to Governors Island. It’s one of my favorite spots in the city, an oasis of trees and beautiful views and quirky public art plunked right off the edge of Manhattan. I eat nachos for lunch, washed down with beer and zero regret. Afterward, we all rent bicycles, and as we pedal around the circumference of the island, it doesn’t take long for Bea’s patience with pedestrians to run out. As we creak toward a particularly thick throng, she bellows, “Outta the way! My mom has cancer!”

  I turn my head back at her. The wind is blowing through her long hair, and she is laughing uproariously. “Outta the way!” she repeats. Then Lucy joins in. “Our mom has cancer, everybody!” In case you ever need to disperse a crowd, I can report that this gambit works like a charm.

  Later, on the subway ride home, Bea curls up next to me and falls asleep on my shoulder. Her tender, trusting nature is so pure it floors me on a daily basis. As the fussed-over baby of our family, she assumes the world will adore her, and takes applause as her due. What’s impressive about her is how much love she gives right back. She is lavish in her affections, dispensing hugs generously and scattering love notes to the rest of us around the apartment. My sunny sweetie. How little pain and worry you’ve had in your short life. How little I hope to trouble you now.

  How little I have ever wanted to trouble anybody, really. My headstone will likely read: “I’m fine. Whatever.” But now I am in a pickle, the serious kind, and as the days approaching my surgery dwindle down, a new dynamic between my friends and me has emerged. A seismic shift occurred the moment I shared my diagnosis, and when the ground stopped moving, my relationships had been rearranged. Some people—people I never doubted would be there through thick and thin—have been conspicuously avoiding me, and worse, avoiding the kids. Others have unhelpfully regaled me with their own horror stories and anxieties. Many others have been supremely great, though, with greatness specific to their generous souls. Jill and Michele have offered to come up from Miami. Carolyn has sent jars of homemade jams and pickles. Martin has magnanimously told me that if I need any extra help during recovery, he’s got “two dead parents and all their pills.” Ben has cheerfully volunteered his medical marijuana card and added, “Wig sex is hot. Like you don’t already know.” Stephanie—a vegetarian—has dropped by with three meat loaves. Anne, a cancer veteran herself, has advised, “Don’t Google worst-case scenarios. Keep positive people close. Remember that most of us live.”

  My favorite response is from my colleague King, because King knows. In January, he fell suddenly and seriously ill with a rare, potentially life-altering disorder known as Guillain-Barré. He spent several weeks in the hospital and for a while didn’t know if he would ever regain the use of his limbs. It was a scary time, one he recovered from with odds-defying speed. Naturally, he has written competitively to me, “This was my year, bitch.” In the next line, he’s added, “I’ve discovered the answer to ‘Why?’ is ‘Because,’ and the answer to ‘Why me?’ is ‘Why not you?’ So let people do astonishingly generous things for you. Know why? Because why not you?”

  Then there’s Debbie.

  Debbie is the Tina Fey character of my life. Pretty, dark-haired, and bespectacled, she is married to her college sweetheart, teaches elementary school, has two sons named Tim and Adam, and has never strayed far from the Philadelphia suburb where she grew up. She also has the filthiest mouth and the most punk rock sensibility of any human being I have ever encountered. So when a large box with a Pennsylvania postmark arrives in the mail, I know its provenance immediately. In the box are two dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies with a note that says, “Rich in antioxidants!” There is also a T-shirt in my favorite shade of green. Debbie designed it herself. It reads: FUCK CANCER.

  On the morning before my surgery, I put on my shorts and my sports bra and sneakers and run around the park, as I do most mornings. This time, however, is the last time for a long time, so I run as if an ax murderer is chasing me. I run five miles at a crushing pace, the Beastie Boys blaring in my ears, drowning out the sound of my increasingly hard breathing. I’m shoring up endorphins, determined to make this the sweetest, sweatiest run of the summer.

  That evening is trivia night at the local bar, and it’s a beautiful night for a send-off among friends. Our team, the self-explanatorily named Mothers Who Drink, does respectably in local history and sci-fi films. And when the category turns to Harry Potter, the table full of moms is raging.

  When we wind up tied with another team, it prompts a sudden-death match—a chugging competition. “Who’s representing the Mothers?” the MC hoots to our table. Everyone points at me. This will be the last thing I consume before my surgery. Might as well make it worthwhile.

  My male adversary is younger and bigger, but tonight, I’ve got the eye of the tiger. On the count of three, I pour the pint down my throat in one big gulp, bringing glory and a commemorative T-shirt back for the team. You gotta fight. For your right. To paaaaaaarrrtay.

