Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy

by Geralyn Lucas

  It is my first talk as a “survivor.” I am so excited to speak at this event because Julie, the young woman hosting it, has had a recurrence, and I need to meet her. I have been terrified that my cancer might come back, so meeting her feels like such a vote of confidence in my future. That maybe I could face having cancer again. My doctors warn me that I am at a very high risk to recur because I am so young. This chance to meet someone going through a recurrence might reassure me that I can endure that, too.

  When I arrive in Seattle, I can’t find Julie anywhere. I know she is planning on introducing me when the program starts because we have e-mailed each other. Everyone takes their seats in the auditorium. But instead of Julie there is a doctor at the podium. She begins to talk about what an amazing job Julie did with the event that night, and then, “Julie died today at 5:40.”

  There is a large gasp in the room.

  “Now Geralyn Lucas will speak to us.”

  I begin to walk but I do not even feel my feet moving or know where I am going. I am heading towards the podium. I need to speak to the audience, I am supposed to inspire them, but now I am only convinced that I am going to die. How can I even call myself a survivor?

  Every step forward there is something pulling me towards the podium, and when I get to the front of the audience and stand at the podium I know she is there. Julie. She is passing a torch. I know that I need to save a life. Julie is telling me that I have to. It is the only way we can understand what has happened to her, what has happened to me. Even though I won the seventh-grade public speaking contest, there is nothing that I can say that will sound clever or inspiring. I step up to the microphone but I keep my head down.

  “My name is Geralyn Lucas. I just turned twenty-nine. Julie was only thirty-four. We are too young to die.”

  I cry through my speech, but I end by making them laugh about the one-balled cab driver.

  I decide to do the breast cancer walk, for Julie. I write her name on a form they are handing out which says, “I walk in memory of . . .” and pin it on my back. I grab another piece of paper—“I walk in celebration of”—and I write “Rena, Jane, and Meredith.” I pick up a pink hat and pink pom-pom socks to wear, which means that I am a “survivor.” Maybe being in a crowd of survivors will make me feel more alive or more convinced? But all that I can see is a sea of pink signs that say “In memory of” and list the names of all the women who have died from breast cancer.

  Every step of the walk I am trailed by a ghost. Why am I alive and Julie is dead? After all of the pain and suffering those women went through, they deserved to live. Will I live?

  I finish the walk and head to a coffee shop. My head is spinning from seeing all the names of women who died of breast cancer. Maybe I am too new a survivor to handle this. I can’t be a survivor, not yet. Just as I’m about to take off my pink survivor hat a young woman holding a baby walks up to me.

  “Excuse me. Are you a survivor?” She must have seen my pink hat.

  I pause for so long that she asks me again, and I nod.

  “I came to the walk today to meet a young woman and show her my baby. All my doctors told me not to get pregnant, but I did anyway. I wanted to show my baby to someone to give her some hope.”

  She doesn’t know how badly I need some hope right now. How much I need to believe that I, too, will be a survivor. She lets me hold her baby girl, Maya.

  “Weren’t you scared to get pregnant because your doctors said not to?”

  Her fear and her defiance make me understand the word survivor a little bit better. That being a survivor is not all about being feeling feisty and so sure of it. I tell her about Julie’s death. How I think that Julie is a survivor, too, even though she died.

  Maybe it is not really about if I win or lose against cancer, it is how I played the game. I know now that I am a survivor. Because I have survived the vomiting, the stretching, the uncertainty.

  But right about when I start to believe that I’m a survivor, I am robbed again. My Grandma Katie’s diamond ring is stolen from my apartment just as everything in my life is returning to “normal.” I cry so hard when I discover the ring is stolen. I can never replace that ring, it is too sentimental. I can never get it back. I look for that ring everywhere. It was inscribed, “To Katie, Love Phil.” My parents gave me the ring when I was diagnosed as a symbol that my grandma’s spirit was with me.

  Looking so hard for that ring makes me realize that I think that I have been looking for her everywhere, too: the pre-cancer Geralyn. My breast, my hair, everything that cancer has stolen from me?

