What the worst day of your life can teach you about lasting happiness.
Matt and Delaney in Los Angeles, two weeks after diagnosis. Image by Liam Finn. / Cover image by Dani Brubaker.
As a kid, I was afraid of everything.
A large Alsatian that lived down the street;
the old man next door who smelled like dust and old ashtrays;
large and small spiders;
speaking in public; speaking at all (I was a stutterer);
the dark;
sharks;
jellyfish (what even are they?);
bees or tiny insects that fly and sting;
global warming;
and, death.
I once thought being afraid was my most deplorable trait, and I spent most of my childhood trying to pretend I wasn’t. Now I know something I didn’t know then. Courage cannot exist without fear. One fuels the other. Fear is a catalyst for bravery.
“Courage cannot exist without fear. One fuels the other. Fear is a catalyst for bravery.”
February 28th 2017 was an utterly unremarkable day. The usual smoggy haze hung lazily over Los Angeles. My phone rang. I was standing in line at the bank. A man walked past with a dog. On the other end of the phone, a woman’s voice said: “I’m sorry, you have breast cancer.”
It was the first of many times over the following weeks I would hear the words “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry this has happened to you.”
“I’m sorry this might hurt a little.”
“I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.”
“We found a 3cm mass on your liver, and we don’t know what it is. I’m sorry.”
No one was as sorry as I was. Frozen still. No words. No tears. Only stillness.
“Invasive ductal carcinoma in your right breast” she said. “We’ll need to do more tests. We’ll know more when the pathology results come back in.”
In an unremarkable moment, my life had changed forever. Cancer is a no-bullshit broad who taught me a few things about bravery, love and lasting happiness.
“In an unremarkable moment, my life had changed forever.”
The following April, I survived a bilateral mastectomy – both my breasts carefully scooped out by Dr Kristi Funk, a celebrity breast cancer surgeon. Well-meaning strangers kept telling me how lucky I was to be worked on by the same hands that operated on Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow. “It’s practically a free boob job” they said with a wink and a smile.
They were right. I was lucky but not for those reasons. I was lucky because while lying in bed, hungover on a Sunday morning, I felt a tiny, soft, nearly imperceptible lump underneath my right breast. It was so small and insignificant. My boyfriend Matt couldn’t feel it. My family passed it off as my tendency toward hypochondria. My doctor said “It’s probably nothing. I see hundreds of young women every day with benign cysts. I don’t want you to worry about this but let’s get it checked out for peace of mind.”
If you are still reading this, please don’t ever tell someone with breast cancer they are lucky to be getting a free boob job. A mastectomy is an amputation. There is no upside to breast cancer. Doctor Funk had tears in her eyes when she talked me through my pathology results. She held my hand as I sobbed quietly in her office. She put me in touch with a fertility specialist to swiftly save my eggs since the treatment would probably render me infertile. She helped me find a brilliant oncologist, radiologist and psychologist. She saved my life. Not just mine but countless women live because of her tireless work in the fight against breast cancer.
“If you are still reading this, please don’t ever tell someone with breast cancer they are lucky to be getting a free boob job.”
Matt held my hand and cracked inappropriate jokes to make me laugh through all of it. He pulled me closer when I woke up crying in the middle of the night from the terror of the invisible assailant inside of me. He slept by my bed in a hard, wooden chair for three days after my surgery. He loves to tell people at dinner parties how he had to masturbate into a cup while two nurses talked about their grocery lists right outside the door so we might one day still be able to conceive a child. He wiped my tears and rubbed my back when the doctor told us I was in the wrong place in my cycle and didn’t have enough viable eggs. We managed to make one embryo — one tiny miracle, cold and lonely and waiting in the deep freeze to be thawed.
This is not the life I imagined.
I never imagined I would be crouching in a small beige closet at Cedars Sinai hospital watching the blood drain from my mother’s face on the heavily fingerprinted screen of my phone. I tried to sob quietly. I told her I was scared I was going to die.
“I tried to sob quietly. I told her I was scared I was going to die. ”
I was facing a potentially terminal illness, but worse than the fear of death was the guilt for the pain I was inflicting on the people I loved the most. I thought about all the people who matter to me in this world, and I desperately wanted to live. I wanted more time to make more memories, to grow old and see what my wrinkled face would look like. The wrinkle creams we slather on our faces as a daily ritual to cheat ageing suddenly seemed absurd. Ageing is a privilege we don’t all get to enjoy.
“The wrinkle creams we slather on our faces as a daily ritual to cheat ageing suddenly seemed absurd.”
My grandmother used to call me a velvet hammer — steel on the inside, soft on the outside. I never fully understood what she meant until now. On this death-defying roller-coaster, I have survived nine hours of surgery; six months of chemotherapy; thirty-three rounds of radiation; endless doctors’ visits; several hospitalisations; countless MRI’s, CT scans, biopsies and ultrasounds; and, hundreds of pills and jabs and blood tests. I’ve vomited for days, pissed blood, had poison mainlined to a vein directly into my heart. It seemed as though it would never end. And finally… the shit storm subsided, and I emerged a newer, braver and balder version of myself.
“I’ve vomited for days, pissed blood, had poison mainlined to a vein directly into my heart.”
I have spent my life chasing extraordinary dreams. Now I realise it is the small, outwardly mundane moments that mean the most to me. The muffled sound of Matt singing in the shower. The way my mum dances in the kitchen when she’s making breakfast. The smell of wood chips on my dad’s sweater. The way my sister sometimes cries when she laughs too hard. Countless tiny moments that join together to make life extraordinary. Life can be terrifying and unpredictable but also breathtaking, and I will fight to be able to live every messy moment of it.
Kintsugi is a Japanese artistic tradition where broken pottery is mended with gold. Its troubled history on display renders it more valuable. I was broken, but I have mended the cracks.
The year 2017 will live on in my memory as the year my boobs tried to kill me, but I have learned that true happiness, the kind of joy that endures, can be born of adversity. At my lowest point, I felt broken, shattered into a thousand pieces with no idea how to put myself back together, and yet, I survived. I glued myself back together with gold and am stronger, happier and more resilient than ever before.