I already know exactly what I want for my tattoo and after I explain it, Josh spends two hours sketching the tattoo design. I want a heart. Not the kind of poofy heart you draw in high school—I want a serious heart to remind me how courageous it is to follow my heart. I want wings on the top to represent all the angels who showed me that I would get my life back: the one-balled cab driver; the stripper who was giving it away but still swaggered; the nurse who helped me wipe myself when I was trying to be glamorous and not use a bedpan; my Amazons: Meredith, Rena, and Jane.
The placement of the tattoo is key. I tell Josh that I want it right at the lower end of my scar, much lower than a nipple would be. It is not replacing the nipple and I do not want it to be perfectly centered. I want the heart to look like it’s flying up, soaring away. Where my scar ends, my courage and hope begin. The heart should be outlined in black but inside will be the shade of the bright red lipstick I wore to my surgery. In the right corner of the heart, there will be the two wings outlined in black. Josh thinks we should shade them in with white, but I like seeing only my skin through the wings.
When I take my satin leopard bra off and stand in front of Josh, I know that my mound really is a breast because of the way he is looking at it. At me. This is the first time a man has seen the mound, the first time that I am topless in front of another man except for my husband (and my breast surgeon, but he doesn’t count). I cannot believe how hard Josh looks. When I look at him just looking at me, I start to apologize for how awkward this must be for him to have to see me like this. There is a sort of an unspoken conversation where Josh tells me that he still thinks I am hot without my boob and that he really can’t help but take a long look. I am shocked, and just to prove I am not imagining his interest he looks me straight in the eyes: “Geralyn. You are a very foxy woman.”
As he starts the tattooing, the pain on my breast reminds me of all the pain I have been through: the drains, the stitches, the bandages, the stretching—and I black out. Josh gets me Oreos and we continue. I am not leaving with half a tattoo. As the pain continues, I feel a sudden burst of euphoria; Josh says that my natural endorphins are kicking in to combat the pain. But I know that this is what courage must feel like.
When he leads me to the mirror to look at myself I feel the same fear as when Dr. B removed my bandage in the hospital. I am scared to look and start thinking I have made a huge mistake.
I close my eyes and slowly take a peep. The mirror is playing a trick on me. When I first see the red of the heart, I think—for a flash—it is my nipple, and for a flash I see my old breast. I hold the mirror so that I will see just my new breast—it is still too painful to compare it to my other one.
I think about Monet’s waterlilies and remember my old nipple and something about this one is so bold that it forces my eyes to focus and I look and look and look until I think I see what is there. There are no waterlilies. No soft hues. No dancing and blending color.
Va-va-voom! It is red. And bold. And powerful! A karmic boomerang hits me and everything that was robbed from me, my breast, my nipple, my hope, my innocence, my beauty, returns for that moment and then some. Because so much has been taken from me, that much more is now here, almost screaming its existence at me.
I see that I am sort of pieced back together. I think maybe I have found my new right breast right here in this tattoo parlor in the East Village. I am finally able to say good-bye to my real right breast, which I still hope is in a Tupperware container in a pathology refrigerator as my husband had promised.
I was born into a certain body, but I have become this one, I have fashioned part of it and I feel powerful. This is the breast I have chosen. It is not hiding its battle scar—it is wearing it proudly. This is its story.
I go back to work at 20/20 after I get my tattoo. I show several colleagues—it is bad judgment but I am delirious. In order to show my tattoo (which is not in the center of my boob, but in the corner, at the end of my diagonal mastectomy scar), I need to pull my shirt and bra all the way down and it shows my whole new boob. I don’t think of it as a boob—to me it’s just an expander implant mound, but the looks I am getting make me realize it is more.
When I come home, there are a dozen red roses from Tyler as a vote of confidence for the tattoo. I make sure he closes his eyes and that I have the wings positioned so they are jutting out of my leopard bra before he takes a look. I want him to love it, and he does! It is not a nipple, but it does excite him.
