Pocket Change: The First Days

Three weeks bridged the moment on a Friday afternoon when I read the biopsy report that bluntly stated my triple negative breast cancer diagnosis, and the day I embarked on intense treatment to kill it. In my memory, those weeks take the shape of one continuous fall. I have no recollection of sleeping or waking, of cooking or eating. The calendar said it was mid-March, but no one in our house could keep track of days. 

Fairly early on, I knew that mine was an aggressive type of breast cancer that occurs in only ten to twenty percent of breast cancer patients. But further tests over the course of the coming month would determine just how bad it was– its size, stage, whether it had spread into my lymph nodes, or worse. Even now, almost a year later, I can feel the absolute free fall of those days, the way I was plummeting in panic with no foreseeable place to land. A smooth lump filled my throat, an ache rose from my sternum, and perpetual nausea took over my stomach. My muscles spontaneously quaked as I carried out normal activities like slipping a shirt over my head, brushing my teeth, or writing with a pen on paper. When I laid in bed at night, or sometimes during the day, I curled my body into a tight ball, like an animal does to protect its organs–as if I could hide from the nightmare that was unfolding. 

Everything I had known to be true–my identity; my concept of time; the indelibility of my relationships with my children, husband, family and friends; my physicality and the good health I had worked hard to maintain – was suddenly, impossibly tissue-thin, on the verge of crumbling and floating away.

Even the most mundane parts of everyday life seemed to reveal tiny graces that were painfully vulnerable. I watched intently as my mom, who had driven north to be with us while I was waiting for my biopsy results, taught our seven year-old daughter Maggie how to knit. I caught myself staring at our ten year-old daughter Lucy’s profile, trying to record her laugh in my mind to replay later. I lingered by the kids’ bedsides while they dozed off, wondering how many more times I would be able to tuck them in. I listened to my husband Craig read books to the kids in the evenings, took comfort in how he comforted them, how he lost himself in being their dad. I tried to etch every detail into my memory and worried about who would carry along its contents if I was gone. The days were as steep as cliffs. 

Two weeks earlier I had readied myself for a diagnostic mammogram - a specific scan meant to get a better look at the dense mass buried in the flesh of my left breast, that I had felt and inquired about when I’d seen my doctor in January. The day of the mammogram, I wore a soft grass-green cardigan, black jeans, warm winter boots, and my husband’s wooly scarf wrapped around my neck. I remember taking each article of clothing off in the cubicle changing room, and trading them for a crisp, gigantic plum-colored gown, well-worn by countless women before me.

I looked into the mirror and scanned my naked body- the circles under my eyes; the stretch marks on my belly left by my two pregnancies; the old nail polish chipping off of my toenails; the wonky knitted bracelet Lucy had slipped around my wrist that morning; and the bulbous form jutting out along the side of my breast. I met my eyes in the mirror, and acknowledged the feeling creeping along my spine that after the scan everything might be different.

And then it was, and, stunningly, we were in the wholly surreal reality of my diagnosis, fumbling about in darkness. 

Two days after I learned I had cancer, Craig and I decided that we would almost immediately tell the kids. Our desire to protect them from the awful truth of it was so strong, but we knew they could already sense a strangeness settling in amongst us. When we worked up the courage to have the conversation, it was Sunday. Three days later, we were scheduled to depart for a vacation to Paris and Amsterdam, a trip we had been planning and talking about for months. The girls were begging us to help them lay out their clothes, and giggling while they tried on their matching tomato-red berets we had given them for Christmas.

Instead of helping the kids pack their new suitcases, we all sat in the den together so I could tell them I had cancer. Craig and I had debated that morning about whether to use the word cancer at all. It was incomprehensible to be using it in relation to me, but then, there was no way around it. Our goal was to be honest without terrifying them. Was that even possible? The fuzzy line between truth and trepidation was one we had only just started to negotiate ourselves.

First, we told them that we could not go on our much-anticipated trip. The room felt cold, and my mouth went dry. The reason we had to stay home, we continued, was that I had bad cells in my body that were misbehaving and multiplying, and that it was crucial I start taking medicine right away to get rid of them. Lucy immediately recognized the word we were obviously avoiding.

 “I know what it is,” she said, with the kind of adult worry one never wants to see in their child’s eyes. “It’s cancer.” 

“Yes,” I whispered, trembling. 

The words were astonishing as they tumbled out of my mouth. It seemed that they had the power to shake our children out of their childhoods in a matter of seconds. 

