Posts tagged “breast cancer”

Four Months

Posted on October 23, 2014

In the plastic surgeon’s office, something like a barber’s chair sat squared against a full-length mirror in an otherwise empty room. White. Sci-fi white. After motioning for me to stand, the surgeon attempted to gather a few inches of flesh at my stomach as a nurse stood behind him, looking unimpressed with a pen to a clipboard.

“You’re just so … bloody thin,” he said as he squinted in inspection.

Believe me, I know how annoying this sounds. When I logged onto Twitter later that day and asked if anyone had any ideas for “high calorie, nutrient-dense shakes for healthy weight gain,” six people immediately unfollowed me. Just keep in mind I’d spent sixteen weeks on chemo and turned vegan somewhere along the way.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Mastectomy, pie dough chestburster, reconstruction, The Walking Dead

The Cindy Project

Posted on October 17, 2014

Well, here we are again, friends, talking about tumors and doctors’ appointments not five months after I’d declared the end of the sad cancer blog. I’d wanted to blog instead about walking that half-marathon in December, but it would seem I really know how to get out of strenuous activities. Alas, I will walk another half marathon at a later date, and crossing that finish line will be all the sweeter. But for now, I’ll tell you a little story about boobs.

Yesterday, I cancer-punched nurse Margaret. (Cancer punch: verb — to blindside innocent party with unprompted news of one’s cancer, often, but not necessarily, at the least appropriate moment.) It seemed clear when Joe and I showed up at the oncologist’s office for our first meeting since the biopsy that everyone was very gingerly preparing us for the bad news of the biopsy results. My oncologist has a strict “no test results over the phone” policy, so, as far as they knew, we were in the dark. As far as they knew. I’ll tell you a secret. I always ask that test results be sent to my surgeon as well because he calls me as soon as he gets them. I’m like the Danny Ocean of oncology patients. Always a step ahead.

And Nurse Margaret looked pained as she settled into her swivel seat at the computer in the examining room.

“Margaret,” I said, “It’s okay. Dr. Fischer already told us about the biopsy results being negative.”

Margaret’s posture crumpled.

“I thought something was up!” she said. “I never look at test results because I’m no good at hiding it when patients walk in. Damn it.” After a long sigh, with her fingers arched over the computer keys, she continued, “Well, let me ask you my questions,” sounding thoroughly deflated, “Are you still taking your Tamoxifen?”

Tamoxifen is the hormone regulating drug some patients are given as a breast cancer preventative.

“Nope. I stopped taking it two days ago,” I told her.

“And why’s that?”

“Because I’m mad at Tamoxifen. It’s like, ‘You had one job, Tamoxifen!”

“No shit,” she said.

If I haven’t told you about Nurse Margaret before, she ‘s great. She once gunned down a ten foot rattlesnake on her ranch and posed with it dangling from her grip for pictures. She claims vegetarian food makes her tongue swell. When she first gave me the after hours nurse phone number and I called it the same day, she answered, “Oh, you think you can just call me whenever you want?” And after she input all of my updated information, she stood and said, “I’m telling on you,” as she let the door fall shut behind her.

“About the Tamoxifen?” I called after her.

“About you talking to Dr. Fischer!” she answered from the other side of the door.

But the oncologist didn’t come in with a scolding. She came in with the contorted head tilt of the completely perplexed. “You shouldn’t be sitting here right now,” she said. Surprisingly not on her list of explanations:

That I brought my students cupcakes and sang, “Guess who’s cancer free!?”
That I watched ethereal sad cancer mom flatline at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy not once but twice.
That I ate feta in my lentil soup that one time.
That I registered for a half marathon.

Her best guess? A few stubborn cells somehow got left behind during the lumpectomy and were then resistant to radiation. I’m imagining these cells hanging out silently chain-smoking in white.

This was echoed by the plastic surgeon I met two hours later, the one who compared the DIEP flap reconstruction process to Big Mac layers and told me to start inhaling donuts to gain weight before the surgery, AKA My Favorite Plastic Surgeon. “You should have met with me back then,” he lamented. “I would have made you do the mastectomy.”

Ugly truths time. And I want to be clear about how moronic my reasons had been that first time so if you are in the same predicament you won’t repeat my mistakes. The fact that I thought Guardians of the Galaxy gave me cancer again is proof in itself that I should not be trusted with major decisions. More evidence: I decided a mastectomy would have taken me away from work too long. The surgeries required for someone just off chemo sounded numerous and extensive … based on what I found on the internet. The terms “DIEP flap” and “nipple reconstruction” sounded like something from Saw. I liked my boobs (emphasis on past tense — I’m over them). To paraphrase Shakira, they might be small and humble and not to be confused with mountains, but they’re mine. The worst reason? I decided, without talking to Joe about it at all, that Joe would see me as deformed and our marriage would be kaput. Chemo had already made me feel monstrous enough. I know. I told you they were ugly truths.

