For those of you who follow my cancersploits and were wondering how my battery of scans from the other day turned out: a big old nugatory on all fronts.
I post this because I have noticed a marked tendency among the more melodramatically-inclined sector of the blametariat to speculate, in the absence of specific information to the contrary, that I am dead or dying.
Not yet, apparently.
Thanks to you all for your interest in my tumors and in my continued existence.
It is possible to avoid going to shopping malls. If you’re imprisoned by Fundamentalist Mormons in the middle of West Texas.
The other day, for no very interesting reason, I was hot-footin’ it through one of these whirling vortices of polyester lust when I happened upon the above-pictured wretched display of consumerist bogosity. Simon Property Group, which runs the Barton Square Creek Oaks Valley Spring Mall in question, is selling pink gift cards. They will pay Komen a buck for every gift card you buy.
This is why I hate Komen, and why I hate malls, and why I hate gift cards.
First, just don’t do it. Don’t give anyone a damn gift card. Unless you hate her. Nothing says “few things are more tedious than buying you a present” loudlier and clearlier than a gift card. I’d rather get light bulbs. AAA batteries. A ball of string. A bag of dirt. Seriously. When my sister got married I gave her a fly swatter and to this day she wipes a tear from her grateful eye when she says that it’s been more useful than all her other nuptial swag combined.
I hate Komen because they’ve brainwashed millions of people into believing that if they buy pink shit they are “making a difference.” Snap out of it! All you are doing is buying pink shit. Komen is a marketing facilitator. They do not reduce breast cancer occurence. They do not reduce breast cancer deaths. All they do is hook up sanctimonious shopaholics with corporate leeches who want to shine up their tarnished public images.
Such as mall owner Simon Property Group. It is not widely known that, before he was governor of New York and got collared for paying to rape women, then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit against Simon. So did Massachusetts and Connecticut. That’s right — it was a nefarious gift card con. You bought the gift card, but if the recipient didn’t use it within six months — and why would she? Wounded by your indifference, she tossed you lame-ass card into her desk drawer and forgot about it — Simon started charging “dormancy” fees. This was on top of the purchase fees, fees to check the balance, fees to transfer the balance to another card, fees to reissue lost or stolen cards, and “shipping and handling” fees if the card was used for online purchases. After 11 months, your dear, beloved friend’s crappy $25 Simon Mall gift card was whittled down to about 11 bucks, even if she never bought a single thing at the stupid mall.
And now I have to go and get shot up with radioactive waste so I can lie imprisoned in a tube at a nuclear medicine depot and get scanned for the goddam cancer that — surprise — 20 years of pink marketing failed to prevent.
I was mucking out the Twisty Archive of Abandoned Projects when I came across this funky and anomalous object. “Oh yeah,” I said. “That thing!”
It’s a self-portrait in cancerbroidery, incompleted a summer ago as I recuperated from, and felt compelled to represent in a medium with which I was entirely unfamiliar, assorted barbaric cancer cures. I’m no embroiderer, but I can attest to the therapeutic forces contained in wool thread.
I thought some of you crafty types might appreciate the vigor of its naivete.
Photo from TLC “The Life Lens” Documentary series.
It just shows to go ya, if you slap the word ’sexy’ on it, you can sell anything. Even “seemingly tragic” stage 4 cancer!
[Gracias, scrappyBadger]
Moonrise over the berry-flavored barium ’smoothie’.
UPDATE, JUNE 2: For those of you following my tiptoe through the garden of cancer, the scans were negative for metastases. One is tempted to hoist cups of wassail, but as it is only 10:30 in the morning, a shot of Patrón will suffice. A shout-out to the excellent Elsa, my oncologist’s nurse, for actually calling me on a Saturday so I wouldn’t have to spend the weekend pulling pins and needles out of my ass.
Susan Mitchell, writing in Salon on the oft-smirked-at phenomenon of ‘chemo-brain’, describes it nicely. Memory holes, addled wits, the “quite frequent inability to name common objects [...] : ‘Book.’ ‘Envelope.’ ‘Cup.’”
