Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality

From the NYT

August 12, 2008
Cases
Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality
By RUTH PENNEBAKER

They say cancer changes you. They may be right. When I found out I had breast cancer 12 years ago, I became a comedian.

Not the kind anyone paid to see. Just the kind who lurked around hospital corridors and examination rooms offering offbeat opinions, wiseacre remarks, outrageous commentary.

To my oncologist — a short, brisk woman who informed me my tumor had been “fairly aggressive” — I complained about the title of the pamphlet she had given me, “Chemotherapy and You.” I said I’d prefer it if the title were “Chemotherapy and Somebody Else.”

I complained, too, about the little marketing-friendly write-up that listed her family and her hobbies. The family was fine. But hobbies? I didn’t want a doctor who had time for hobbies. I wanted her to spend all her waking hours focusing on curing cancer, particularly the type indicated on my own nasty little pathology report.

To everyone else, especially the people wearing white coats and carrying big needles, I announced I was writing a book about cancer. I tried to look rabidly litigious whenever I spoke.

In the midst of all this — the comebacks, the wisecracks, the flapping mouth — I had a dim idea of what I was doing. I wanted to be someone, a recognizable personality, a full-blooded, memorable human being, and not just a cancer patient. I had already lost the person I used to be, that healthy, energetic 45-year-old woman. I wasn’t capable of losing more.

Other friends had their own spins on claiming individuality in the cancer world. One, a psychiatrist, questioned every medical decision that was made. Another, never timid to begin with, terrorized the technicians. “You get one chance to stick me and find a vein,” she told them. “If you can’t do that, find me somebody who can.”

I also took comfort from Anatole Broyard’s beautifully written, intermittently hilarious account of his own cancer treatments in “Intoxicated by My Illness,” published in 1992, two years after his death from prostate cancer. Mr. Broyard, a book critic and editor at The New York Times, had fired a prominent surgeon because he hadn’t liked the way the man wore a cap in the operating room. It looked, he wrote, “like a condom stuck on his head.”

The way Mr. Broyard saw it, : “A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving. It’s all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, but when you’re sick you can let it go in all its garish colors.”

Yes! That’s what I was experiencing, too. Those garish colors, that craziness and freedom, that painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not. It was as if, I sometimes felt, I had lived my life half asleep. But now, now, I was wide awake.

As my treatments wore on, though — the catheter in my chest, the chemotherapy, the anti-nausea drugs, the baldness, the fatigue, the radiation — my high spirits and sense of clarity began to wane. One night at a play, I noticed a woman across the room. She was attractive, middle-age, vibrant. Completely unlike me, as I had become over the past few months. I huddled in my seat, feeling spent and empty and old.

The last time I visited my oncologist after my treatments were over, I felt lost. The image that kept recurring in my mind was that someone with a gigantic pair of tweezers had picked me up, shaken me and tossed me back down. Now what?

“I feel as if I want to ask you,” I told my oncologist, “how to live.”

She told me I could live as I had before — working, taking care of kids, exercising, traveling, enjoying life. Anything, really. I could lead a normal life.

As I left her office, I realized how completely I’d lost myself over the past several months. I needed to be reminded who I was.

Can you tell me who I am now? I never asked my oncologist that question. Probably she would have thought I was joking, the way I always was.