It should have been a wonderful summer. We were trading in humid, smelly New York City for sublime Berkeley, California. My hubby, D, was commuting down to his job in Mountain View, the kids had various summer camps lined up, and I was revising the second half of my novel. We’d rented a beautiful Arts and Crafts house in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto: the house had a big deck and yard, a park opposite, and great restaurants just five minutes’ walk away. Once a week, more or less on our doorstep, there was a farmers’ market where you could buy low-glycemic potatoes and heirloom tomatoes from a red-headed transvestite named Pam.
But almost from the moment we got there, something didn’t feel right. I was more tired than usual, and often felt hot and nauseous in the evenings. I would beg off from family activities and go to bed early, not even wanting to watch television or read. During the day, I’d sit on the sofa in the spare bedroom with my laptop, holding myself very still, trying to focus on the words on the screen. After camp ended in the afternoons, entertaining the kids —especially Thing 2, who wanted to go to playgrounds and pools—wore on my body and spirits.
At first, I put it down to exhaustion: it had been tiring getting our New York apartment ready for subtenants and traveling across country. I’d also recently been through a round of publishers’ rejections on my novel, which had been emotionally draining. Perhaps, combined, these were causing my malaise? Maybe if I gave it a few weeks, the symptoms would go away and I’d be back to feeling myself?
So I let things slide for a while—hoping the situation would right itself—then reluctantly started seeking medical aid. The first doctor ascribed my symptoms to the uterine fibroids that I’d been diagnosed with about six years previously. When D pointed out that I’d had them for years without problems, the doctor speculated that perimenopause might be making them shrink and causing these symptoms. It didn’t make much sense to us, but it was a diagnosis from a medical professional, so we went with it for a while.
The second doctor suspected thyroid issues or mono. And indeed, the blood test she ordered came back showing that my thyroid level was low, despite the drug I was already taking for hypothyroidism. She adjusted my dose and I went away happy, thinking we’d found the culprit. I just had to wait for the new dose to kick in.
A few weeks later, I was sitting in my customary writing spot when something truly bizarre happened. It was as if a series of tiny fireworks erupted on the right side of my abdomen, or dozens of flower buds popped open at once. The sensation was freakish: I’d never felt anything like it before, and haven’t since. It was over in a few seconds—so quickly that I wondered if I might have imagined it—but it left its mark, a sticky residue of unease.
Still, I tried to dismiss it. I was holding myself to a strict deadline with my novel, and needed to produce pages—I didn’t want anything to be wrong. And while these ailments were concerning, they generally weren’t serious enough to curtail our activities. On weekends, we explored the stunning California coast: we made trips to Big Sur and Point Reyes, where we hiked among tule elk and kayaked in clear blue waters. We attended the 2015 Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, cheering and waving from the sidelines as the LGBT community celebrated the Supreme Court’s historic decision to legalize gay marriage. We played tennis, went swimming and saw movies and theater in the park.
I didn’t get myself back to the doctor until the week before we were due to fly home to New York. This time I saw someone different, and she didn’t mess around. “This has been going on too long. You need an abdominal CT scan,” she said. Her best guess was that it was something gastrointestinal. She offered to try to fast-track me for a CT scan in the six days before we left California, but I said no: I’d do it when we got back to New York.
This time, I didn’t mess around either. We arrived back on Saturday, and on Monday I got an appointment with the first available doctor at my practice, who happened to be an OB-GYN I didn’t know. She scheduled me for the abdominal CT scan that Wednesday. It was a busy week: my brother and his three sons were visiting from the U.K., D was heading to London for a conference, and it was still the summer, so the kids were on my hands 24/7.
I feel as if all cancer patients should be able to remember, in high-definition detail, the moment of hearing their news. It’s our personal 9/11 or Kennedy assassination, our dividing line between normal and not. Yet my memory of that day is vague. I know that it was humid and sticky, and that the kids weren’t around. I had a sense of pride that I had gotten to the doctor and done the scan: I was looking after myself, getting the oil to tune up the engine.