And when I say she describes it nicely, I mean she is nice about it. She betrays little sense of outrage or crapulence when she admits that her oncologist “has difficulty getting too worked up about my forgetfulness.” She is even nice when running down the checklist of all the other conditions wrought by chemo et al: neuropathy, stubborn weight gain, hot flashes, excruciating joint pain, the fact that her ‘reconstructed’ globular unit is no substitute for an actual boob.
In fact, she says a couple of times how grateful she is. She says it’s “hard to complain” because after all, she notes, she’s not dead. She was “lucky” to have had the “great surgeon” who stitched together — probably using fat from a foot-long incision in her abdomen — the macabre lump of feminine acquiescence on her chest. It is only after explaining how lucky and grateful and understanding she is of her oncologist’s insouciance that she gets a little cranky. She says she wishes for her old self back.
The point of her piece, of course, is not to cut loose about her bloody fucking awful post-chemo condition. She means to suggest the need for a new field of medicine that would treat the symptoms of the treatment.*
The point of my piece, however, is to complain. Complaining is not virtuous, I realize. In fact, thanks to the corporate breast cancer mascot — the plucky, pinkified Breast Cancer Survivor (TM) who’s popularized the insane idea that women embrace the disease as an opportunity for personal growth — there is nothing in this world so unpleasant as a breast cancer sufferer who
– isn’t grateful
– doesn’t feel lucky
– won’t suffer nobly in silence
– thinks all those pious pink volunterrorists are deluded
– believes that the pseudo-concerned Racers-for-the-Cure luxuriate at her expense in a false sense of meaningless “philanthropy”
– is hopping mad over the expectation that she pretend she still has tits
– is even hopping-madder over the expectation that she shut the fuck up
I’m even hopping madder that I find myself capitulating. “So how’re you doing?” people ask me, and I almost always answer that I’m doing “great.” Because it would seem so ungracious to answer any other way. I mean, since after all I’m not dead and wouldn’t it be greedy and ungrateful of me to expect more than that?
Well, I’m puttin’ the kibosh on that bogus shit right now.
This is what it’s like to “survive” breast cancer treatment: you feel, every goddam day, like something that oozed from a rotting log after an acid rain. I mean, every goddam day you experience everything on this list:
– markedly decreased mental acuity that your friends laugh off because they don’t understand it’s not just garden-variety where-did-I-put-my-keys, but is in fact a substantial and debilitating hit in the old IQ (in fact, it’s really dementia, but you can’t bring yourself to call it that because a) you’re only 48, and b) you can’t remember the goddam word anyway)
– crippling joint pain
– either diarrhea or constipation but never neither and you never know which
– dizziness
– depression
– episodic weeping
– insomnia
– hourly hot flashes
– the ‘aura’ of utter despair that precedes, and is substantially more discomfiting than, the hourly hot flashes
– a sense of general debility
– extreme fatigue
– pain and peeling skin on the radiation site
– a flappy, post-hysterectomy bladder
– anxiety that the next scan will reveal a recurrence
– numbness and pain from the center of your chest to your elbow
– the constant sensation, from your dual 7″ scars, that you’re wearing a bra two sizes too small
– a crushing sense of futility
– fear of imminent death
Nothing’s gonna fix all that shit. And let’s face it; socially, it’s just a big pile of stay-away-you-repulse-me. Even I find it repulsive. If I were you, I wouldn’t be touching this blog post with a ten-foot pole.
I suspect that’s why Susan Mitchell feels obliged to so agreeably acknowledge her indebtedness to the wonders of medical science. It’s impolite to have cancer. It’s even more impoliter, when, a year or so after your last treatment and you’re still not dead, someone asks you “so how are you feeling“, and you go, “Well, Chet, my post-cancer-treatment life is actually a waking nightmare.”
A waking nightmare may be somewhat preferable to death, but only just. It’s definitely not a fucking cure, and I’m done pretending to be grateful for it.
UPDATE: Here’s a list of 10 remarks that are guaranteed to insult the cancer patient. [Thanks, Carol.]
