On tittie tumors
Can I be a middle-aged ho with a reconstructed tittie? Guess I’ll find out.
My doctor won’t let me give my tittie meat the Damien Hirst shark treatment.
I should explain.
I have been diagnosed with breast cancer. I have to have a mastectomy. Maybe a double—I don’t know yet. And, seeing as I have to bid adieu to this part of myself in order to remain alive, I would like a keepsake. And I would like that keepsake to be a modest amount of tissue—like a melon ball or two—suspended in a jar of preservatives. I want to keep it in my office next to the framed quote from Slave Play that is omnipresent in my Zoom background and declares, MOTHERFUCKER, I AM THE PRIZE, which has become something of a mantra for me. (I’m not big on saying affirmations out loud to myself, but it turns out I just needed a well-placed expletive to make it appealing.)
Anyway, now some rogue cells and probably genetics have upended my life and I’m going to have to focus on something other than reading, writing, and thinking about film, television and theatre for a bit in favor of odysseys to doctor appointments and getting poked in the boob with needles. Is it the storyline I would have given myself? No. But it’s where I am.
But back to Damien Hirst-ing my tittie meat. My doctor is great and super smart and I feel confident in her abilities to get this dumb tumor out of me. That said, when I broached the topic of a takehome gift of my own tissue, she shut me down.
Really? My ENTIRE 36-H boob has to go to a lab to be studied for various pathologies and you can’t spare me a melon ball’s worth of my own flesh—flesh I’ve been growing out of my chest since I’m 9?
Some of you may think this is an odd thing on which to dwell, because, you know: breast cancer, but trust when I say that it’s a sideline issue in my brain. There’s the matter of having to disappear from work for a bit, though I’ll be writing occasionally when I’m able and I feel as though I have thoughts worth sharing. I don’t like that part at all, but I’m still early enough in the process that I randomly burst into tears, and no editor needs to be dealing with that on a daily basis. That’s what therapists are for.
I don’t intend for this to be a Substack just about cancer, but it’ll probably make appearances. This seems like an appropriate venue for musings too long for Twitter and too debased/cockamamie/self-indulgent/expletive-laced for professional publication. Mostly I just felt like I needed to provide my readers, especially the eager, loyal ride-or-dies, with some explanation for why maybe I’ve seemed a bit off lately and missing from The Discourse.
The more I try to have individual conversations with friends, work colleagues, etc, about what’s going on, the more I realize this is far more efficient, and with any hope, less emotionally taxing. So far, I can handle about 3 cancer phone calls per day, and then I just want to get stoned and smash things in video games (I finally, finally beat Hades. That was a big day for me).
When I was about 12 or 13, I wrote a poem about my nipples. It lives on a 3-and-a-half inch diskette in my office closet, along with a bunch of other stuff I wrote while attending Duke Young Writers Camp. What I remember about that poem is that it was one of the first times I felt like I was taken seriously as a writer outside of schoolwork. I wrote it for an all-girl women’s writing camp class, and we shared our poems by reading them aloud at a bookstore with a bunch of grown women who were professional writers. It was such a warm, encouraging space to be open about how we felt about anything, but especially our bodies and the conceptions of them created by mainstream women’s magazines. We talked about eating disorders and a shared love of Ani DiFranco. Real hippie shit.
I wrote about my nipples, the same ones that, now decades later, my doctor may or may not be able to save. I really hope she can—I have yet to see a manufactured or tattooed nipple that’s a convincing dupe for the real deal. Come July, I may be walking about New York with unholy space alien nipples, but I will be alive, so get ready fellas! *shimmies*
More soon.