The call came in the late afternoon. I was sitting on my bed, and was surprised to hear Dr. G’s voice because the scan had only been a few hours before. “There’s nothing wrong with your intestines,” she said, and I experienced a microsecond of relief—Ah, nothing wrong—before she went on, “but they found something very concerning in your liver.” A momentary pause. “They saw innumerable tumors there.”
Tumors. Innumerable. I didn’t know which word was more terrifying. At the sound of them, I let out an involuntary “Jesus!” “Yes,” she said, her professional tone softening, before hitting me with the next two-by-four: the radiographer had noticed something that looked like a shadow on my right lung. Since tumors in the liver are typically not primary, she explained, it was possible that I had one in my lung too. She’d arranged for me to have a chest CT the following day.
I put the phone down, and numbness set in. This was some kind of warped parallel universe, or perhaps a nightmare. Tumors. Innumerable. My brother and his clan had gone back to the U.K.; D was in London too. I called and woke him up: he could immediately tell that something was wrong. “I think you should come home,” I said in a tiny voice after telling him. “Yes,” he said, “I will.” Everything sounded stilted: it was as if we were reading from the script of a Lifetime movie. He let out an involuntary sigh, and although I knew it was irrational, I felt guilty for being an encumbrance. He was in a new job, and was still in the impression-making stage. Upping and leaving a conference would be noticed.
That evening, I got a voicemail message from my internist. “I imagine you’re freaking out, and I want you to know that this might be entirely treatable,” she said. I was spending the evening with C, a psychiatrist friend: we’d arranged to join forces while our husbands were out of town. C told me that from what she’d learned in medical school, it didn’t sound like I had metastatic cancer, and we got busy Googling other possibilities. I called my doctor, who speculated that it was Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. “Let’s hang our hat on that for the moment,” she said. I liked the sound of that. A friend in England had had Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for fifteen years and, as far as I knew, was doing fine.
The next day, in a brand new radiology department, I was led into a room with a scanner that looked like a giant, gleaming white doughnut. The test was over in ten minutes or so—wham, scan, thank you ma’am. A couple of hours later, a phone call confirmed my worst fear: a primary tumor in the lung, which wiped out the possibility of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Everything shifted into high gear. D was flying home; my doctor was working the phones to get me squeezed me in for a liver biopsy the next day, Friday. She didn’t want me to have to wait over the weekend.
Doggedly, I put one foot in front of the other as the world spun. All of this made no sense. I’d always been the healthy one: while my parents and siblings had each had numerous surgeries and health issues, I’d been the outlier. I hadn’t even had my blood drawn until I was thirty—and then only because I was getting married in Massachusetts, which required a blood test. I was no fan of the medical-industrial complex: when diagnosed with uterine fibroids, I’d chosen to radically alter my diet and lifestyle rather than undergo surgery, and with discipline I’d beaten them into submission. Now, it seemed, I was staring into a tunnel of intense medical interventions with an almost certain early death at the end.
On Friday afternoon, D and I went to the doctor’s office to get the biopsy news in person. My internist, Dr. P, is a lovely woman who has always done her best, within a harried system, to make a personal connection. She entered the room, and there was palpable shock under her professional veneer. The cancer had metastasized from my lung to my liver, she patiently explained. Yes, it was definitely cancer. Yes, it had been staged: it was Stage 4. No, there was no longer a possibility that it could be anything else.
“In other words,” I said, my voice sounding unnaturally faraway and flat, “it’s the very worst it could be.” No, I wanted her to say, there are worse things. I’ve seen people recover from this. I believe you can heal…
“Yes,” she said, “it’s just awful.”
I stared into the darkness of the tunnel, a muddy scrim of fear and desolation clouding my view. I wanted my old life back—the imperfect one, with the unsold novel and stubborn belly fat and cluttered apartment. I wanted bike rides and leaves turning color and the smell of garlic and onions simmering in a pan. The luxury of a world where tragedy was a headline from Syria or Iraq.
Now I’d become a statistic. But I knew this much: I was a fighter. An uphill trudger. Resourcefulness was in my DNA.
I put my cancer on notice: Watch out, you fucker. I’m coming for you with everything I’ve got.