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* I sympathize with Mitchell’s call for a branch of medicine focused on fixing the diseases they give you when they’re curing you, but after 2 years enmeshed in the medicorporatocracy, I’m pretty sure that any “therapy” they could come up with to treat FLS (Feels Like Shit) would probably turn you into a bald zombie with hemorrhaging eyeballs.
If you follow the news — and I pity you if you do — you have already heard that post-menopausal women can supposedly cut their risk of dementia in half if they take HRT (hormone replacement therapy) immediately after the onset of the pause. But the findings are merely “observational,” so don’t go running off half-cocked.
Because four years ago, as the canny blamer will recall, HRT got the bum’s rush after links to breast cancer, stroke, and heart disease were discovered. A few months ago it was announced that the mass bagging of HRT had coincided with a decrease in breast cancer.
So which would you rather have: breast cancer or Alzheimer’s? Or, to put it another way, which drug company do you feel is most deserving of your dough?
I am unimpressed with the Hobson’s choicism of modern medicine. You can either do what they say, and eventually die, or ignore what they say, and eventually die. You can do what they say, and get struck by lightning, and immediately die. You can do what they say, and live a while longer, and suffer debilitating side effects from the “therapy,” and eventually die. You can ignore what they say, and live to be 96, and still die. You can do what they say, and live to be 96, and be disease-ridden and frail, and dependent on drugs, and left to rot in a home, and die. You can want to do what they say, but not be able to afford it, and die. You can afford to do what they say, but paternalistic government interference or the self-interest of a drug company prevents you [1], so you die sooner — or perhaps later, if the drug in question turns out to be a bit more toxic than was hoped — but dead you will be.
Note that there’s a constant. Medical science can’t deliver the only thing that would make it truly useful. And even if it could, unless the dominant culture were overthrown, or unless the cure for death turned out to be “eat more dirt,” hardly anybody would be able to afford it. There’d be a TV show called “Medications of the Rich and Immortal.”
Every morning, as I struggle to choke down the five $22-apiece Guam-sized snake oil pills that are supposedly decreasing my risk of cancer recurrence a point or two, I reflect on the crapshootiness and cosmic futility of the exercise.
So why do I bother? Well, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, there are chemical reactions taking place in my brain, which reactions produce what is commonly and romantically referred to as “the will to live” but which is perhaps more accurately described as “fear of death.”
A more irksome chemical reaction I cannot fathom.
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1. I allude to the case of 4-year-old Penelope London (link is to subscription-only WSJ article. A post at bioethics.net discussing the article can be found here), who is dying of a rare form of cancer. Having exhausted the options, her wealthy father caught wind of an unproved experimental drug. He actually got the FDA to invoke the “compassionate use” clause to allow the Penelope to take the drug, which is no small feat in itself. But the drug company, Neotropix, said no dice, because even if the father was willing to cough up the enormous remuneration they required, if kid repaid their magnanimity by dying anyway, it would blow their chances for future successful marketing.
Ripped mercilessly from their tankinis, these former over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders are destined to hang limp forever more.
It’s like this: as of last July, I ain’t got no boobs. So today I initiate what is certain to become an annual ritual: the Spring Shelf-Bra Slice-Out. I expect to complain about it every year, too, so don’t be surprised when, next April 28, I begin a post with the words “Fuck the fucking Spring Shelf-Bra Slice-Out.”
See, there’s a catch if you’ve had a double mastectomy and have declined to saddle yourself with “reconstructed” encumbrances that serve no purpose other than to mollify other people’s anxieties and consign you to wearing drag 24/7. As I discovered last year, a spinster aunt occupying my position on the contittynuum no longer has boobs to demurely hide from prurient eyes, but there remains, astonishingly and absurdly, the strongest of expectations that she cover up the blank spaces where those old boobs used to be. This is because the world will literally explode if the following two conflicting conditions are met: (a) a female appears in public topless, and (b) a female in public fails to produce mammary tissue upon inspection.
You see the catch? It’s not exactly a Catch-22; that catch comes later. This is more of a Catch-23. If you have mammary tissue, you have to cover it up. If you dn’t have mammary tissue, you’re obliged to get some, then cover it up. If you don’t get some, you still have to cover it up.
