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If you're on Facebook, you've seen the meme going around the past couple of days. Women the world over are posting colors to their status updates. Lots of black, some pink, some white, a virtual rainbow. It's a game that several of my circles (high school, local friends, blogging friends) are playing right now, and it looked cute if harmless. I wanted to play.
I tracked the game back a couple hours and figured it out -- they were writing their bra colors! I put hands to keyboard and wrote ... nothing. Truth is, I didn't know what to write. I wanted to frivilously play along -- the boys had gone to bed, and this was MY time, after all -- but I couldn't. And why couldn't I? If you know me, you don't have to ask. But if you're new here, I couldn't play along by posting the color of my bra because I don't have one. I don't own one.
Two years ago this month, I underwent surgery, you see. I had a double mastectomy to remove the cancer that was trying to kill me. In my right breast, Stage III inflammatory breast cancer, a fast-moving, deadly cancer that kills more than 60% of women in the first five years. (Statistics have improved somewhat since my diagnosis, but it's still the second-deadliest cancer, second only to prostate cancer.) In my left breast, potential. Potential that the same cancer would recur, as it was in my lymph system, coursing through my body, even as we tried to kill it with six months of tri-weekly, then weekly chemotherapy.
We had been through hell. First the cancer, then the chemo tried to kill me, and both of them almost succeeded. I was in bed for months, too tired to move. I couldn't leave the house for fear of infection during flu season -- and we had to take my oldest out of preschool, to keep those germs at bay. At one point, the taxol had ravaged my nervous system so much that I lost the use of my legs.
After all that, we had to wait for my body to rally after the last chemotherapy treatment and become strong enough to survive the surgery. As each day went by, I would grow stronger -- but so would the cancer. and if it grew faster than my white blood cells rebounded, then the surgery might not happen, and the tumor would be inoperable again.
It was terrible.
But eventually the day came, January 23, 2007, and I was able to have my breasts removed. I've never felt so relieved in all my life. This was my one big shot at getting rid of (most of) the cancer in my body, and starting life anew. This was it. This HAD to work.
And it did. I made it through surgery just fine (twittering when I woke up, and blogging about it the same day). I went through the gory aftermath of breast removal, and the difficulty of explaining it to my children. We found out that the second breast was not innocent at all, but fostering its own little type of cancer, Paget's disease. If I had not removed it preventatively, I could have been back in chemo within the year -- if it were found in time.
So I have some history here.
But I tried to shrug it off and play along. I wrote "None -- In fact, I don't even OWN one! :-)" and watched my friends play along in their own way, hoping I didn't make anyone uncomfortable.
But what I saw was nothing short of amazing. I'd forgotten for an instant that this wasn't about my story. This was about our story, and the Mothers With Cancer were coming out to play too. Here's what they wrote:
"Nude."
"Nothing."
"White, with pockets."
And then, in the comments, some amazing things began to happen. Their friends came out to support them, cheering them on. Friends engaged me on FB and twitter too, talking about it, asking why I felt left out, and letting me know that the whole meme was staged by some women in the midwest urging awareness of breast cancer.
Really?
Awareness?
Aren't we aware by now, people? Don't we know that we