I am so pleased with my tattoo that I become something of an exhibitionist. It’s ironic considering how scared I was initially about anyone ever seeing how different I really looked. I show my doorman, and I even show the Amtrak conductor who has a letter of his name on each knuckle: S-A-L-L-Y. Each time I show the tattoo I pull my shirt and bra down. Each time I am learning that my implant mound has become sort of a breast, at least to other people. I like that my tattoo makes people smile instead of the scared faces I am used to seeing when people see my scar and that I was missing a nipple. The tattoo makes me laugh and is now my constant reminder in case I ever forget.
It is so important to follow my heart.
15
Vomit
I want a baby. I am back in the same hospital, having my blood drawn. But in this blood test they will look for signs of a baby, not like my routine blood tests that look for signs of a tumor and the blood tests from my chemo that measured my white counts. I hate the way the needle feels in my vein. It is too familiar.
I have been vomiting again, constantly, and I think I might be pregnant. Even though it might be a baby that is making me vomit, the vomit tastes like my chemo vomit.
I was told that I needed to wait at least two years before I could even think of getting pregnant, to see if my cancer would come back. It has been four. And I was told that pregnancy was dangerous and could make my cancer come back even if it hadn’t already, because my hormones would be hundreds of times my normal levels. The doctors are worried that any small cancer cells floating around could go wild with those hormones. My mom and my sister-in-law Wendy offered to be my surrogate. They must love me a lot to be willing to vomit for me.
The waiting has been excruciating. I was unsure if my body could have a baby and if I could, was it even fair to have a child if I might die? And what about my eggs going through all that poisoning? Were they still normal? I did research. I found studies about women who went through chemo and then had babies. Their eggs seemed okay. I read the fine print—the profiles of the subjects. I got the entire way to the bottom of the scientific paper, and on the bottom of the page was print so small that I had to squint: Subject 34 had seven children after her breast cancer treatment. Seven! Was it a typo? Seven! Silly number seven made me believe during all my tests to see if my cancer had come back before I got pregnant. I sang sevens in the bone scan, when I was told to hold my breath with the heavy lead apron on during my chest x-ray, and I swear I could make out the number seven on the sonogram screen during my liver profile.
And then I met Erin. She was assigned to me as a story at my job at 20/20. She was a young mother dying of cancer and she had a toddler daughter, Peyton. Erin decided to videotape certain lessons for Peyton to watch after Erin had died. The man who gave me the assignment was not Mr. Sensitive, he was very matter of fact.
“Geralyn, call this woman. She’s dying of breast cancer and making videotapes for her young daughter so the girl won’t forget her. Here’s her phone number. Sounds like a good story, right?”
Meredith was horrified when she realized that he’d given me this project. She made him call me back to express some fake concern.
“If this is too hard for you to work on, then we’ll reassign it.”
But it was too late. I had already called Erin. And I wanted to hear her story.
She and her husband, Doug, were reluctant to share their story with anyone because they were wary that their story would become too tabloid. I understood their fear, and in an attempt to
offer some credibility I explained that I had just had breast cancer. Instead of being reassured, she surprised me with her hesitation.
“Will this story be too hard for you to work on, Geralyn? I’m going to die.”
I couldn’t believe she was thinking about me with everything she was facing. I told her that maybe her story would lead me to some answers I had been searching for.
“Erin, I think about this all the time. I’m so scared. Please tell your story for me and all the other women who need this hope.”
She explained that the hardest part was starting the video camera. On the first tape she had started and stopped five times. She kept crying, then saying, “Pardon,” and turning off the camera. I think it was the hardest part because she knew that in that beginning was her end. That when her daughter saw that tape, she would no longer be there to hold her. After that, Erin became a madwoman, recording through the night. The video camera was her new umbilical cord to her daughter. It was her salvation.
Erin’s courage answered my greatest fear about leaving a child motherless. Erin would always be Peyton’s mom, and she had found a way to stay in Peyton’s life.