  What else could I possibly have taken away from me? What is left to rob me of? The one-boobed, bald, broken, tired, depressed woman who used to light up a room and flirt with cab drivers even the day before her mastectomy? What else could I possibly have to be stolen? I had lost so much in the brief nine months of hell it just frightened and overwhelmed me. Actually, loss is too banal a word to describe what I was feeling about the cancer. I had been robbed. Robbed of my innocence about life and my health and my future, robbed of an actual piece of me. Why was I robbed again?

  I have a strange dream. I had found everything that I had ever lost. I am not talking about the one sock that disappears in the dryer. I mean the things that were stolen.

  My boyfriend, Flip, who Karen stole from me at my high school prom after I passed out from too much champagne,

  My German Shepherd, Tippy, who I spent my entire childhood with, who had to be put to sleep right before I went off to college,

  My long black hair that had fallen out during my chemo,

  There were a lot of things . . . and when they started swirling and mingling together I realized they were all irreplaceable. No other ring would be my grandmother’s, no wig could equal my own hair, and I couldn’t go out and buy a brand new breast. There was a unifying theme in all of the objects, too. No matter how hard I had looked, they were lost forever. At least with a needle in a haystack, there is a needle that you know is there. These things were gone.

  When I woke up, first there was the disappointment that it was just a dream. And then it occurred to me. Yes, the ring was gone—but Grandma Katie wasn’t. No one could steal her from me—ever. Maybe, when I was facing the largest loss of my life, she had arranged for the ring to disappear?

  She could never be stolen from me. I never believed in life after death, but I now believe that Grandma Katie is trying to reach out to me through the robbery. She is showing me that her memory is too fierce to get stolen with the ring, that she is there in my heart. Maybe she is showing me that even though so much has been stolen from me, I am still here. I still exist despite all the losses.

  I thought that diamonds are supposed to be forever. I am not so sure of forevers now. Nothing feels certain.

  But I am a survivor.

  I survived this hell.

  I decide I will steal it all back.

  14

  My Monet

  I begin to procrastinate about the nipple. Because the reconstruction took so long, hurt so much, and went over budget, I thought I would be eager to get my finishing touch: the nipple. Maybe it’s like finally hanging up the drapes or applying the last coat of varnish on your newly installed hardwood floors.

  My plastic surgeon, Dr. P, sensing my nipple nervousness, is trying to get me to schedule the procedure when I am at an appointment in her office. She has the photo book out and she opens it up. She has built me the perfect boob and I know that if anyone can make a perfect nipple, it is Dr. P. I did not realize just how seriously she takes her nipples.

  “I make a Seurat nipple.”

  My mom is with me and it catches us both off guard.

  “Most plastic surgeons tattoo the new nipple skin only one color with the tattoo ink. But an areola”—she is calling a nipple by its medical name—“is not one color. They have different shades. When the light hits a nipple there are different colors.”

  I look down at my nipple and she is right—
it is a masterpiece of creamy pinks and whites and maroon and definitely not one shade. My mom and I are enraptured as she continues.

  “I make pointillist nipples. Different shades with dots of color. I make the best nipple in the world. Really, it’s hard to tell which one is real and which is the nipple I’ve painted.”

  I am suddenly so relieved that I was required to take an art history course as an undergraduate because now I finally understand beauty and art, and the universe might make sense. I am seeing Monet’s waterlilies. I am picturing his beautiful strokes that blend and somehow move together to create a gorgeous hue that seems so real. Waterlilies are seducing me. The thought of a museum-quality nipple is comforting. When I look up at Dr. P and her photos of nipples I see she is wearing an antique gold, jewel-encrusted sword on the lapel of her white doctor coat. Family heirlooms do inspire confidence at a time like this. I remember her in the operating room in her blue scrubs, her blue face mask, her hair net, and her beautiful blue eyes. She was wearing a gorgeous strand of pearls around her neck. She has taste and class. She will complete me.

