Woman in the Next Bed

I hear that a friend of Kim’s was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.  My heart sinks at the news, even though I don’t know who she is. I’m sure she already has her own network of friendly support and commiseration. Nonetheless, I offer to do whatever I can for her—exchange emails if she wants, for instance—just in case. Instant solidarity based on shared affliction may sound like a cliche, but you realize that it’s become a cliche because the ages-old truth in it has been worked to no end.

 

Knowing your disease is important.  But it's not just a matter of knowledge.  Breast cancer is such a public disease that googling alone will provide you with an overwhelming amount of information.  I devoured whatever I could get my hands on in the first few weeks after my diagnosis. But only a very limited amount of medical discourse and statistical data helps you cope with the catastrophe that has become your everyday life. Statistics is especially tricky. You’d like to learn the 5-year survival rate, 10-year survival rate of your particular subtype of cancer. Inevitably, however, in the process you also get to learn the recurrence rate, the mortality rate of your particular age or ethnicity group. Your refusal to be reduced to a piece of data won’t effectively prevent your wondering where in that pie chart or graph or table you’d fit eventually. This can undo you at a stroke, because, being that one woman out of eight, deep down you think the odds are already against you. Especially if you’re that one woman with the triple negative breast cancer unlike the other nine women with other, less difficult subtypes of breast cancer, wouldn’t you think the odds are really against you? It’s hard to say what particular good it did me to learn about the TNBC’s higher recurrence rate in the 3rd to 5th year period.

 

What did me good, on the other hand, was the things I learned from other women with cancer. During my first chemo infusion, the woman in the next bed, who looked about my age, almost determined the ways in which I took my own chemotherapy. Seeing that I was as tightly wound as possible, she asked me whether it was my first. She was having her fifth. Only two years older than me, she had colon cancer. Not exactly the most inviting personality in general, I was in no mood for conversation.  But she kept talking. I never could understand why some sick people just assumed that other sick people would openly discuss their sickness with anyone. My slow, inexpressive responses didn’t deter her, however.  When the nurse from the oncology department left me with the booklet about the side effects, diet, exercise and so on, the woman in the next bed again turned to me.  “You won’t throw up. You’ll lose appetite, but with antemetics these days you don’t throw up.” I still didn’t feel like talking but I could gladly do without one of the most upsetting images about chemotherapy. “Eat whatever you want and keep your strength up. It’s a cycle of good days and bad days. You’ll be fine on good days, fine enough to go out with friends and stuff.” She was actually answering some of the questions I had asked the nurse. The nurse gave me a lot of helpful general information, but this co-patient’s first-hand report was in fact much better than the nurse’s noncommittal “every patient can react differently” spiel. And she told me many things besides, including what she liked to eat, how she was dealing with particular symptoms, etc. She wasn’t invading my privacy. She was instead forgoing her privacy to help me with what I was in for. In the end, she told me that it wasn’t easy but “bearable” (her exact word) and showed me that it was possible to carry on with life, with the chemo as part of it. And she wasn’t being a hero or a cheerleader, either. That was good to know, truly. If someone who was going through nine infusions could say that it was bearable and make it believable, it meant that I’d be OK with my six infusions. Weeks and months into the chemo, I realized that there were many things that professional medical discourse didn’t, couldn’t, prepare me for. But I often thought of this co-patient’s reassuring word and demeanor. Symptoms and side effects came and went, and I believed that all those things were bearable—and they were.

 

Three weeks after my last infusion, I was sitting in front of the Breast Cancer Center at the KUMC (Korea University Medical Center) for the ultrasound and a CT scan. I noticed the woman next to me burning a hole in my face with her stare. By that time I was too used to my own sickly face to be very self-conscious, but her stare reminded me that I indeed looked awful. I was annoyed and turned around with a terrible, accusing look. When our eyes met, she said: “The eyebrows go, too? No one told me about the eyebrows.”  With such absent-minded despondence in her face. She had had her first infusion only a few days before. Memories of my first day were still fresh. I said that no one had told me about the eyebrows and eyelashes either, and that I hadn’t even realized that they were gone until there were only four or five strands left. I found myself saying things to her. “Losing hair is nothing to worry about. I feel better than I look.” Without meaning to, I suddenly turned into that woman in the next bed from a year before, and was basically telling her that it was going to be “bearable.”

 

I had another friend who helped me with the details of her experience from five years ago too. Since hers was the TNBC like mine, her successful cope record is particularly meaningful to me. Though she was temporarily living in Brazil until a few months ago, she was another woman in the next bed to me with her long-distance support. For another friend—this is an old friend’s wife—I’ve been the woman in the next bed most willingly since her diagnosis last June. Everybody knows at least one person who has or had breast cancer and it’s one of the first things they would tell you. Most of the times such remarks don’t amount to much, but connecting with that person might actually help. I guess that’s why there are support groups on and off line everywhere. My own personal chain of “women in the next bed” attaches me to these co-patients.  All the more so, as I never forget that still early in our occurrence history we’re copers rather than survivors just yet. I hope Kim’s friend is coping well. I hope my friend’s wife will sail through her last infusion in two weeks.  Every time I think of them I root for them and root for myself.  In commiseration I root for all the copers and all the women in the next bed.