There’s a scene in Dallas Buyer’s Club in which Matthew McConaughey’s character takes his doctor, played by Jennifer Garner, to dinner. He wears his best cowboy hat, brings her a framed painting of flowers, clearly has romantic aspirations the viewer knows aren’t likely to materialize. He’s an emaciated, terminal HIV patient with possibly only months to live. As he sits across from her, settles in, he says something like, “Nice dinner. Pretty lady. I almost feel human again.”

That line crushed me. That’s the secret fear of the toll of hard fights, of the toll of serious illness — that we’ll be rendered inhuman, unlovable, desexualized.

But, to quote Dr. Malcolm, “Life finds a way.” And in my case, life found a way to make me do what I should have done the first time around. Full mastectomy with reconstruction.

“Like, yesterday,” the oncologist said.

She tells me I’m such a strange case that a board of breast cancer specialists will be convening to go over my records. After the surgery, the removed tissues will be “genome profiled” to try to isolate and define the mutation in my DNA. They will grow the tumor in the lab for research purposes, to study the behavior of these cells, to test the types of cancer treatments they respond best to. “They’ll transplant little pieces of the tumor into mice,” the oncologist explained. (My sister Michelle called this “The Cindy Project” when I told her.) And when the oncologist left the room, I turned to Joe and said, “Aw! I want one of my little mice when they’re done with it!”

Then Joe pulled the same wide-eyed, ironed-flat expression he gets when our kids ask if he’s Santa.

My posture crumpled.

“Oh. Oh!”

“It’ll be like the monkey in Project X,” he said.

We were both sitting there morosely doing the “Virgil, apple” sign when Nurse Margaret came back in with my flu shot. Now I’m feeling a little conflicted about “The Cindy Project” …..

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Breast Reconstruction, Danny Ocean, George Clooney, guilty remnants, Mastectomy, mouse boobs, Shakira, tamoxifen, triple negative

Day 198: Down the Lane

Posted on June 4, 2014

I take the Firecracker and Hannah to a Greek restaurant up the street the day I learn my grandfather’s dying. Really dying. He’d been joking about dying for a long time, joking about never buying green bananas, that sort of thing. My mom tells me that if I want to call to say goodbye, the nurse at the veteran’s home will hold the phone to grandpa’s ear.

“He can’t respond,” mom explains, “but they say he’ll hear you. The mind is the last thing to shut down.”

I sit in my kitchen after this, phone in my hands. The Firecracker fills in the pages of a blank book made of stapled construction paper. “Pinky 9985 is Moving,” she titles this one. Pinky 9985 is an imaginary penguin. Sometimes Pinky 9985 is ice fishing in front of the Taj Mahal. Sometimes Pinky 9985 is hidden inside a storm of ink spirals or juggling pink igloos or moving to New York on a plane with wings like tucked arms, bent elbows, a sleek dolphin fin of a tail in a blue scribble sky. Pinky 9985 peers out the airplane window with oversized penguin eyes and a “what the hell is going on” kind of crumple to her beak. Hannah sits on a kitchen bar stool, her own phone in her own hands, thumbs tapping. I look at the hanging pots, the sun catching the rims.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemotherapy, hair, radiation, Rosie the Riveter

Day 132: The Copy

Posted on April 1, 2014

If it weren’t for a running tally on my calendar, I’d lose track of the days since diagnosis. That’s where I am now – ready to be done marking time. And this morning I got the girls on their buses, walked two miles, drank a green smoothie, did some yoga, checked emails, and logged on to see the NaPoWriMo prompt. That’s National Poetry Writing Month, for those who are unfamiliar. I’ve never done it before, and I usually make fun of National Novel Writing Month every November (because, seriously, one month!? The novel I’m re-revising now has taken me something like three years). But the new, energetic post-chemo dynamo that is my current self wanted to tackle NaPoWriMo, despite the fact that I typically write prose. So I cheated a little and wrote a prose-poem, and cheated even more by using NaPoWriMo’s “get ready” prompt from yesterday. Yesterday, the prompt was to write an ekphrastic poem, or a poem about a work of art. If wall art in home decorating catalogues isn’t really art, then I cheated all around. Nevertheless, here’s the result:

Minding the IV I shift in my seat to see the home decorating catalogue my sister unfolds. She’s driven roughly 300 miles to sit beside me, chemo snaking through the loose plastic loop pinched between my fingers. It’s like talking to a drunk, I’ve warned her, and the mass-produced paintings on canvases in the catalogue drift one into the other like liquid beads. Blues and grays. I can do that, I tell her. I’d been an art student just long enough to learn to copy.

