My Story

Aside from writing this blog, I go days without thinking about cancer. I make an effort not to dwell on it. However, travelling by subway during a recent trip to Manhattan, I noticed that next to a 10-foot-high advertisement promoting Lady Gaga's next tour there is an equally unavoidable floor-to-ceiling billboard-sized poster about the importance of early detection of breast cancer.

Actually, there are four of them, strategically placed on the walls under Grand Central.

I met Ingrid when I was bald. It was a few months after the handsome Dr. Lanin had removed the malignant tumor from my left breast, and I was walking to stave off an impending sense of doom. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon. I was watching her walk briskly a few yards ahead of me. She was a handsome woman of a certain age and I caught up with her on purpose, thinking I might have found a friend to walk with on a regular basis.

Cancer is not contagious; it only seemed that way when I started to recover from my breast cancer surgery, chemo and radiation therapy. Whenever I heard that someone had died, I would say, "Cancer, right?" and nine times out of ten, I was right. I'd just nod, all smug and everything.

Then I would start ghoulishly toting them up: my grandfather died of cancer, my dad died of cancer, my high school boyfriend, my great-grandmother on my mother's side, Elizabeth Edwards, Frank Zappa, Ty Cobb. I seemed to have drawn a blank when it came to people who survived it.

One would think that when a woman with breast cancer walks out of the hospital after her last radiation treatment and chemo is behind her, she would sail back into real life with both breasts (the old ones redux or some nice new reconstructed ones), admirable moxie, and unshakable spirituality.

Not me.

I crept back, looking over my shoulder for the guy with the scythe and the creepy robe.

I DON'T MEAN TO BE PICKY

I know it's all about words, but I am an English teacher. I'm a little anal about words.