Like me, she was a writer. Unlike me, she found her voice far earlier than I did. In the short time between diagnosis and demise, she wrote — a lot. A metaphor from a long piece she wrote for Glamour magazine sticks with me all this time. She described having cancer as (I’m paraphrasing) being on a raft in a rushing river, while everyone you love is shouting at you to paddle back to shore. But you’re alone, borne away by the current. I thought I knew what she meant then. I know it even more keenly now. My cancer — invasive lobular carcinoma in my right breast, possible sneaky lymph node involvement on that side (more on that in a second) — is nothing like my friend’s. First, of course, it’s a quarter-century of cancer advancement later. Second, mine is an early form of a highly treatable disease. I am not going to die. But in these last several weeks since my surgery, a bilateral mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction, I’ve felt that sense of being on the raft alone. Now that I’m a month out from surgery and visits have slowed and my husband and sons are back to their routines, I spend long stretches of alone time at home. But the lonely feeling began months ago. I remember the first time I felt it; I was having an MRI-guided biopsy not long after the initial diagnosis last spring, and while there were several people in the room — the very kind nurse keeping a warm and steady hand on my back, the technicians positioning me and calibrating their machines, the radiologist waiting with her probe — I felt it, the unique loneliness of a cancer diagnosis, people’s words and actions being heard and felt from a distance, through a scrim. Friends who have had cancer told me to expect this, and once I experienced it, my childhood pal’s words came rushing back, like that river’s current she described all those years ago. Nighttime is my true alone time. Then, I’m on my “raft,” the borrowed recliner I’ve been sleeping in since my surgery. Covered in white sheets, it sits like an invited but bothersome guest in the center of my living room. The chair reclines to fully flat, and its oversized arms act as guardrails, keeping me contained on my back, something I’m required to do for at least eight weeks to safeguard my “new” breasts (reconstructed from abdominal tissue). Every night, one by one as they head their separate ways, my family asks if I need anything else — painkillers, tissues, more water, the TV remotes, my reading glasses, a shade pulled. While in theory I like having full control of the TV and unfettered time to read late into the night without bothering any bedmate, I’m less enamored of solitude now. Because it’s less solitude than it is alienation. I’m alone in the dark, with my cancer, thinking. Now I have new things to think about. Going into my surgery, it looked almost sure that this choice, the mastectomy, would be virtually curative. The two tumors in my right breast were small and contained. I had no genetic markers. My cancer was estrogen- and progestin-receptor positive and HER-2 negative. (Look it up; it’s good.) It felt like I shook the magic eight ball of cancer and the answer swam to the window: “All signs point to alive.” But those lymph nodes. One of three or four sentinel nodes the surgeon removed, those sitting smack in my breast’s exit ramp, was not 100 percent innocent; it contained some microscopic cancer cells. Ticking, but not a time bomb. That means that starting next month, when my surgical scars are more sufficiently healed and my boys are safely ensconced in their college dorms, I’ll undergo a course of just-to-be-safe radiation. My radiation oncologist is a believer — beyond her faith in the beams of focused light that’ll kill what errant cancer cells may exist — in complementary therapies, as well. I’m told I can look forward to Reiki treatments and massage and nutritional counseling when I come in for my appointments. They are all so lovely. They are all surrounding me. And I know I’ll be fine. But I’m still alone.