To put it another way: you have to hide it in order to prove that you have it. If you can’t prove that you have it, you have to prove that you’re willing to fake having it.
It goes without saying that if you won’t fake having it by hiding what isn’t, you must be shunned.
Here’s why I give a rat’s ass about Catch-23: Apparently the delicate trophy wives at my sister Tidy’s club pool absolutely go apeshit whenever someone walks amongst them who expresses insufficient interest in capitulating to the femininity mandate by offensively exhibiting a couple of mastectomy scars. So in order to go swimming with the nieces — this is the whole point of today’s tirade — I have to pay homage to the concept of boobage by covering up the blank spaces where my boobs used to be.
Last year this bullshit pissed me off so much I refused to go to that pool. This year, although the bigotry still offends me in no small way, I have reluctantly decided to sacrifice another chunk of my dignity and wear some sort of tankini top thing. You know, for the sake of the nieces whose lives are so immeasurably enbiggened by my company in and around bodies of water (and for the club burgers on Tidy’s tab).
But here’s the other catch, the Catch-22: I must cover up the non-boobs, but the garment that would accomplish this while preserving what’s left of my dignity does not exist! That is, nobody manufactures a swim suit made for the top half of a human body that does not presuppose the existence of gazongas. Everything’s got cups and elastic and darts and shit. All this extra material just hangs there, flapping in the breeze, billowing in the water, making me feel like a clown. No offense to clowns, but, you know, sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don’t.
A Google search on ‘mastectomy swimwear’ produces results only for suits that accommodate prostheses. ‘Mastectomy swimwear’, see, doesn’t mean “no-boobs swimwear.” It means “swimwear that maintains, for the comfort of the entire community, the illusion that you never had a socially awkward deadly cancer, and could still turn dudes on if you wern’t so old and pruney.”
So today I’m cutting the shelf bras out of a few bathing suit tops that were made for women with boobs. The country club pool may succeed in getting me into a stupid-looking flappy spandex tank, but they can shove that breath-crushing elastic rib-cinch dealio up their entire ass. Fucking knobs.
And while I’m on the subject of swimwear, there can be no reason other than pornulation for any woman to put up with this crack-crawling bikini bottom crap.
Note: don’t bother writing in telling me to blow off Tidy’s club and just go au naturel at Barton Springs, where nobody gives a crap what you look like. That pool is effing cold!
The FDA just approved this drug for patients with mondo HER2-positive breast cancer. Lucky for Glaxo-Smith-Kline! And lucky for the 4 or 5 women on the planet who can fucking afford it! My insurance company doesn’t feel like coughing up. I’ll be on it for a year, assuming it doesn’t kill me, to the tune of 40 large, not including the creepy radioactive MUGA scans every 90 days to make sure my heart is still beating.
But that’s nothing. My father, who has pancreatic cancer, has on his bathroom vanity a bottle of pills that cost $5000 for a month’s supply. He calculates that so far it has cost him about three quarters of a million dollars to stay alive for the past 3 years.
I have yet to find a single thing about cancer that isn’t fucking inconvenient as hell, but this kill-the-poor bullshit takes the fucking cake.
Fucking megameditheocorporatocracy.
I know how you all look forward to these close-ups of my fresh incisions.
Me: I always forget. How long does this stuff take to work?
Anesthesiologist [depressing syringe plunger]: You probably won’t even remember me saying th–
Me: What am I doing with this Taco Cabana taco wrapper in my hand? Why am I in your car? Man, it feels like somebody harpooned me in the collarbone. What’s that horrible smell?
My sibling Tidy: Dad-gum, how many times do I have to tell you this? You said you couldn’t wait to eat until you got home, and you ordered extra onions.
You are reading I Blame The Patriarchy, the patriarchy-blaming blog that has been advancing the radical feminist views of Jill Psmith and/or Twisty Faster, a gentleman farmer and/or spinster aunt doing the butt-dance in Cottonmouth County, Texas, since 2004.
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