Random Acts
Everything about being with Skye made me see my life through a new lens of wonder. Skye let me take off my cancer-colored glasses and put on the rose ones again. Watching her take in life made me feel more alive than I’d ever felt. Her first giggle ricocheted around my heart and its echo stayed with me. On Take Your Daughter to Work Day, six-year-old Skye sat at my desk and pretended to answer the phone the way I did: “Lifetime Television, this is Geralyn Lucas’s daughter.” She wanted to be me so badly that when we bought matching nightgowns, she wanted to wear the “Mommy” one—and she wore it, dragging on the floor, until it was dirty and had a hole worn in it. Skye would take a nap, falling asleep while holding my hair. I couldn’t move but I was happy to lie there, staring at her as she slept, her soft little breathing reminding me that we were both alive. I can still picture her clomping around in my high heels, her tiny feet pushed all the way to the front of the shoes, nearly losing her balance.
Being so in love with Skye made me see that I wanted another child, and Skye was always coming home from playdates asking why she couldn’t have a brother or a sister. How could I explain to a six-year-old that I couldn’t have another baby because it might be too dangerous—that even having her had been a risk? Now she was here and I couldn’t take that risk again. I needed to live for her.
As if to answer my uncertainty about life and how fragile it is, and how I shouldn’t mess with my miracle, there was front-page news in The New York Times about Dr. P, the doctor I needed to ask about the safety of getting pregnant again:
A cancer researcher known for her investigations into the aftermath of breast cancer surgery, especially its impact on fertility, was killed in an accident in Manhattan on Monday. She was 57 and lived in Bronxville, N.Y. [She] died in surgery, hours after being struck by an ambulette while crossing the street at Second Avenue and 64th Street. At the time, she was on her way to work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where she directed the surgical program at the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center.
I threw down the paper. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. She had devoted her life to helping people like me. How could a cancer doctor die crossing the street?
Another medical journal noted: “[She] was poised to answer several key questions—most notably, the safety of pregnancy after breast cancer treatment.”
My gynecologist had been monitoring my ovaries and told me that I could go into premature ovarian failure from the chemo treatments, and that would mean I was being thrown into early menopause. At my next appointment I told my gynecologist that my periods weren’t regular. “If you aren’t menstruating every month, it isn’t a good sign about your fertility. We can do a test to see how fertile you are, to see what your egg quality is.”
The test results were terrible. My follicle stimulation hormone (FSH) was way too high: 20.9. Four was normal. Three to nine was the target range, and at above ten, most fertility clinics would not consider you as a candidate. “Your brain is working too hard to get you to ovulate, like stepping on the gas again and again when an engine is dead. I’m sorry. It’s probably because of the chemo.”
After I heard the news, I saw baby carriages everywhere, and I had to remind myself that I was lucky I’d had even one child after chemotherapy. It was too risky, to be exposed to all those pregnancy hormones again. They could restimulate any remaining cancer cells. My estrogen level could increase a thousandfold.
I was still being monitored for any sign of the cancer returning. Every six months my life were PET scans, CT scans, blood tests for tumor levels, and physical exams with my oncologist. I had insisted on wearing my high heels during my next routine PET scan. I had never known if I was allowed to wear heels to my scans, so I just kept them on with my surgical gown when I went into the waiting room.
“Nice shoes.” The medical technician was admiring my heels.
“Can I wear them in the machine?” I don’t even know why I asked.
“Sure, why not.” She seemed as happy about it as I was. Looking at my high heels as I stepped onto the machine that held my fate was a small link to the other world I wanted to continue to live in. These machines were like my crystal balls, and I always tried to read the technicians’ faces to see if there was good news or bad. They weren’t allowed to tell me anything. All I thought about when I lay in the cold, scary darkness was Skye.
After the test, I went for the follow-up appointment with my oncologist. I must have blacked out when she reviewed the test results and told me where the spot was, because for the life of me I couldn’t remember where on my body it was. I called her in a frenzy after I left her office. “Where is it again?”
“On your lung. You need to see a lung specialist immediately.”
Days later, the lung specialist explained to me that the spot was actually called a “nodule” and that I needed a surgical procedure where they’d crack my rib cage and remove the lung lobe in order to get to the spot they needed to biopsy. “Unfortunately, we can’t reach the spot on your lung by putting a scope down your throat because it’s too far away. If I were you, I’d go ahead and schedule your lobe removal quickly. Breast cancer often travels to the lung. If we remove it early, you might not even have to do chemo.”
My cancer might be back. This time it might only be “treatable,” not “curable,” since it would have metastasized to a vital organ. When the doctor was telling me this, all I could focus on was the beautiful aqua-colored Turkish rug in his office. It was mesmerizing, a light turquoise with sand-colored accents. I knew that my results were right in front of him, in an open file, but I was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to buy a rug.
Actually, I wanted to be a rug. Rugs didn’t get cancer. Rugs didn’t need PET scans. When I was first diagnosed with cancer, buildings would make me cry because I knew they would be there so much longer than I would be. I wanted to be a building, strong as concrete. I wanted to be anything but a medical chart with bad news, another diagnosis. It felt so undignified to be only a diagnosis in front of this man.
