Sweet
After cancer, celebrating my birthdays is a little bittersweet. Of course there is huge relief I’ve actually lived another year. But birthdays now make me aware of how much every year is truly a present, one I might not get to open with as much joy the next year. I’m not quite sure how to celebrate them anymore. Sometimes I hide and try to pretend the birthday isn’t happening.
But today I decided to shake it up and take my fears head-on. I’m sitting in a tattoo parlor, wearing a flashy “Sweet Sixteen” blinking tiara, a tight black bodysuit (with Spanx underneath), jeans I had to lie down in to zip up, and a push-up bra that sort of makes my postmastectomy reconstructed rack work really well. The tiara is awesome: It has a battery switch in the back that makes the entire tiara light up hot pink and then makes it blink extra-hot pink intermittently. “Sweet Sixteen” is written in pretty script across the top in gold, accented with really big blingy rhinestones. The tiara is perfectly balanced on my head, held in place with combs that dig into my hair, which I just had blown out after I had it dyed to hide the gray.
Even though I’m in my midforties, today is my cancerversary—sixteen bonus years since the day of my mastectomy. It is strange that my birthday and mastectomy date are only one day apart, but my doctors refused to operate on me on my actual birthday; they didn’t want me to associate my birthday with the operation. I wasn’t convinced at the time that there would be many more birthdays because my tumor was so aggressive and I was so young, but I was wrong, and so were the doctors who thought my prognosis wasn’t good.
Even though I have survived sixteen years, every cancerversary feels like I have just been diagnosed again. The triumph of the cancerversary is always a combo of bitter and sweet: The pain is still so fresh from my trauma, but the joy is there—that I am still here . . . wearing a blinking “Sweet Sixteen” tiara and Spanx. I am surprisingly grateful for the muffin top I have grown over the years; I am grateful for my a-little-bit-mean-to-her-mom tween daughter; I am grateful for my husband, even though we are in couples counseling; I am grateful for my son, even though he’s becoming sort of grumpy like my husband. I am grateful for my life.
But I am still scared of losing the beautiful and messy life that has been my second act after the cancer. I have much more to lose now if it comes back: my healthy body, my gorgeous daughter blossoming into a woman, my prince of a husband who puts up with me, my completely original and freethinking son.
I’ve come to a tattoo parlor because it’s a place where people choose needles and pain, where people smile after the pain, so different from the hospital, where I am forced to go for my checkups and scans to make sure the cancer isn’t back. I am always scared of my cancer coming back—but right now I’m more scared of the woman behind the desk at the tattoo parlor, because she has full tat sleeves up both arms, along with a large sparkling nose ring. I am brave, but not that kind of brave. She’s given me the tattoo book to thumb through to pick out what I want. The friends who have come with me are sure about their choices, but I’m not: one is getting a gator, the other, a survivor too, is copying my winged heart on her reconstructed breast and inking a girl boxer on her arm.
I’m going for something much more subtle and personal than an entire arm sleeve or a dragon: I have decided to get “HEALED” spelled out across my butt in elegant curlicue script letters. I considered doing it on just one cheek, but that felt too noncommittal. I want this to be an announcement, a declaration, a billboard of sorts. Tyler gave me his approval, and no one else will see it—but I’ll know it’s there.
A lot of survivors celebrate their treatment-completion dates every year. Some have parties, some go on cruises, and some prefer quiet reflection. Quiet reflection? Not this year! It’s my Sweet Sixteen!
I’ve ordered myself a fabulous birthday cake and I am not going to share any of the icing roses. And I brought champagne, because I can drink legally at this Sweet Sixteen. Madonna is blaring too. Happy cancerversary to me!
Under the hot lights, with beautiful tubes of inks and the buzzing of the tattoo needle, I’m feeling bold. I’m giving specific instructions to my tattoo artist, Josh, whose kind green eyes make me feel so centered until I notice the snake crawling up his neck.
“I want the tattoo to spread across my butt, like one of those banners the airplanes pull across the sky at the beach.” I’m trying to be clear and really explain how artistic my vision seems. “Like it’s unraveling its message. Sort of an energy to it.”
Josh is totally getting the vibe. I’m a little self-conscious because airplane signs seem tacky for invoking a moment as somber as declaring my total cure.