And after my last treatment, the toxins having done their work, sixteen weeks of squeezing the tumor down so small fingertips can no longer find it, I stand in my studio, a bead-board room in the back of the detached garage, stand by the drafting table that takes up half the space and holds three crates of vinyl records on its crossbar underneath, stand and paint the same squares of color from the catalogue. Blues and grays. I add only a touch of sunrise orange, a nod to George, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. Brush to canvas, bristles dragging, long strokes like drawn breath.

Some nights I’d curl around my little girl and teach her how to breathe deep. In, out. Ocean sounds. Can you feel the waves chasing after your toes in the sand? Can you hear them wiping the bad dreams away?

I paint the squares. I paint over the squares. I wipe color on and off again with a rag dipped into the mud-colored water of a plastic tumbler that reads in scratched, black print: Eskimo Joe’s – Stillwater, Oklahoma. I let the canvas dry. I remember why I’d changed my major. My copy is like a slurred version of the original, like me trying to tell a story while the chemo slips along the IV. But it’s the end, too. It’s the first morning I spend post chemo listening to the raking of the brush bristles while I hum “Here Comes the Sun.”

And here’s the copy of a copy itself (see what I did there? I just copied Trent Reznor):

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: April 1, art, breast cancer, chemo's over!, chemotherapy, Cynthia Hawkins, Here Comes the Sun, NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Month, painting, the Beatles

Day 124: Let’s All Go to the Movies

Posted on March 24, 2014

Hello from the other side of chemo! It’s been a little over a week since my very last treatment, and I’ve been celebrating ever since. Of course, it’s just one phase that has ended. I still have a lumpectomy and radiation to look forward to (gah!), but in the meantime I’m happy to be almost all done with this cancer business.

One thing I had to stop doing when I started chemo, since I had to avoid crowds and germs while my immune system was more fragile, was venturing out to movie theaters. Roll up to the top of this blog, will you? You’ll note that it says: Cynthia Hawkins, Girl on Film. Mostly because I typed it in as a joke and now I can’t figure out how to undo it, but also because many people know me as a film connoisseur.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: Alamo Drafthouse, breast cancer, Cynthia Hawkins, film, George Gaytan, guided mediation, Han Solo, I can do what I want now!, movies, Sean Bean

Day 113 Monster

Posted on March 15, 2014

This blog began with a monster, a Day One Monster that was cancer, the Firecracker, and me at different turns. My breast cancer journey has been that way all along, monsters morphing into other monsters, some benevolent, some bad, if I may borrow the language of Frankenstein. On Day One, my New York friend Carlos started making papercraft monsters, one per day, to photograph and post to cheer me up. And they did, like the many gifts I’ve been given by everyone from my dear friends and family to supporters I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting in person. A handmade table, a hand-sewn hat, a Star Trek blanket, a hand-knit night cap, poems and photographs, tea, candy, potted herbs, lotions, yoga DVDs, magazines, rodeo tickets, gift cards, dried fruits, a bonsai tree. A bonsai tree!

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemo, chemotherapy, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Challenge, Frankenstein, gift ideas, monsters, vampires

Day 96: Incognito

Posted on February 23, 2014

This is me. This is the me you’ll see shopping for dishwashing detergent or walking to the curb when the kindergarten school bus pulls up or standing at a lectern at the university. This is a woman with a bag of tricks, a bag on wheels, no less, a bag that thumps over the concrete seams of campus with purpose. A snack-sized baggie with Motrin tucked inside. A bottle of water. Peanuts. A makeup compact. A bottle of hand-sanitizer. Determination. This woman puts her hand on top of her head in a good Texas gust because she’s afraid it will all blow away. This is me when the girls want to trace hopscotch patterns on the sidewalks, when everyone’s smiling, when the sun breaks over the eaves and the bare tree limbs blur into the blue sky.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Cynthia Hawkins, Makeup Free Monday, photography, wig

Day 89: Here Comes the Sun

Posted on February 18, 2014

Three a.m. on Day 89 and I’m sitting on the side of the Firecracker’s bed while she howls over my many reasons why we can’t turn the clock radio on high in the middle of the night. INXS is playing. “What You Need.” I turn it off. She balls her fists over her eyes, begs to go to my bed, squirms under the new Minnie Mouse sheet set and blanket we’d bought to lure her to her room to sleep in the first place. The clock radio had been part of that package. Along with one plush penguin with a flashlight tummy and a zebra-striped beanbag chair she’d pushed into her inflatable igloo in the middle of the room.

On Day 17, after my first round of adriamycin and cytoxan, I’d stuffed myself full of anti-nausea meds, curled up under my blue blanket, and found the Firecracker beside me. “I want to sleep in mama’s bed,” she said, and we held fingertips and whisper-sang her usual bedtime songs and somewhere in the middle of “When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” I drifted off. That’s okay, I thought. Her mom has cancer. She needs comforting. And hadn’t it been a comfort to me too, to roll over and find her softly snoring away on her dad’s pillow. She’s pretty much been there ever since because it would seem the corners of her room at night yawn wide with terrible monsters, like the one she met in the Whole Foods fish case earlier on Day 89, the red wide-eyed dead fish which sent her into a blood-curdling scream-run toward the bulk bins.