“Recovery from this procedure is about six weeks to six months, to get your range of breathing back. Most people don’t notice missing a lung lobe. You can still do normal athletic activity,” he said.
“Where did you get this rug?”
“My wife picked it out,” he said. “It may be hard to talk or even breathe right after surgery, but we can help you with that. Do you understand what I’ve been saying?”
“Could we call your wife and ask her where she got it?” I wanted to be an inanimate object, completely solid in time and space, so nothing could change. The doctor wanted to schedule my lung lobe removal ASAP. I wanted to head down to ABC Carpet and go rug shopping, and I knew that I had my priorities straight. I wanted to run toward life and keep shopping, not get more bad news.
“You could just watch and wait, though I don’t recommend it. But we could send you for another image in, say, six months, and if the nodule looks the same, we could continue to image it and make sure it isn’t growing. But if it’s cancer, it would spread quickly. I wouldn’t take that risk.”
That night the doctor’s words echoed in my brain as I looked at Skye breathing. She had fallen asleep next to me, holding my hair. Her little chest was moving up and down. I loved her so much that I cried when I clipped her fingernails. I wanted her to feel safe. She’d never seen me sick or in a hospital. I had lost a breast, my hair, and now possibly I’d lose a lung lobe. I spoke with a woman who’d had the same thing happen to her. She’d had her lung lobe removed, and when they did the biopsy on the node, it was breast cancer that had traveled into her lung. She didn’t need chemo, and felt she had saved her life. I started thinking about the lipstick I would wear to my lung lobe removal.
But I started worrying they hadn’t found it in time. Lately I’d felt a little short of breath. I was due for blood work anyway to measure my tumor levels again. And something else really weird was going on. I couldn’t stop eating, more than my normal can’t-stop-eating. I was craving a hot open-faced turkey sandwich dripping with gravy, oozing stuffing, and topped with a puddle of cranberry sauce—and it was July. After I ate the sandwich and wanted another one, I realized that the last time I’d felt this way was after chemo. And one other time: when I was pregnant. But now when I peed on three pregnancy sticks, all three tests were negative.
My doctor called me: She had taken blood to test my tumor levels, but there was more news.
“You are pregnant. . . .”
But my tumor markers were way up, which meant the cancer was back. Was it the node on my lung? I hadn’t scheduled the lobe removal yet; I was waiting. Any joy that I felt about the baby news was trumped by cancer. There was hysteria from my doctors over whether it was medically sound to keep the baby. What if I had cancer and my pregnancy fueled the new cancer? As a doctor himself, Tyler was scared at first, and he didn’t want me to have the lung lobe removed.
“These tests create all sorts of false alarms,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.” But I knew he was worried about my lung lobe too, by the look in his eyes. Actually, he looked more scared than I felt, though he kept on reassuring me. “You’re pregnant! Remember when we just wished for one? Now we’ll have two.”
This life inside me was such a vote of hope. Life had found a way to exist inside me, even though my own survival felt wobbly. I wished I could call the famous research doctor to ask her what I should do, even though I knew what she would say. Was I crazy to have this baby? I needed her help, and not in a theoretical way. Was I just being seduced by the fact that my cells could multiply in ways other than cancer? Was this too dangerous for me and for Skye?
I had a dream in which Dr. P appeared and told me exactly what to do: “Have the baby. Life is a mystery. Look at what happened to me.”
I thought she had my answers. Dying of cancer felt so certain that I thought somehow my death from breast cancer was predetermined, yet now I was on a new path—growing new life inside of me. How could she have died before me, crossing the street?
My doctors were panicked that my tumor levels were so high, and started doing research on what could be wrong with me and where my cancer was. I was sent for an ovarian sonogram to rule out ovarian cancer because I was at such high risk after having breast cancer. When I looked at the screen, I saw the little sack of life that was there—a shadow, but not a tumor. The same doctor who had diagnosed me when I was only twenty-seven was there and knocked on the door of the examining room. “A baby? What?”
I was thirty-nine, still alive, and pregnant.
I knew that my breast cancer could come back, I knew that I could have a new breast cancer, I knew that I was at risk for other cancers because of my breast cancer. I also knew that I wanted a baby. I wanted to run toward life, buy rugs, and be back in the maternity ward where people sent cards of congratulation for being in the hospital. I prayed for no regrets. But even if my cancer came back, I would have a baby, and I wouldn’t regret that.
My doctors kept researching the case as I waited each day, growing a baby and terrified I might also be growing a new cancer. Finally the call with the news came. “Placental growth can mimic tumor markers—you’re okay.”
A new life masquerading as a life-threatening situation.