Airplane signs usually advertise beer specials at “Ladies’ Nights” or “No Credit Check” car ads for new leasing agreements. Maybe I need to elevate my vision. A banner is too obvious, like I don’t actually believe I am “HEALED,” like I am trying to advertise it or prove it to myself. Maybe a small, tasteful, lower-right-cheek tattoo might be less embarrassing if I end up back in the hospital for cancer treatment and my gown opens up in the back and my butt accidentally peeks out.
I say the word out loud: “Healed.”
Josh nods his head.
“I love the way it sounds. So definite and elegant and safe. It’s like a stamp we’re putting on my body to prove I’ve crossed over to the other side and escaped the cancer shadow.”
Josh is really deep in thought for me. He’s been the consultant on my other three tattoos, but this one seems most important, the final statement. I got the first tattoo at the lower end of the diagonal scar that crossed my reconstructed breast: a heart with wings to remind me to live with courage and to remind me of the angels I’d met. I got the tat instead of a nipple, to show myself that nothing would ever be the same again. I couldn’t just “replace” my nipple, and the winged heart was a symbol that my new life would look different. I thought very carefully about how down the road some mortician might view that mastectomy scar, and how the tattoo would symbolize hope and maybe make the mortician smile: She would know that I had found a way to decorate my scar and love my wound.
My next tattoo was a wing behind my left shoulder, like an angel looking over me, dedicated to a friend who died of breast cancer and left behind a little boy. She had always wanted a tattoo of angel wings, but her white blood cell counts were too low from her chemotherapy. A group of her friends went and got tats for her as a tribute after she died.
My third tat was two stars on my left wrist, one for each of my kids. Those tattoos were videotaped for a YouTube video I did called “Ouch,” to show women that getting a tat hurt more than getting a mammogram.
I can hide those star tattoos under my watch at parent-teacher night. In fact, I can hide all my tattoos so people don’t judge me. I’m pretty sure that I used to judge people with tattoos, and now I have three, going for a fourth. My friend was a bit worried about this tattoo thing—was I moving into fetishism? I’m a bit worried too, in the tattoo parlor, about getting inked again. But I’m certain that this tattoo will complete me.
I think I am finally ready to move past my past. I think the healing has finally happened. And writing “HEALED” across my butt will be different from writing “CURED.” Whenever I read an article about a celebrity who declares herself “one hundred percent cancer-free,” I wonder how she knows. Who is her doctor? Is she taking new patients?
Cancer cells are so small and all of us have them at any moment. It’s up to the fighter cells to stop them, and somehow my fighter cells had lost their fight before. Do my fighter cells have game now? Am I truly healed? I might never be cured—that felt way too certain and definite. Being “HEALED” was more of an evolution and a state of mind.
I chose the word because I remembered a speech an oncologist gave at a cancer luncheon in New Mexico, about what it meant to be healed. I was so curious about when a person knew she was genuinely healed. Was there a test? Could she prove it to me? “Many of my patients consider themselves healed, even when they’re dying” was her answer to my skepticism. I looked at her like I didn’t believe her—how can you be healed when you’re dying?—but she looked right back at me like she didn’t care if I believed her or not, because she had some truth that she didn’t need to prove to anyone.
As I am telling Josh the story of why I picked the word, just saying the words “healed” and “dying” together make me a little teary. Something about the word healed is making me think of so many unhealed wounds.
I ask Josh if I can take a moment because I’m feeling a little dizzy too. I sit down on the tattoo table and gulp some of my cancerversary champagne straight from the bottle. Instead of relaxing me and chilling me out, thinking about being healed is having the decidedly opposite effect on me.
I chug more champagne, and it’s as if wounds start oozing out of my mind: boyfriend wounds, professional rejections, friendship falling-outs. Healed is a word that is so provocative, that feels so unfinished for some reason, especially now.
Should I get a question mark after the word? It might be more authentic. But I can’t walk around with an unanswered question on my body.
Josh sees my tears and is reassuring. “Let’s do this!” he says. I hike my underwear down a bit and get ready to lie over the table.
Josh is patient and totally feeling my dilemma, exactly as engaged as you want your tattoo artist to be. Part therapist, part painter, the tattoo artist has to manage fleeting emotions with permanent ink. I have seen the laser therapy needed to remove unwanted ones. Choosing a tattoo is much more important to me than choosing paint for my walls, a new carpet or sofa. Josh is my personal exterior designer, and we can’t choose wrong.
All my tattoos have stories, and I need this story to be as true as the others. He starts to make other tattoo suggestions. Anything goes with Josh except getting a guy’s name on my body. Josh has had to fix one of those for a very famous client. I know that Tyler would be horrified if I had his name written down there.
