Cell Rebellion

Boobs. Tits. Jugs. The twins. The girls. Whatever you call them, breasts are breasts. Symbols of the feminine gender, they nourish infants and attract guys. Poets write about them; artists paint them. Women are supposed to have two of them. Sometimes it doesn’t end up that way.

I have one and a half. I was “lucky” and didn’t need a mastectomy when the little cluster of calcifications that “nine times out of ten is nothing” turned out to be cancer. Never well endowed, in my case a lumpectomy took out a lot of real estate.

After ten years, the half-boob still hurts; a constant reminder that life is short and days are too precious to waste. The doctor told me the pain is from the radiation, and should go away eventually. Ten years is a long eventually. Ten years is also a gift—many women don’t get ten years after surgery for breast cancer.

With a diagnosis of cancer, there comes a flood of questions. The most perplexing circle like vultures around the word “why?” Why does a woman who eats broccoli, takes vitamins, nurses her babies, and has no family history of breast cancer get breast cancer? Was it the abortion I had at nineteen? Was it the time I used heavy-duty paint stripper on the kitchen windows? Was it the stress of years living in a difficult marriage? Who knows?

What is it that triggers a cell to take on a demented life of its own? Matt Ridley, in Genome has a good description of the cascade of events within a cell that impel it to rebellion. Such a tiny thing, a cell, a net of chromosomes, a scrap of a spiral of DNA—you could die from that one tiny thing.

Cancer is strange. You go along with your life, feeling fine, and all the time there is this tiny thing growing inside you that carries your death. And you have no clue. I was too busy with children and life to take time out for a mammogram. When I finally made an appointment for the big squeeze, the last thing I expected was a call from the doctor suggesting a biopsy was in order. And what the heck did a biopsy involve, anyway?

It turns out there are two kinds of biopsies. One consists of lying on your stomach on a table with your breast hanging out through a hole so the doctor can stick a needle into it, remove some of the suspicious tissue, and send it off to the lab for the inquisition. So I got all ready, up to the point of assuming the position, only to be told that I didn’t have the required minimum size for the procedure. (Insult to injury!)

No, I had to have the other kind. The kind where they put you to sleep and take out a chunk, which seems a little odd to me because my total boobal endowment was just a chunk to begin with. When I heard the word “biopsy,” I always assumed it was just a little smidgeon of tissue that gets removed—not so. But the doctor was reassuring, thought for sure it wasn’t cancer, said he’d call me when the results were in.

So a week later the phone rings. It’s the doctor. I have three different kinds of cancer going on in my breast. I have a 30% chance of getting it in the other one. Oh crap.

I didn’t fall apart. Didn’t cry. Just went through the grim setting of one foot in front of the next and then doing it again, and again, step by step. The surgeon. The oncologist. The second opinion at Mass General. The CAT scan. The bone scan. The science fiction horror of sterile walls and fluorescent lights and plastic and steel, the giant machines in this factory of life and death where there is no living thing to be seen, and the dead are hidden away.

I had a lumpectomy (there’s a word for you) and weeks of radiation. Were all the errant cells destroyed? How does one know for sure? A cell is so small—what if one got away, slipped into a capillary and headed on down the river to God knows where, to pick up where it left off? That is the sword of Damocles that hangs over the head of every survivor of cancer treatment: what if one got away? You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know until the symptoms started to take over, and from what I understand, once that happens your chances go way down...