But it was not that easy to grasp. Just when I had worked up my confidence to try to get pregnant, I saw the little girl holding the pink stuffed bunny rabbit in my oncologist’s office. God must have placed her there to taunt me. The first thing I noticed, which anyone would have noticed, was that the velvety fur was missing from the bunny—it had almost bald patches. And the next thing I noticed was the little girl gripping her bunny, holding onto the fur that was left. She was standing next to a seat in the waiting room. Then her mom walked out and that’s when it made sense: Her mom’s hair had fallen out, in patches, like the bunny’s. Her mom had breast cancer. I was at an after-chemo check-up. I had come to see my oncologist, Dr. O, to ask her permission to get pregnant. Erin had showed me a way. But the pink bunny was not a vote of confidence. My mom had come with me for support. She saw the pink bunny, too. We both started to cry.
I kept focused on my goal. I wanted Dr. O’s approval. There were magical reasons to get pregnant: To trust my body again. To believe in the future again. To run towards life and away from death. To pick up where Tyler and I left off before my diagnosis. Tyler told me he wanted me to have a baby so that he could always be with me. He wanted to take a piece of me into the world with him in case I died. He promised he would always be there for her, that he could handle being a single dad.
I didn’t get Dr. O’s approval. Not even close. She lowered her eyes and almost whispered, “It is so hard to take care of sick mothers. It is so sad.” I was about to challenge her until I remembered the pink bunny that I had just seen in the waiting room, and I knew that she had seen things that would ruin any joy in motherhood.
But I needed to have a baby. I had earned this. I was a sherpa who had scaled Mount Everest with the fragile eggs in my backpack. Every step over the jagged and steep terrain, I watched my breath in front of me, but I worried more about the hope trailing behind me. Every time I stumbled, I only wanted to protect the eggs. But now that I had finished my trek, with my eggs not broken, I realized I had maybe a bigger trek ahead.
My body was there, my eggs were okay, but my mind was unsteady. Was it irresponsible to have a baby if I could die on it? What kind of mother would that make me? If I did manage to have a normal baby, and beat all the odds, there was still the greatest problem: I might die. The baby might never remember me. Suppose I had a daughter. Would she live her life under a cloud of fear because of her own breasts? Would she resent my cancerous breast and see it as a road map of her own doomed destiny?
When I heard that Erin had died, I was sad and scared. But her death strangely convinced me that I, too, should become a mom. I was haunted by how unfair it was that she was robbed from Peyton, but I loved how she tricked the cancer and found a way to be Peyton’s mom forever. Erin gave me my baby.
When I miss my period, I think it might be menopause. At the hospital, they tell me that I need a blood test and sonogram, just like the sonogram that saw my cancer for the first time. This sonogram will show clump of cells, too, but not like the cancer.
It is a baby.
I get genetic testing to see if the baby is okay after all the poison my eggs endured. I should be relieved when the genetics counselor calls me.
“Congratulations, you’re having a healthy baby girl.”
But all I can think about are her breasts and her future. Will she live under a cancer cloud? Fear of death circles me like a vulture. I become obsessed that my child will be motherless. It sends me into a depression. I do research and find a group called “Motherless Daughters.” Rosie O’Donnell’s mother and Madonna’s mother died when they were young, from breast cancer—Rosie and Madonna turned out normal, right?
When I begin to vomit from morning sickness, I remember the vomiting from chemo. It reminds me that even when I am about to embark on creating a new life, there is unfinished business lurking. Vomiting becomes my bridge between death and life . . . the connection between the oncology office and the maternity ward. Although I had mastered vomiting systems, nothing prepared me for leaving the cancer ward and entering the maternity ward: I went from a world of death to a world of life.
Vomiting is a constant reminder that for me these two worlds are connected, and I can never just leave one for the other.
