…you know that it’s very real when your closest friends are diagnosed with it.
A WOMAN WHO’S VERY DEAR TO ME, an old friend we’ll call Gerty who’s been with and for me all my life, was diagnosed with second stage breast cancer in June. Last night I had dinner with her and, eyes brimming with tears, she pleaded for me to look at her and to tell her—in all honesty—how she looked with her head bald.
I looked unwaveringly at her, making sure that my gaze remained as powerful as possible. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, to me, she was as beautiful as ever. I’m not just saying it. If you were to have been me, you would have thought so too. And I told her so.
In June, Gerty discovered a lump in her left breast while praying, and within 13 days she had had a lumpectomy. In another 10 days from now, she’s due for the third of her four scheduled chemotherapy sessions.
Her hair started to drop, or rather “shed”, in clumps just before her second session. Being prepared, she had worn the wig that she had bought before she started on chemotherapy to her second session.
To her utter delight she had everyone tell her that her “hair” was so beautiful. Ironically, as her “immaculate coiffure”, her real hair, looked so much like a wig in the first place, her wig looked absolutely natural.
Such sudden hair-loss seems, to me, a stage in itself in cancer treatment. That’s why Betty Gomez’s story in this month’s Focus section on breast cancer (Breast cancer gave me a new life, page 44) struck such a cord with me. She had said that her hair loss had the greatest impact on her and her daughter who could not, initially, deal with it.
Of course, the hair will grow once treatment ends, but the actual loss in conjunction with low spirits during chemotherapy treatment can prove pulverizing for the soul. This is just one of the little but significant nuances about cancer treatment that I have learnt ever since Gerty’s diagnosis.
The other one is that of self-blame just after diagnosis. Gerty kept asking me if “her cancer” was retribution, or karma for all the “bad” things she’d done in life. I don’t know everything about cancer or its treatment, but I’m glad I know enough to have been able to reassure her that it’s nothing that she’s done, but it’s just the way it is and that cancer is much like the flu, and as undiscriminating.
*For the full article please refer to Shape October 2011 Issue