  As a finishing touch, Dr. P explains the importance of light in her work. A perfect nipple should not be created under fluorescent light because, hopefully, my nipple will not be viewed in such harsh lighting. She will bring me to the window while tattooing to get the color right in natural light. This was the best sales job I had ever heard.

  And I am craving a nipple because suddenly nipples are “in,” a must-have accessory. Thin, sheer white shirts worn without bras are the rage. I miss my nipple. I miss the freedom of not wearing a bra, of wearing a thin T-shirt and seeing the outline of my nipples underneath. I miss my symmetry and I miss bikini tops and tank tops and I especially missed my nipple when Tyler took me to St. Lucia to celebrate my last reconstruction surgery and I inadvertently ended up on a topless beach. All of the European tourists were sunbathing topless and I didn’t have the courage to take off my bathing suit top. It would have involved too much explaining and I was tired.

  When I share my nipple ambivalence with my mom, she is not buying it. She is positive that it will make me feel complete and calls constantly to nipple-nag. She even leaves me a desperate message from a cell phone saying she is sitting next to a woman on the Metroliner on her way home to Philadelphia, they got to talking, and the woman told her she had just finished her breast cancer treatments and had just gotten her nipple done. My mom tells me it looks fabulous, and the woman is screaming into the phone in the background that she loves her nipple—no one can tell which one is real, blah, blah.

  I schedule my nipple surgery but I begin wavering about getting my new nipple. I am confident about Dr. P’s nipple aptitude, but a strange thought pops into my head that I can’t stop: Who would I be fooling? I would know that it was a fake. Tyler would definitely know it was counterfeit. Would it be for the people at the topless beach? In a Loehmann’s communal dressing room? For prancing around the gym locker room? Is my nipple about blending? About being an imposter? About pretending I still have a boob when I really don’t? It suddenly feels so, well, inauthentic. Grandma Katie’s ring being stolen helped me understand that my nipple was gone and there was just no replacing it.

  The day of my scheduled nipple surgery I am instead standing on a grungy street corner in the East Village trying to work up courage to go inside the tattoo parlor.

  I want to put my own signature on my mound and I want something meaningful. This is not Monet, but it is art. This will be my Monet.

  I am on my own and really miss Dr. P’s pearls when I see the dirty steps leading up to the parlor. I know Grandma Katie is pushing me to walk up the steps. I had no idea what to wear to a tattoo parlor, but I knew I had to look cool. I chose dark sunglasses and all black, except for the red heart on my T-shirt. My heart is going to guide me to the tattoo parlor. If my mind chickens out, my heart will make me stay. I am so sick of wearing my heart on my sleeve that I have decided I need it permanently etched on my boob instead. I need to remember my mojo.

  I know I don’t look like I belong in a tattoo parlor even though I have bought a satin leopard-print push-up bra just to fit in. Wearing the leopard bra feels racy. I feel the satin sliding between my shirt and my skin and I realize that it is the first time I have actually felt something other than a needle on that breast. The fabric is so soft. I have tried to feel my husband’s hands on that breast, but I couldn’t really feel much of anything but pain.

  I need to walk around the block, and strange images of myself keep flashing through my head. I still think of myself as the goody girl, the preppie, the high school newspaper editor, and the prude. Can I pull this off?

  I need to show what I feel inside. I need to tell my story of fear and the courage that came from it.

  When I floated the idea of getting a real tattoo instead of a nipple tattoo my parents told me that I could never be buried in a Jewish cemetery because Jewish law prohibited desecrating one’s body. So I enlisted my Grandmother Ruth’s husband, Irving, the most religious member in our family, for a fact check. He left me a message on my answering machine three days later.

  “Geralyn. This is Irving. I met a rabbi named Shmuel. He has three tattoos.” Coast was clear.

  I pulled every Internet article I could find about tattoo artists and began to call around New York City. Every man who answered the phone sounded gruff, like he was covered with very scary tattoos—daggers or swastikas.

  “Joe’s Tattoo Parlor.”