My water broke on Easter Sunday. I was supposed to be at an Easter lunch at the home of my new boss. Amazingly, she was the second boss in my life whose name was Meredith, and she was a rock star too. When I checked in, the hospital was nearly deserted and the maternity ward was decorated everywhere with brightly colored cutouts of humongous eggs. It felt like a sign: My eggs had worked. And I loved being in maternity, where everyone just assumed that I was fine, and they worried about the baby. It was a personal resurrection, and my perfect little Easter bunny was wheeled in to me, in a clear glass nursery box identical to Skye’s. Meredith II brought me a bedside picnic, with homemade ham and desserts. And she had big news: She had convinced Lifetime to turn my book into a movie, as part of their Stop Breast Cancer for Life campaign.
Skye wore a “Big Sister” T-shirt when we brought her baby brother home. Tyler agreed to have the circumcision done in our apartment even though he wanted it done in the hospital. His father cried during the ceremony, Tyler cried, and of course our baby boy, Hayden, cried. My dad cried; my two younger brothers kept their hands casually clasped in front of their members and looked tense. It was so emotional—there was another man joining the family. Hayden had green eyes, like my father, like my grandma Katie, who had come to this country from Poland when she was only sixteen to escape oppression for being Jewish. When I looked into Hayden’s eyes, I saw my grandma’s journey to America, my unlikely journeys back and forth to the same hospital for breast cancer and then babies.
I wished all my grandparents could meet the new baby, and I named Hayden for my grandpa Harry. His middle name was Connor, a nod to Tyler’s Irish heritage. Hayden looked like Tyler, and seeing them together on Father’s Day was a dream come true that I had never even dreamed. I got them matching orange sweaters because Tyler’s favorite color was orange. It would become Hayden’s favorite color.
I had to wait until after Hayden was born to check on that lung nodule again. It hadn’t changed, and it never did change.
Every six months when I had it checked again in the PET scan machine, I couldn’t wait to get back to my new life. I wanted to keep living outside the lines of cancer diagnoses. I had become a life junkie. I was hooked on things people had told me I couldn’t do. Having Hayden broke the cancer sound barrier.
As soon as Hayden learned to walk, he was clomping around in Tyler’s shoes, the way Skye had worn mine. Having a boy was more boisterous: Hayden would come to visit at my office, but he didn’t sit and play-work like Skye; instead he’d open the drawers and throw everything on the floor. He’d want to spend an hour at the photocopying machine copying his hands. He was always on the move until one day, when he was two years old, he stopped—and started convulsing, with huge bubbles coming out of his mouth.
Hayden had had a high fever, and our babysitter, Hawa, was at home with him. I was at my office when Tyler called. “Hayden stopped breathing. He might have died! Run! Meet me at the pediatrician!” I shrieked something I don’t remember and tore out of the office. I must have said “Hayden died!” to all my colleagues because they were all running after me and calling me on my cell. I was on the line with the pediatrician’s office; they had called an ambulance and it was on its way to give Hayden oxygen to try to revive him.
As I rode in a taxi from my office through the park, I was crying hysterically, “Please drive faster, my son might have died. Please, hurry!” The park was bursting with life—it was June and almost every flower and tree was in bloom, taunting me with their greenness. A thought flashed into my mind: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.” There was no point in living if Hayden were dead. My life had become too big to turn back now; I couldn’t give up any piece of it. I would die right then if only Hayden could live.
Living life had given me so much more to lose now.
When I burst into the pediatrician’s office, Hayden was unconscious on the exam table. Hawa was near him, crying and barefoot—she had run the two city blocks from our apartment to the pediatrician’s office without her shoes, carrying Hayden, wailing. The doctor was by Hayden’s side, stroking his head, telling the nurse to call 911 again because the ambulance still hadn’t arrived.
“Hayden!” I screamed as soon as I saw him.
The doctor looked up. “Did you see that?” Hayden had opened his eyes for a brief second. “Now that is what we call in medicine ‘the maternal response.’ Your boy just woke up!” He still had some bubbles around his mouth, but he stretched a little arm to touch me as the ambulance finally arrived to carry him away. I rode with him in the ambulance, to the hospital, and Tyler would meet us there.
Hawa was so thoughtful: She went home to get Hayden’s beloved stuffed bunny, so when he woke up he’d have his comfort object. Hayden’s Bun-Bun was a huge part of his life and so was Hawa. We had met Hawa when Skye was only three weeks old, and I was looking for a babysitter so I could go back to work right after my maternity leave. Our pediatrician had recommended Hawa: She was looking for work and he had watched with respect the way she cared for her own little boy Mohamed. It was as if Hawa had arrived on an umbrella, a Senegalese Mary Poppins to sing to my children and bring order and joy to their lives. But she hadn’t really arrived so whimsically. She had come to America to find a better life and help her family back home. Her first job was bagging groceries, heading to work at four A.M.
Hayden went from being a brightly colored Easter egg to a fragile Fabergé egg. He’d had a febrile seizure, a convulsion that can be brought on by a small child’s high fever, and much more common in boys than girls. The doctors at the hospital assured me that many kids are fine after a febrile seizure. And he got well and strong again, and continued to thrive until he had to interview for nursery schools in New York City.