The problem is, she’s a restless sleeper unless she’s in her own bed. She’s been staggering off the school bus in the afternoons, wild-haired and half-awake, having slumped to sleep on the ten-minute ride to our front door. She’s been in a bad mood. She’s told her best friend she’s not her best friend anymore forever and ever, sparking a meltdown worthy of a call from her teacher. The problem is, an overtired Firecracker is even more fervently firecracker-like. So I turn INXS off, though the song keeps playing in my head. All night.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer and given the treatment plan back in November, the first thing I did was research. I learned what to expect on chemo, what to do to curb side-effects, what to eat, and so on, but nothing explained that while I was on chemo the kids would take over like kudzu vine through window gaps. One reason is ease. It’s so much easier from under the throw blanket on the sofa to wave a hand and let them play video games for hours on end and eat all the snack packs meant for their lunch boxes and gather every cushion and pillow in the house to make a fort and scatter uncapped markers across the wood floors and accumulate laundry. It’s so much easier to shrug off a sibling shoving match with something like, “Just ignore each other for awhile, please,” than to actually bring down the hammer of discipline.

The even bigger thing is the cancer guilt that functions in at least two ways. For one, I never want to be the reason why they can’t do something – have friends over, go to a movie, stay after school, play outside – whatever it is they often ask to do that requires a little more effort, a little more planning than playing video games and inhaling Oreos at home does. I don’t want to be the reason, or, more to the point, I don’t want cancer to be the reason. And when they want something – a shopping spree, skinny pants, a second Instagram account, another dozen stuffed penguins, a spot in mommy’s bed forever and ever – my default reaction is to think, That’s okay. Their mom has cancer.

Maybe few have written about managing the family on chemo because there aren’t any easy answers, no right or wrong under the circumstances. Maybe there’s only pushing through to the other side of treatment and reorganizing in the aftermath. And we’re almost there. Two more chemo sessions to go. Four more weeks.

I assure the Firecracker that daddy told the people at Whole Foods to take the red fish to the polar bears at the zoo. “They ate them up, and they’re gone,” I say. “The red fish aren’t coming to our house tonight.” Then I try to convince her again that she doesn’t need her radio to go back to sleep. She’s only quiet under her Minnie sheets when I tell her I’ll sing the song that was my favorite when I was her age:

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 3

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemotherapy, children, Cynthia Hawkins, INXS, parenting, the Beatles

Day 74: In the Margins

Posted on February 7, 2014

My dad had a box of fishing tackle he kept in the garage, a great silver box that accordioned into eight levels when you opened the lid. That’s how I remember it anyway. The glints on little hooks. The feathers. The spools of iridescent fishing line. Later he’d carve his own out of bass wood and hang them on handmade racks to paint and epoxy them to a high shine, writing names on the tails he’d picked out of an English to Spanish dictionary: Pescado, Nadar, Niño Malo. But these in the box were store bought, some still in their clear plastic containers that snapped shut. Lying stretched straight in a tray — a rubber worm twice the length of my finger and the purple color of an old bruise. I was six or seven, living in Arkansas. One month before my breast cancer diagnosis, D. R. (Duke) Haney and I were working on a piece about Frankenstein and Duke told me that growing up in Virginia he was able to tune into a D. C. station to watch Detroit-based Sir Graves Ghastly present films like Whale’s Frankenstein in the middle of the night.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Cynthia Hawkins, D. R. Haney, Frankenstein, James Whale, Philip Seymour Hoffman, TNBC

Day 72: Strong-Willed Children

Posted on February 1, 2014

On Day 68 the oncologist sends me back to the beginning, back to the radiologist’s office where I had the mammogram and sonogram that revealed the mass before we knew it was malignant. This time I try to park close to the front doors because my red blood cell count is half of what it was last time I was here due to eight weeks of chemo, which means I’m walking very slowly in my wig I call “the Hitchcock blonde.” The “Tennille” wig I wear to work, and somehow I’ve frayed it a little around the bangs. I think from the time I leaned to pull a sheet of sweet potato fries out of the oven and felt the steam from the gap of the oven door sprawl across my cheeks. Leave it to me to melt my best wig. Or it could have frayed because Tennille filed for divorce from the Captain. So I sweep the Hitchcock blonde bangs back and step into the building’s lobby, which looks like the Genesis cave in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. Stone walls and greenery.

+Read more

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemo, children, Cynthia Hawkins, Damien, Wrath of Khan