  August 20, 2010

  It’s well before dawn, and I am luxuriating in a long shower, scrubbing my hair, and running my fingers along my still intact scalp. Occasionally I glide over the bump. Hello, cancer, I think. Your time here is up.

  My bag is packed with my favorite pajamas, a copy of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, the newest issue of InStyle, and a handmade card that says “I LOVE YOU MOM” in a six-year-old’s scrawl. I slip into the black jerse
y dress I wore to visit my friend Larry and his wife in Barcelona last September. When I told him last week I had cancer, he’d replied, “You and me, dancing all night in Spain, ten years from today.” Every time I look at that dress I think of the Sagrada Família, and the three-hour lunch by the beach, and the gay tapas bar in the Gothic Quarter. Now it’s my going to cancer surgery dress.

  Jeff opens his eyes reluctantly and waves at me as I pick up the bag. We’re working very hard to keep things normal here. He’s taking the girls to their final day of camp this morning, and picking them up this afternoon. We both want them to have this day, and for my cancer to not get in the way of it. “See you around, babe,” I say. “Your money’s on the dresser.” I peek in on the girls, snug in their bunks. Lucy groggily sits up in her bed. “Mommy,” she says, smiling proudly. I strongly suspect she willed herself to wake up at this unholy hour just to send me off. “You have a great last day of camp,” I tell her, and I kiss her sleepy, rumpled head.

  Minutes later, my cab is careering down the FDR Drive as the day is breaking over Manhattan. I spend much of the ride mussing my still damp tresses and smoothing them out again. After today, that experience will never be the same. There will be an empty patch on the top of my head where no hair will ever grow again. Outside, the early crowd is bustling to work, grabbing their coffees and bagels from the corner carts. It’s the rhythm of life, pulsing on, just outside this building, teeming with folks in various stages of cancer, that I’m racing toward. I find solace in that.

  At the hospital, I while away the morning staring out the window, trying to memorize every detail I see outside, because illogically, I think that if this were to be my last day on Earth, I would want to remember it. I read the same page of The Magicians over and over without a word of it sinking in. I eavesdrop on the patient next to me, a chubby middle-aged man in for prostate surgery. “Things are changing all the time,” his doctor says brightly to the lady I assume is his wife. “Cancer used to be a lot scarier. We’re now looking at it as a long-term condition that can be managed.” I’m beginning to understand that cancer is no longer exclusively something you triumph over, Robin Roberts style, or slowly die of, Warren Zevon style. It could instead be something you learn to live with.

  In the world I too lived in just a few weeks ago, people talk about cancer as if being entirely disease free is the only measure of a healthy, satisfying life. But in here, in Cancer Town, success is often measured not in terms of disease going entirely away, but by simple survival. How can you say who’s officially “cured” without knowing 100 percent what’s happening in every cell in a person’s body anyway? Even scans can’t do that. What if treatment succeeds only as far as shrinking the tumors? What if it only arrests their growth? There’s no snappy T-shirt slogan to be had, no “Race for the Cessation of Progression.” To have the cancer go away entirely is great. It’s exactly what I hope for today. But in the all-or-nothing magical thinking around cancer, no one admits that the word “cure” doesn’t encompass the breathtaking, beautiful possibility of living, living well and living long, with cancer in your body. You can survive and never be “cured.” Turns out it happens all the time. That would be plenty good enough for me.

  Around midday, Dr. Edwards, the surgical assistant, lopes in to introduce himself. Dr. Edwards is a big, bearded, rumpled man who looks like a cross between a professor and a bass guitarist. “I have to draw on you now,” he says gently, as he stipples his pen along my left thigh and the left side of my neck.

  His voice is soothing, even if I don’t understand most of what he’s saying. Stuff about incisions and sutures. “When you get into the OR, your nurse will be Alan. You’re going to love Alan,” he says.

  “I can’t wait to meet him,” I reply.

  “Then I think it’s just about showtime,” he says, in the same comforting tone he’s used throughout. He pats me on the back. “Let’s go kick some ass.”

  A half hour later the orderly comes for me. “You ready?” he asks. Back on January 1, I made a New Year’s resolution. Thanks to my pal Larry and his infectious mania for turning everything into a six-word story, I had distilled my goal for the year 2010 into a half dozen–worded plan: Go somewhere I’ve never been before. Okay. So let’s go.

  There’s no dramatic ride on a stretcher, like in the movies. There’s just me in a seersucker gown and a shower cap and silly booties, dragging an IV pole as the orderly walks me down an endless corridor, past several sets of doors and several sets of surgeries. The air grows exponentially colder the farther we go. I wonder if that’s why I’m trembling uncontrollably.

