By Janis Greve

Thirty years ago I couldn’t even imagine myself at 50, let alone turning 50 with breast cancer. The 19-year-old would have shuddered at the sight of me, or rather, the me I will be on my upcoming birthday: bald, without eyebrows and eyelashes, leaning over the table to puff out birthday candles more robust than I am.  Shaking her head to wake up from the nightmare, she would have thought she had tuned in to someone else’s future, channeled the wrong vision on her crystal ball.

To my-then self, breast cancer would have been almost equal to turning 50, which I viewed as an advanced maturity so dull that it was just a step away from death.

But now that I’m here and tasting my mortality sharply, I want to scream at that girl and set her straight:  How dare she be so dismissive, writing me off to an early grave! How dare she jinx me with such vague, confused notions, not seeing herself in me, blind to my love of life, my insatiable craving for new clothes, how much I still care about my hair!

Moreover, I would lecture me, breast cancer is not the logical extension of becoming an old crone, which I am not.

Since this is my second time with cancer, I’ve been keeping a journal, determined to catch it all. The first time I was 25. Fresh off the boat from Buffalo and graduate school-bound, I knew something was wrong: I had a constant ache in my chest, and just a sip of alcohol would send a nerve-rattling pain down my neck and along my right arm. I’d have to put down my drink, excuse myself from the party, and take to bed with a handful of aspirin.

The doctors in Buffalo were mystified. Allergic to alcohol? Injury due to a heavy backpack? They even misread an x-ray. Once in Amherst, I saw a doctor I saw at the University Health Services, who quickly identified the problem. What followed was a biopsy and four months of radiation, five days a week, for Hodgkins Disease. 

Fast-forward 24 years to last August. I’m married and have a daughter in  college. Though I’ve been cancer phobic all these years, I cannot give myself breast exams. Instead, I jab at my breasts from time to time, often while talking casually in the kitchen with my husband or daughter. This time, a jab finds something: a right breast that feels surprisingly firmer than my left.  Hysteric that I am, I blurt the worst to my husband to ward it off:  “My whole breast feels like a tumor!”

Little do I know. What follows is an emergency visit to Valley Medical, a mammogram that comes back negative, an MRI that looks murky, and a biopsy that comes back positive for invasive lobular carcinoma.

The doctors concur that the cancer is probably the result of the mantle radiation I had all those years ago. My cure has come back to bite me. I’ve had a mastectomy and now await four months of chemotherapy, and, then, the product of much debate by the doctors, even more radiation. 

Cancer #1 was lost in the din of young womanhood, preserved only in memory. Now, at 49, I want to better witness myself, watching the event unfold on my computer screen as I revel in the permutations of the road I’m on. Haven’t I earned it? 

In “Welcome to Cancerland,” Barbara Ehrenreich describes what she calls “breast cancer mainstream culture” in which women happily, if not giddily, embrace their disease because of how corporate America snows them with upbeat attitudes and pink, feel-good products.

Corporate America, she points out, produces the carcinogens that are likely making women sick, even while it promotes campaigns to fight breast cancer. Instead of actively looking at causes in the environment, she says, women accept breast cancer as a rite of passage, curl up in their chat rooms, glut themselves on pink, let breast cancer happen.

It’s true that I can get giddy about breast cancer paraphernalia. I’ve had many viewings in front of my mirror, tucking in all my hair, admiring my latest silk headscarf from Chemosavvy.com. (The glasses, I’m afraid, don’t quite jibe with the head-hugging elegance I’m aiming for.) 

I’m grateful for Ehrenreich’s disclosure of the Cancer Industrial Complex, but it’s also true that I’m embracing my cancer. Like other cancer sufferers, I’ve got to make myself comfortable in this space, as much as that’s possible. Acceptance doesn’t  rule out activism, whatever form it might take, in the Cancer Wars. It’s possible to both embrace your disease and hate having it. Or to not hate having it all that much, yet not want to die of it.

Nineteen. Twenty-five. Forty-nine. I can imagine many attitudes about cancer, whose possibility connects each of us. Let’s entertain them all. 

Janis Greve teaches and advises in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. E-mail: jjgreve@comcast.net.