Maggie and Lucy cuddled into a blanket with their arms around each other as we told them the strange facts that would alter each of our lives. We explained that cancer was a word that meant many different diseases, and that there were strong medicines to help people with the type I had. I would take the medicines for a long time, and they would probably make me feel horrible. Many months later there would be a surgery. We did not know exactly what was going to happen, but my doctors (who I did not yet know) were going to do everything they could to help me fight the bad cells, we said.

As we huddled closer together, we prepared them for the riot of feelings and questions they might encounter, and reassured them as best we could that all of them were ok. I told them I was scared, and it was normal if they felt scared, too. Lucy asked questions (Does it hurt? What will happen when they do surgery? Do you feel sick right now? When will it be over?), many of which I could not answer. Maggie hardly spoke a word. I made only one promise: that we would be honest and clear with them as each step of the process unfolded. We would never hide information from them. When we said goodnight and tucked them in that night, I was terrified of what monsters would unleash themselves in their dreams. 

The next morning, I sat with them while they ate toaster waffles at the kitchen counter before school. I watched them hawkishly. I was strung out from sleepless nights and anxious about how they would carry the heaviness through their days.

Craig packed their backpacks and drove them to school, then returned to huddle around phones and computers with me and my mom. Time slowed, and the feeling of waiting was tenacious. We were desperate for a doctor to call us, to explain exactly how we would make it go away. When a doctor or hospital administrator did call, we frantically scribbled notes on yellow legal pads, but every answer led to more questions.

Our mouths formed words that felt like jagged rocks–their ferocity seemingly encased in dense syllables: neoadjuvant, immunotherapy, carboplatin, paclitaxel. I arranged myself at the table each day in my sweatpants, my eyes hollowed out from crying, my limbs shaking and my nervous system sprinting to hold on, as I listened to well meaning people explain how to try to shrink and excavate the cancer in order to save my life. We repeated words back to the doctors, mimicking their plan in our own voices as if this would allow us to keep pace with their strange lexicon. In our new reality we stood at the threshold of an unfamiliar world. 

My family and I live on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan, where winters are windy, snowy and gray, and can last nearly half of the year. It is not uncommon to see snowfall as late as April or May. But that streak of days in March were unusually clear, snowless, sunny and blue-skied. The bright light streaming in our windows felt at odds with the wobbly, murky tenor inside. At the end of each day, I dragged myself outside to suck in the frigid, twilight air before the sun went down. The sharp cold numbed my hands and face, and brought a soothing pause, like someone holding an ice compress against the whole of me. As I walked to the water’s edge, I felt a delicate film of ice crack with each footstep, letting the soft sand give way beneath it. 

Sometimes my mom walked with me quietly with her hand on my shoulder, trying her best to comfort me, or perhaps just to hold on to me. Other times the girls rambled down the stairs to the beach to chase the dog, shrieking and chasing the waves in the waning light. I watched them run ahead of me, resisting the urge to call them back to cocoon them in my heavy jacket and feel their warm breath against my neck. Often, Craig and I went together. We walked, or stood still, bracing our shivering bodies against each other, shock washing over us, dread lapping at our toes. 

At the edge of the lake, where time and distance seem to span beyond the finite, I stood face to face with my looming mortality. It was the only place or time in that endless string of days when anything that felt like clarity was within reach. I watched the waves rise, settle, and vanish into the sand. I allowed myself to follow my thoughts to their very bitter ends. I envisioned Craig living a life without me; my daughters growing up without their mom; my parents mourning their youngest child; all the immensity that I would leave behind. And I saw my life as I had already lived it, laid out in front of me- a glimmering array of love and friendship, wonder, experience and growth, playing out against the smooth unceasing sweep of water, and the long horizon behind it.

My heart cracked open and the sky, it seemed, cracked open with it. I stood at the lake’s edge watching the sun sink down. Its fluorescent luminosity bled all over the sky. I felt myself tiny against the magnitude of the universe, and the terror and fragility of being alive in it. 

It was during those evenings under the vivid sky, that I felt myself begin to split in two. Half of me stood there, boots firmly dug into the sand on this planet while it made its daily turn away from the sun. The other half floated above witnessing the sublime pierce straight through the temporal world that I knew. 

I saw my life and its precariousness flooding me with the sun’s last light. A curtain whisked open radiating shades of cerulean, amber and vermilion. And as all that color faded to ultramarine into jet black and the first stars came out, I imagined my death. 

And all of it–my life and my death–felt equally, unfathomably real.

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