The C-Word

I was eating dinner with a gallery owner here in Portland, Maine, named Lyla—burritos at a place called El Rayo—when the topic of breast cancer came up. It often does these days. Partly because I was diagnosed not so many years ago, and mostly because the c-word has been very big all fall. You'd have to be living in a hole underground not to notice all the pink ribbons. Or the Laura Linney t.v. series. Or the NFL's pink helmets.

I'd just ordered my first margarita when Lyla said, a propos of little, "I will never get breast cancer because I don't have that kind of energy."

Energy? I wanted to yell at her. What energy? You don't get breast cancer from energy.

But every amazing woman I've met with this disease can't stop asking herself what did cause her cancer? Maybe it was the occasional cigarette I smoked in college? The beer I drank? The contraceptive pill I took for six months junior year until I stopped because it made me sick? The plastics the experts say are playing havoc with our endocrine systems?  Or grapefruit? Some researchers think it's citrus. Or estrogen. Or estrogen and citrus. Or stress. Everyone blames stress.

I meet people—kind mothers at dinner parties, and the occasional nervous dad on the sidelines of a soccer game, who think breast cancer is just a chronic illness now. They say well-intentioned things like, isn't it great that breast cancer is treatable. And what a relief that you can cure it in 2010.

And you can. Kind of. But sometimes this disease stops at nothing. And the only cure for breast cancer that I know is the tally of the years I've been able to outrun recurrence. In that way it's like so many cancers. On my amazing soccer team of doctors the number they bat around is ten—as in, "in ten years you breathe easy if you're cancer free." But still.

Mine could be a sleeper cell cancer that wakes up fifteen years later. All of this is to say that breast cancer can take the floor out of the house you live in and ask you to start over on the ground. And then ask you to get it together and go to your seven-year-old son, Aidan's, school piano recital.

And so I do go. Because how many years do I have left to listen to the song called "Sleigh Ride" that he's been practicing incessantly all fall? He was five when I was diagnosed. And just before we leave for the recital he asks out of the blue if he's going to get it. "Get what?" I wonder.

"Breast cancer," Aidan says. "Kids were making posters today at school with pink ribbons on them for breast cancer."

And I try to hide my surprise. All this awareness is a good thing. But it can also make for tricky conversations at home. "No," I say. "You're not going to get it."

Then Aidan puts his blue parka on, opens the back door and asks one more question. "Is breast cancer going to kill you?"

I stand there, trying to pull the zipper up on my own coat, wondering whether this disease ever really lets go. But there are statistics, and they are on my side.  "No," I say, like I have many times before to him. "It's not going to kill me." And I look him in the eye.