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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
Strangely enough, even though cancer is a monster, it can be easily hidden. I hid my diagnosis. If I kept moving, it didn’t exist.
I was diagnosed in January and had surgery shortly after to remove a Stage 2 tumour in my right breast.
Everything appeared normal when I returned to work after one week. It was normal; I made it normal for everyone including myself.
A colleague inquired if I was okay when I was moving up a double flight of stairs as slowly as a snail. “Yes,” I replied, “Just tired.” He knowingly nodded and walked past me. Should I have responded differently? And why didn’t I when he asked? It was my opportunity to connect. Wherever I went, however, I presented a perfect persona and pushed my cancer down further into my Jungian shadow.
Cancer is normal. We all know someone who has had it. Medically speaking though, cancer is abnormal. It is created from atypical cells that duplicate out of control. While the medical community treated the “out of control” in my body, I worked to remain in control.
As a radiology patient, I only allowed two people to go into the hospital with me over the four weeks that I was a patient. When friends drove me to my appointments, I asked them to wait in the car. The appointments were quick, and they wouldn’t need to pay for parking if they stayed in the car, but also, and more importantly, I realize now that I could remain the same person I was before I got out of their car if they didn’t see me inside the hospital. It was like dropping someone off at the mall. I would enter alone and leave alone. It was my secret, and that made it easier for me to feel as if my cancer wasn’t real.
When my daughter came home from university in the spring, she wanted to help. I explained that she didn’t need to take me for my treatments and that I had rides lined up. She said that this would give other people a break. The thing was, I needed someone to take me to the hospital, and she needed to feel needed. She wanted to do this for me. So I let her.
In the hospital, after sitting down to wait for our turn, my name was called and for the first time, someone else got up and walked into the treatment area with me. I introduced my daughter and explained that she’d love to see the radiation room. It was decided that I would go change while she had a brief tour. I quickly walked into a tiny dressing cubicle. I was half-undressed when I realized my mistake. There was nowhere to hide. I would walk out of this closet wearing a hospital gown. My daughter would see me in this worn-out blue gown that cries out: “I’m a sick person.” I can’t pretend that I’m at the dentist; I can’t pretend that I’m not sick. After three months of imitating a healthy, yet tired person, there was nowhere to hide.
I walked out wearing what is arguably the most universally vulnerable outfit. This was the first time in 18 years that my daughter saw me in a hospital gown, and it was because I was being treated for cancer. I swallowed my fear, smiled and explained how the arms on the radiation machine move.
When I saw her next, I was dressed again, but it didn’t matter because she had already seen me wearing that blue gown. I had been caught. Her eyes had seen what my eyes had seen, and I couldn’t deny it. I may have already been sick according to her, but not in terms of my perspective and perspective is everything.
It’s been months since that day, and I want to tell everyone that I had cancer – but I don’t. I want to talk about it at parties; I want to tell people at the gym when I’m more tired than they appear to be, and I want to tell my colleagues. But I still don’t tell anyone.
I’ve spent time having imaginary conversations in my head and can’t come up with any good way to smoothly work recently having cancer into a conversation. It fits about as well as those hospital gowns.
I’m hoping that cancer will soon be a distant memory, and I won’t feel like sharing it with my hairdresser or my massage therapist anymore. I’m not sure when that will happen, but until then I continue to play out these conversations in my head. Currently, everyone is responding well – at least in my mind.
Michelle Harvey lives in Toronto.