A sea cucumber at low tide; also, how I feel about my cancer sometimes.

One day I didn’t have cancer. And then one day I did. Which is not true, but it’s how a cancer diagnosis feels. I felt good. I was running and swimming all summer. I was starting a new graduate program. I had slowed down on work and was about to gear back up in the fall, and I felt a lump. Chances were it was nothing, and so I didn’t worry until suddenly I was in a dark room with an ultrasound technician looking at dark masses under my skin and a radiologist was telling me next week I would get biopsies and she started using words like “cancer.” This was shocking. I felt like all the odds – that 80 percent of masses found in the breast are benign – betrayed me.

I have been searching for a story of cancer, to understand how I was fine, but also I wasn’t. How I didn’t have cancer in July, on our family road trip to Canada, or in May, when I cried and applauded at Ida’s dance recital. Or did I have cancer then? I suppose I did. Do I really have cancer now? “Have” sounds to me like there is a thing that can be passed: a trinket, a cookie, a virus. “Having” sounds like there was an acquiring. But I didn’t pick cancer up anywhere. I am coming to think of this breast cancer more like a morphing, under the skin, of the self I knew into cancer. My breast skin is the chrysalis for a monstrous metamorphosis.

I finally googled “what is cancer” because it makes no sense to me. I am learning about carcinogenesis: the steps a body goes through in which normal cells turn into cancerous cells. My body, my own cells, have been transmuting into something new, something in which the cells that should die refuse to die, and those are the cells that keep duplicating themselves. So much so that if I don’t stop them, they will live so much they could kill me. Western medicine, for all its advances, has this to offer me: I need to cut my body open and remove the unstoppable cells. Then maybe I’ll need to poison myself to “mop up any leftovers,” in the janitorial words of my oncologist.

I should have written sooner: my prognosis is good. Treatment options are good. “Good” in that there are treatments. Everyone thinks I will survive this.

I am annoyed because I didn’t want to write about cancer. But also, I am overwhelmed by the fact of having such incredible friends and community who want to care for me and our family (and the world) in ways that keep me afloat. Thank you for gently asking me for updates and telling me that I don’t need to respond. Every year when late January comes around and it is so wet and grey and no one leaves their homes for long in the NW, I forget how many people I love and love me back. So I guess I’m grateful to be getting (or finding out about becoming) cancer in August, and August three years into a pandemic. I’ve already seen so many more people that I would have in winter, or would have in 2020. Good timing cancer. Just kidding. What I really mean is thank you. Thank you beloved friends so, so much.

Here is how the doctors tell the story of my cancer: It is hormone positive, HER-2 negative. It is both invasive and in situ. First it was a few small masses, then, on MRI, one large mass. (My interjection: do you know what has a diameter of 8.5 cm? A whiffle ball and my cancerous growth. Also, my breast. How is that possible? Doctors say it is not all cancerous growth, some if it is precancerous growth. We will know more after surgery.) It is late Stage 1 or early Stage 2, to be determined after surgery. They haven’t seen anything in my lymph nodes, which is very hopeful. They may find something on my lymph nodes after surgery. We won’t know until after surgery if I need chemo and/or radiation. It seems like, given the scope of the carcinogenesis, the odds are not in my favor. That is my interpretation of what the oncologist said to me today.

Another story of my cancer is our collective story. Do you know who died of breast cancer? Audre Lorde. Rachel Carson. Nina Simone. My grandmother, Ethyl Hanson. Hundreds of thousands of women, just in the U.S. Millions worldwide. Do you know what is legislated as our right as a women with breast cancer? Billions of dollars to research prevention? No. Billions of dollars for breast reconstruction? Don’t get me started. (Also, I am glad for everyone for whom reconstruction has been covered and important. Of course this should be covered, too.)

And another story is my grief. I keep saying “surgery” instead of “full mastectomy” because it is a lot. To let go of a body part. I think this is why I’m searching for a story that can help me make sense of this moment. This subjecting my body to a kind of amputation. I am riding the waves of gut-churning grief at losing part of my body. Not just changing the way my body looks to the world, but how it looks and feels to me.

People keep asking what I need. I just deeply need to keep remembering that you care about me and Burke and Lucas and Ida and the collective good. I need us to go out to protest the fossil fuel industry, to demand we make this planet hospitable to human life. I need jokes and flowers. I am so lucky to feel and know that I am not alone – I am in regular touch with two dear friends who are breast cancer survivors, another who survived leukemia. And my mom’s friend going back more than 50 years – thank you! And my neighbor and new friend, who has kids in school with Ida, is also going through breast cancer treatment right now. She’s a couple months further along than me and she feels like a wise and knowing sage every time I talk to her. Another friend in our broader circle of beloved people here in Seattle is also getting ready for breast cancer surgery soon. Old friends are texting me, people I haven’t talked to since we left D.C., and I hate that this is what brings us together and I’m also glad to be in touch and feel so not alone. I went swimming with one of my lake swimming friends yesterday and we celebrated our maybe last four-breasted swim.

I have upcoming appointments with a second surgeon, a social worker, a naturopath and a second oncologist, and even a third surgeon (because the first is going on vacation and I want to do this soon.) I will let you know when I’m headed for surgery. Or I might write a lot between now and then.

If you need something else to do, please go listen to Tig Notaro’s stand up comedy special from 2012, weeks after her breast cancer diagnosis. It’s on Spotify as Tig Notaro, Live. It is what I aspire to, as I think about telling my story. Except I can’t imagine ever being so brave as to stand in front of a live audience and ask them to laugh with you as you reel from a cancer diagnosis. She’s amazing. She helped me in 2012, as we were still adjusting to life with a rare and life altering disease. Thank you, Tig. Thank you vulnerable, brilliant women, for being there for me again and again.

If your kid asks you for matching bathing suits, do it! If you get cancer, who knows if you’ll wear off-the-rack bathing suits ever again.