Suddenly I can’t hear a word Josh is saying to me. He looks like he’s speaking in slo-mo, because I am lost in thinking about how to heal my heart after my tragedy. What kind of bandages work? How do I move on? I picture the Band-Aid from my childhood knee scrapes. The sting of the antiseptic spray before the Band-Aid went on, knowing that underneath there was some process going on, something strange and magical, so that when I took off the Band-Aid there would be fresh, clean skin growing over the wound. There would be a time to take it off, and all would be okay.
· · · ·
My huge faded-red mastectomy scar seems just as fresh and tender now as it was at first. All these years later, I walk funny, holding one side of my body back protectively so no one can brush against me. My scar is a souvenir from that trauma. It is the badge I wear every day. I will never be healed. I will pay tribute to my trauma. I will live my life as fully as I can but I am not healed.
I still wince when I think about the day the bandages came off and I was nervous to see myself for the first time. The wounds took longer to heal than I had expected; doctors always underestimate the pain factor. Every time I thought the bandage was dry and the wound was healed, it would weep just a bit more to remind me not to get too cocky. The bandages are long gone, but the wound is still fresh in my psyche. I am so vulnerable, yet I want to live like I own my life. How do I tell the story of wanting to live even while I’m scared I might die? How do I make this tattoo’s story the one that explains how I feel about living? I stick my finger in an icing rose.
I feel like Cinderella, dancing at the ball, but the clock is ticking very loudly, reminding me there’s a deadline when my dream might unravel. I want to live. Just let me live. Maybe that is what I should have Josh write? But is it too obvious? That has been my wish on my birthday candles every year, as well as in the machines I inserted my body into to see exactly what was happening. Today I will make the same wish over my sixteen candles. I was lucky because my chemo worked—it’s as simple as that.
I had plans for my life before cancer, but cancer uprooted my plans and taught me that all I have is now. But right now I want more. I want to keep living a lusty life: Sixteen years aren’t enough. Give me more. Please. Maybe my plan should be to let my life just hatch—no plans. Plans are for people who have time on their side, and certainty.
Emboldened by my second chance, I decide there is only one choice. I hike up my pants farther to protect my butt from the tattoo mistake that almost happened. I’m so not healed. I’m way too ambivalent for that type of declarative statement.
“Josh, could you just write ‘Sweet’ in a heart on me?” It is my Sweet Sixteen. I have a sweet tooth. I like talking in a sweet voice. I know that life can be bitter, but I want to remember to taste the sweet.
I’m feeling so confident.
“Not on my butt.” I show him exactly where I want the heart. I want it drawn above my actual heart, to remind me it is still beating, despite my doubts. Josh makes the heart outline first. He looks so serious, and pauses to wipe away a bit of blood. I see the blood on the gauze, and it reminds me to be brave. The heart symbolizes my courage to face uncertainty. I learned when I chose my first heart tattoo that the root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”
“I’m going to freehand the word too; is that okay with you?” Josh usually sketches out the tattoo design and then traces it onto my skin. He has just drawn the heart on me, no practice. I’m trying to figure out how exactly he’ll write this word freehand in such a small heart, about the size of a quarter—one small mistake could ruin it. It hurts a lot when he presses the needle into my flesh, and there is a weird smell, but then there is a rush of euphoria. All the endorphins kicking in to action.
This is how Josh draws it: with flourish, with complete abandon and total precision. He is so in the flow of his work, and it looks like pure joy. That is exactly how I want to live my life, the way Josh draws “Sweet.” I decide to make a choice that going forward I will look for the sweet, today on my strange second-chance Sweet Sixteen, and every day.
I want to get out of the shadow of my past and believe in my future. Now that I have tasted the appetizers of life, I want it all. I want to stick around for dessert and an after-dinner drink. I’ve gotten greedy about life, lusty. I want to live. I want to learn to live in the moment and appreciate life without worrying that it might vanish.
I think about the mortician again, but now she is squinting to read the word “Sweet” because it is so small. She might have to put on her reading glasses for this one. I guess it’s good that I’m choosing a less obvious and more mature tattoo in my “older” age, and I laugh.
Can I stay in the sweet? Can I make sure to remember that I chose the sweet even knowing that the bitter can turn up at any moment, without warning? Life had become more sweet since my diagnosis because I saw that it was so precious and fragile. I couldn’t choose my wound, but I can choose my word: sweet. If I forget to taste the sweet, it is there in permanent ink to remind me.