  (I was feeling shy, but I knew that I was going from the kiddie pool to the deep end and there was no changing my mind now.)

  “Can you do a tattoo on a breast reconstruction after a mastectomy? Will the implant burst?”

  I was obsessed with my implant bursting—exploding—in a tattoo parlor. It would be a very dramatic scene. My chest would just collapse, and someone would scream, Call the paramedics! Her implant burst! I would be taken away in an ambulance (would they turn on the siren and run a red light for a burst implant?) and when I arrived in the emergency room there would be whispering among the hospital staff that there was a burst implant in the house, picked up at a tattoo parlor. Medical students in the hospital might line up to see my deflated boob and I might end up as a case history photo in a medical textbook. Either that or as an urban legend.

  And I imagined being back in Dr. P’s pristine Park Avenue office and having to explain to her the trouble I had caused. She would be in her scrubs with her pearl necklace, her forgiving but rolling eyes looking at me like I was her crazy teenage daughter who had done something very naughty.

  I was terrified of what would actually happen if my implant burst. Would my chest be flat and really show me there was nothing between that implant and me? That implant was blown up with some sort of hope, and maybe I was a little terrified that the tattoo needle might burst that layer of hope. The thought of getting expanded again in Dr. P’s office was almost enough to make me change my plan. Strrrrretching, pulling, yanking at my skin again was too much to think about.

  Until Joshua answered the phone. His voice sounded so sweet and reassuring that I thought that I had misdialed and gotten a New Age spa or a therapist’s office.

  “Tattoo Heaven, Josh speaking.”

  I heard buzzing in the background and I knew that I had reached a real tattoo parlor.

  “Hi.” My voice sounded way too high and sweet to be calling a tattoo parlor. I tried to deepen it a little for my next sentence. “I was wondering if you could do a tattoo on a breast reconstruction after a mastectomy? Will the implant burst?”

  I was waiting to see if he thought this was a crank call and if he might start cracking up on the other end of the line, but he seemed very knowledgeable, and serious.

  “There are ten layers of skin until your implant and I would only need to go three deep.”

  I suddenly felt like we were having a quasi-medical conversation. I felt so relieved and thought that Dr. P might even approve of my finding such a
knowledgeable and competent tattoo artist. Then he added the most important piece of information.

  “My grandmother died of breast cancer. I want to donate my time to do your tattoo. I’ve never done an implant before. But I’ve done women who were not reconstructed. I’ve done beautiful oceans and rainbows on their mastectomy scars.”

  “Josh, I’m so scared. I’ve never been to a tattoo parlor. I am really embarrassed to ask, but do you use clean needles?”

  It sort of felt like a safe-sex conversation, but I knew we needed to talk about safe needles. I already had cancer, I had just finished chemo, and I did not want hepatitis C. When Josh assured me that he used clean needles there were no more excuses. I scheduled my tattoo appointment for today.

  But now, standing on the grimy steps, I am scared. Josh sees me outside and comes to get me. In person, he is as beautiful as he sounded. His eyes are green and soulful, and he is so gentle, except for the bad-ass thunderbolt tattooed on his neck. I am trying to be cool but I am really worried that I have left Dr. P’s museum world. If she was an impressionist, Joshua is, at best, a graffiti artist. There are bold, shocking images covering the wall. The floors are grainy, it looks like sawdust has been sprinkled on them, and there is a faint buzzing coming from the back room—the sound of a needle burning dye into flesh.

  Now I am scared because tattoos are permanent. What if I don’t like it? It will be there forever. But I sort of like the idea of it on my body, especially if I do die of cancer. Maybe it will make the undertaker smirk? Maybe, when I am being prepared for burial, they will see I was a fighter, that I was a feisty one who did not go gentle into that good night?

  Josh must see my reluctance and decides now is the time to review his rules with me. Well, actually, it was just one big rule. No guy’s name on my boob. He personally knew that Johnny Depp had to change his Winona Forever tattoo to Wino Forever, and still seemed slightly traumatized by the experience.