When they put the microphone to my stomach to try to hear the baby’s heartbeat, I swear it is so loud that I imagine it is reverberating all the way to the cancer ward. It is so loud that maybe the IV poles are stirring in the chemo room. Maybe they have all heard its hope? It is pulsating and screaming that a life has gone on. I imagine her heartbeat ricocheting through the white sterile hallways: “life, life, life” is what I hear each time the machine beeps.
But I feel like an imposter in both worlds: I am embarrassed to be pregnant in the cancer ward. It feels like I am betraying my comrades. As they remain in the land of the dead, I have moved on to life. In the maternity ward, I think about them. I cannot believe we are in one hospital, only floors apart.
I am so scared when my body starts to grow during the pregnancy. How can I trust it is growing a baby and not a tumor? How will my body know what to do when it has gone haywire before?
I remain obsessed with the idea of dying on my daughter. I think often of Erin and Peyton, and my biggest fear is that I will die before my daughter has time to remember me. Tyler will be there for her, but a father is not the same as a mother.
I still go to work every day and I am vomiting again constantly. I am now in maternity clothing and my real boob is starting to grow again, on the left side, so now I have begun wearing my other falsie again to even myself out—but I switched to the right side. I am so glad that I threw out only one and kept the other. My stomach is expanding, and I cannot believe all the different variations of myself that have existed in this one office. What do my colleagues think when they see me in the elevator? What else can enlarge itself on my body?
It is hard to keep up the new downtown look in maternity clothes, but I try. I wear everything in black and even find a pair of leopard platforms that I can squeeze my pregnant feet into.
Every time I am at Dr. O’s office, I search for the pink bunny and the little girl and her balding mom. I wonder about them. I wonder about us—me and my baby—and I wonder if we will be back in oncology together. I cannot bear to be so pregnant in the oncology ward. I know that everyone is looking at me and remembering how I was one of them, and now I have left them. But I want to tell them that I am really here with them in this world of cancer and death. I just cannot leave it.
This is where I belong.
16
Leo, Not Cancer
When I walk into my baby shower the first thing I notice is all the pink—and I panic. Pink is precarious and dangerous to me now: I have been wearing pink ribbons since my diagnosis.
Everyone knows that I am having a litt
le girl. The pink at the shower is reminding me of the pink signs from breast cancer walks and runs—signs that say “In memory of” for all the lives stolen by breast cancer.
My friend Jen, and her mom Jane, who has survived breast cancer, are insistent that they throw me my baby shower. Jane’s toast reminds us all that this is not an average baby shower: “This is a very special baby shower.”
Before I open my presents, I lose it.
“I feel uncomfortable opening presents,” I start to sob. “You’ve already given me this baby. Because I know if anything were to happen to me, I know you will all fill in for me.”
I decide that I will explain my ordeal to my daughter in her name. I will name her “Skye” because my hypnotherapist had told me that any time I felt any pain I should think of myself as like the sky, because of its resilience. Whatever happens to the sky—a thunderstorm, paint being thrown at it, an airplane flying across it—it is still the sky and remains unchanged. Every needle, every surgery, I said, “I am like the sky.” I decide to add an “e” to make it more legitimate. Her middle name will be Meredith for my boss Meredith, and just in case she is a Republican and “Skye” is too out there for her. Meredith has never had a baby because of her health, and I remember how scared I was to tell her that I was pregnant. I was scared because she never got to do this. “Meredith, I feel so strange telling you I’m pregnant. I feel guilty because this is something you couldn’t do.”
“But Geralyn, I’m so happy for you.”
And I know she is. Meredith gives me hair ribbons for my daughter. They were hers when she was a little girl—she had always hoped her daughter could wear them. Now Skye Meredith will.
Skye’s name feels like a perfect way to explain our journey together and to look towards her future. Maybe it also shows all the changes I’ve gone through and still managed to cling to myself. Maybe it’s a hope that if Skye’s life is filled with clouds and storms there can still be a pink sunset. Maybe after rain and thunder a rainbow will somehow appear.
Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy Page 13