NO SHIT

Jinyong calls me in the afternoon.  Like a good friend he asks how I am; then like a good doctor he adds that I should keep being cautious about everything.  As if I needed to be reminded.  True, I didn't always live like this.  And I'll jump at any reason to skip my Pilates session.  That he knows it slightly irks me.  But I am grateful to him for he's one of the friends who helped me get to this "healthful" state.  Now my diet is mostly of rice, fresh vegetables, fruits, tofu and seafood--everything organic as far as possible.  I do without meat and milk fat, and assiduously avoid sugar.  And absolutely no smoking, not even a social cig or two that I used to love.  I sometimes miss those occasional puffs but I know I can't afford to romanticize that now.  I don't like meat, so going meatless isn't a problem.  But desserts and cheese... Every once in a while, I'll have a bite, literally only a bite, and grudgingly curb myself.  Eating this way, however, is much easier than sticking to my exercise routine--Pilates twice a week, swimming once a week, and an hour-long walk (often longer) twice a week.  This may not seem very rigorous, but for someone like me who used to work out for zero hour a week for most of my life, believe me, it most definitely is.  Especially because my joints still ache from the chemotheray, working out always takes a lot out of me.  But since I started actively working out on a schedule in July, my body aches less.  The thought of not being able to stop this routine (or at least something simliar), however, is disheartening.  I am one of the laziest persons on earth.  Exercise is modern day torture.  Just look at all those unhappy faces on treadmills!  But my doctors are always breathing down my neck about regular exercise as if without it I would keel over any minute.  No shit?

On October 13, 2012, I was diagnosed with stage 2 TNBC (triple negative breast cancer).  That's a little over a year ago now.  I'd had a lump checked out and was facing the doctor in his office at the breast/thyroid clinic.  The usually smiley doctor looked adequately glum as he said, "the biopsy shows cancer cells."  So that was that.  Since happening upon that damned lump in my right breast 10 days ealier, my anxiety level went through the roof.  I am an extremely imaginative hypochondriac, who kind of likes going to the doctor and being told off for being neurotic.  Something was wrong, though.  A palpable lump cannot bode well.  Still I went to the doctor, hoping he'd set things straight.  But the usually chatty doctor was not so chatty when he told me that it wasn't just one lump.  He saw three in the ultrasound.  They weren't big but they were three, and he didn't like their shapes.  He ordered an immediate biopsy, when all I wanted to hear from him was, "Aw, get out of here, this is nothing."  Looking at him showing me the ultrasound pictures I could see thngs could not be good.  The mere sight of the spiky little monsters in black and white was ominous.  The poking needles didn't hurt as much as the marked reticence of the doctor.  The following week was a haze.  I tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy.  It was still unreal, and, flimsy as it was, I held on to the possibility of benign tumors.  On learning the biopsy result the following week, I realized that there was just no preparing for this, no matter how educated or philosophical you might think you were.  Even a meltdown is out of the question for its sheer senselessness.  The doctor suggested a mammotome procedure that afternoon so as to help expedite everything for me, with the cell block and stuff for further testing.  He also said I should call someone.  Too much to absorb and no one to call.  At that moment, an appalling new sense of the word "lonely" descended upon an unattached 42-year-old woman in a single-person household.  I could only repeat to myself: "No shit!"

Under these circumstances there is nothing one can do but accept the fact and act upon it somehow.  I had cancerous tumors growing in my body.  My body, which had been clean in the annual checkup only 10 months earlier, was being attacked by these rapidly multiplying malignant organisms.  Don't they usually take years and years to grow?  The speed and aggression with which these tumors seemed to be growing scared me most.  Something needed to be done about this.  Fast.  Promptness seemed imperative even in my addled mind.  Sitting in my car in the parking lot, I called my sister.  She was going to come for the procedure.  I needed someone else too, though, for I wasn't supposed to drive after the local anaesthesia and my sister couldn't drive.  Thankfully, friends came to rescue.  When I called SK, he said he'd run out as soon as possble to drive me home.  Then I called Jinyong, a close friend who is a physician, for what to consider and where to call.  As he got me some names and numbers at the speed of light, it was finally becoming real.  Looking back, that hour was a threshold to an entirely different phase of life.  The healthy, carefree, cancer-free era of my life was over.  From that hour on, a constant confrontation with the face of mortality was going to be an indispensable part of my life.  As a cancer-ridden single woman living alone, I was to be forever beholden to a few friends.  Several phone calls later, Jinyong and I decided that I'd go see two surgeons in the following week about treatment and surgery options.  Now it was a fixed fact.  Now that the first steps were taken, tight-lipped concentration on pragmatics gave way to fear and despair.  My voice began to crack a little.  If I were to have an emotional breakdown once in my life, this seemed to be the time.  But I didn't get to be a drama queen even at that moment, for Jinyong did not forget to forestall me by yelling, "Breast cancer these days is not even a cancer!"  I heard him half in relief and half in disbelief, but of all the things I had to hear that day it was the only thing that I liked.  No shit.