Adriamycin. The red devil. This is your first—or second—chemo drug. Did the nurses administer them alphabetically or in order of which drug was most likely to kill you? Until it was synthesized, Adriamycin was harvested from bacteria in the soil of an Italian castle near the Adriatic Sea. Your urine is red for a couple of days after each infusion. Prior to beginning chemo, you have a cardiac stress test to make sure your heart is strong enough.
Bald. At first, it’s a strand or two. Then multiple hairs tangle in your fingers when you lather, rinse, but not repeat. At the hair salon, your stylist shaves your head. Your hair tumbles on the cape as you watch your reflection transform into your dad.
Cytoxan. Partnered with Adriamycin, they form the first phase of your chemo cocktail. A real party. You go to the bathroom alone. Flush twice. It’s not safe for your dogs or son to be in the bathroom with you. You look at your toothbrushes and wonder if you’re brushing your teeth with death.
Dexamethasone. It is one of the two steroids you take before, during, and after chemo Mondays to minimize nausea. Years later, when Donald Trump touts it as one of his miracle cures for Covid, you wonder if there will be enough for the people who really need it.
Estrogen. This hormone brings gifts of pubic hair, breasts, and curves. Then, it turns evil and fuels your tumor. After your surgery, you take medication for five years to prevent estrogen production. You think you’re in the home stretch until your oncologist tells you he wants you to continue for another five years. Without estrogen, a breast, ovaries, and fallopian tubes, your femininity crumbles. Your bones begin to disintegrate.
Fight. Fight like a girl. Put up a good fight. Flight or fight. You don’t like to argue, let alone fight. The war on cancer is fought with drugs. The war on drugs is fought with prison. During treatment your body is held hostage by IV lines and the machines you are tethered to.
Gown. Green or blue gowns, some with nondescript floral or geometric patterns, open to the front for easy access to your breasts. You think about counting how many you have worn but wait too long. The same for tallying how many people see your breasts—at what point do doctors and nurses surpass ex-boyfriends?
Halsted, Dr. William S. He thought he could save more women’s lives by removing the breast (sometimes both for the hell of it), the pectoral muscles, and sometimes a rib or more as if he were Dr. Frankenstein’s misguided doppelganger, cutting out significant amounts of tissue instead of cobbling together body parts from graves. Did his addiction to cocaine and morphine make him relentlessly reckless or recklessly relentless?
Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. Not to be confused with ductal carcinoma in situ, which you also have. Your tumor penetrated its milk duct, spread tendrils out like an octopus until one of the arms rested on your chest wall, a fine layer of fascia delineating the space between your pectorals and breast tissue. IDC and DCIS are the first cancer acronyms you learn.
Journey. Perhaps it’s best if we don’t talk about this. No. We should talk about this. Every time someone mentions your cancer journey, you bristle. Your inner responses range from “This is no fucking journey” to “Where am I going?” until you can’t take it anymore and begin educating people about how hollow this cliché is. Maybe people who don’t travel like to think of cancer treatment as an impromptu vacation from the life they have been living. You think of this little adventure as a trip to hell and back.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. We like to have countable, actionable steps or stages to go through. The five stages of grief; the twelve-step program; three wishes; eighteen ways to lose a lover. Denial comes first as you lie in bed at night for months feeling your lump grow until part of it feels like a BB under your fingers and you have to acknowledge its presence. You spend significant time in Acceptance. Anger comes later. You have no Bargaining chip, nothing to offer in exchange. Depression? You cry once.
Lumpectomy. Perhaps you bargained after all. You take chemo in exchange for your lump. The margins aren’t clean. You imagine a smudged line and want to erase every trace of cancer from your body. A re-excision and a mastectomy later and maybe you have.
Mastectomy. Mast-, breast; -ectomy, removal of. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. The flash cards you made in massage school are finally useful.
Nuclear Physicist. Maybe you thought you’d meet one at a bar some day and chitchat about explosions, atom bombs, and whatnot. The wild-haired, barrel-shaped man grinning as he shakes your hand and measures your radiation grid is not what you expected. What did you expect? Albert Einstein seemed to have never met a comb and neither has this man. It’s surreal to meet someone when you’re topless, sliding in and out of a machine.
Oncologist. Choose wisely if you can. This doctor will outlast the rest of your cancer team. He explains what the medications do while he compassionately poisons you.
Port. In Latin, a port is a haven or harbor. In French, porte is also a door. Porter (por-tay) is to carry. The port is the harbor that gives chemo access to your superior vena cava, carrying it throughout your body with each heartbeat. Your port installation surgery solidifies your entry into the land of cancer.
Quiet. In the middle of the night when you can’t sleep and traffic has ceased, you lie with your thoughts and fears. You hear trees creak, snow whisper, and the soft chuff of your dogs’ breath.
Red Jacket. Your down jacket has a cellphone pocket above your left breast. After a suspicious mammogram, you have a biopsy. Benign. You wonder if the surgeon biopsied the correct spot. Maybe your tumor has been multiplying and dividing for years.
Stage. After your diagnosis your mom claims she had had breast cancer, too, even though she has always told you it had been a benign cyst. Nothing to worry about. Suddenly, her story metastasizes. Chemo. Hair loss. Unable to use her arm. Does she want to share the stage?
Taxol. Researchers discovered the Pacific yew tree contains a compound that, although poisonous, is chemotherapeutic in controlled doses. The tree was harvested almost to extinction. Your eyebrows and eyelashes look like a clear-cut forest.
Underinsured. Your catastrophic health insurance with a $10,000 deductible could bankrupt you if your friends and family hadn’t contributed to your GiveForward page. Without insurance, you would have been billed $500,000 for your first year of treatment.
Vanity. Along with modesty, you are left with little of either. You have a love/hate relationship with mirrors, alternating between fascination with your transformation and despair. Everything you thought you knew about yourself has changed.
Wine. Your oncologist cautions you not to drink. You finally ask a nurse if alcohol reduces the efficacy of chemo. She says your liver metabolizes the medications and doesn’t need to work any harder than it already is. Your mom takes you to your favorite French restaurant for a glass of wine after you think you have finished chemo.
X-ray. After each X-ray you wonder how much radiation is too much.
You. Why you? Why not?
Zero. You will never have a 0% chance of recurrence. Triple positive breast cancer can recur at any time. Your oncologist tells you one of his patients had a recurrence after twenty-five years. He chuckles nervously. You are not amused. You spend countless hours researching recurrence statistics until you decide to live.
Kathleen Quigley is a writer and massage therapist living in Wisconsin yet dreaming of Portugal. She has been published in Hypertext Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, the Seventh Wave, HerStry.blg, among others. After pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, Kathleen took a hiatus to raise her son and run marathons. She has been awarded residencies at Ragdale Foundation and is completing a memoir. She loves all things purple and her crazy rescue dog.