  Then I’m in the room. There’s the table. My table. There are Dr. Partridge and Dr. Edwards and a handful of nurses. They’re all wearing masks. I feel at once exposed and underdressed, like Tom Cruise at that orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. A masked man steps forward to guide me. “I’m Alan,” he says.

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” I reply, making small talk at our party with ridiculous costumes and much too assertive air-conditioning.

  My eyes sweep over a tray of gleaming instruments as I hop gracelessly onto the table and onto my back. Alan fiddles with my IV port. “We’re going to give you a cocktail of sedatives before the anesthesia,” Dr. Edwards explains. “It’s standard.” Then he adds, “I’ve already had a few cocktails myself.”

  Dr. Partridge leans in over my face and deadpans, “It steadies his hands.” My surgical team at one of the world’s most prestigious cancer hospitals. What a bunch of cutups, I think. I don’t even feel my eyes close.

  I awaken in the operating room. It feels abrupt, like an alarm going off, and I resent the interruption of my dreams. I can feel the gurney rolling me down a corridor. I am drowsy and distinctly aware that I am still doped to the gills. I am conscious of someone taking me somewhere new and parking me in a dimly lit corner of a room. Just let me go back to sleep. Let me sleep. How can a lady get any rest around here with all this chatting, and right at the foot of my bed?

  “How are you feeling?” asks my nurse, who looks so much like Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie that my druggy brain is convinced she is Nurse Jackie. I don’t know yet. Mostly I am gripped with an increasingly terrifying awareness, like a character in one of the Saw movies, of just how much freaky apparatus I’m tethered to. My calves, for instance, are enrobed in what look like balloons. Puff puff puff chhhhhhhhh. They inflate with air. Hisssss. They flatten. It’s to keep the blood flowing through my legs, presumably so I don’t get an embolism and die. There’s also a clip attached to my forefinger that measures my heart rate. There’s an IV drip in my arm. The bed undulates every few minutes to keep my circulation going and prevent bedsores. There’s blood seeping out from underneath a bandage on my left thigh. My head, meanwhile, feels so heavy. That’s when I understand that it is swaddled in bandages. They’re wrapped up all around me like a thick cocoon. Oh God, they really did it. They operated on me. I think it hurts.

  “How do you feel?” Nurse Jackie asks again. I blink at her questioningly. How do I feel? Like I just had the top of my head sliced off, I guess.

  “Hungry,” I reply.

  She gives me a sly nod. “I’ve got a menu right here at my station,” she says. She hands me a list of words called a “menu” and a “pen,” but I am still far too gone to remember what one does with such things. I crudely check off the box next to the words “turkey burger” and slur, “I’d like to see the wine list.”

  Dr. Partridge is standing at my side. How long has she been there? “The surgery went fine,” she says. “I left a message for Jeff. I think it was Jeff, I couldn’t tell from the outgoing voice mail. He should be on his way soon. Or somebody else with the number you gave me.” Then she’s not there. I am seriously high right now.

  With spectacular effort, of which I am heroically proud, I manage to pull my television set close and flick it on. My favorite of the Harry Potter movies, Goblet of Fire, is on. A few minutes later, Jeff arrives. I’m in the first
bed in the ward and I’m the one with a turban of bandages, so he can’t miss me. “The girls had a great last day of camp,” he says. “They send their love.” I wish I could call them, but I’m scarily incoherent.

  “Hey, remember how you wanted to get back together?” I mumble. “Sucker, you were almost free. Bet you didn’t think I’d pull this. Now you have to stick with me or everyone will think you’re an asshole like Newt Gingrich.”

  “Well played,” he says.

  “Sit down,” I say. “It’s Harry Potter. You can be my Friday night date.” He eases into the chair next to me and holds my hand until it’s time to move me to my room, and he has to leave. I am still very dopey as he stands in our impossibly brightly lit hallway and waves goodbye to me as I roll away. But I am with it enough to recognize the look on his face. It’s profound sadness.

  I don’t really sleep that night. I instead spend the evening pushing my IV tower to the bathroom every time I have to pee and having nice strangers come in and change my bloody bedclothes and sheets and give me painkillers. But the hours slip by, and eventually, while lavender dawn creeps over the 59th Street Bridge, I feel myself fade off into dreamless slumber.

  I am awakened much too early in the morning by two strangers named Dr. Balthazar and Dr. Stewart. One of them, they explain as they take my vitals, is the resident and one of them is the fellow, and I don’t know what either of those terms means anyway.

  “We’ve made your appointment to come back and meet with Dr. Partridge. In the meantime, we’re going to give you a prescription for Percocet,” Dr. Stewart informs me. “We’re having it filled now so you can take it with you. You should pick up some stool softeners on the way home.” He glances up from my chart to look me over. “Percocet can be very constipating.” There is no dignity. There is just no dignity.