April–May 2005
Danielle had been listening to my deliberations for months without offering much of an opinion. She’d been processing all of the information along with me, and it was a lot to process. Considering that Danielle would have preferred to ignore our genetic legacy—and that I’d thrust the issue upon her—she’d been a remarkably patient sounding board. Once I’d actually made the decision to undergo a double mastectomy, however, she began to voice serious reservations.
“I just don’t think you realize how you’re going to feel when you wake up and your breasts are gone, Jessica. I don’t think you appreciate how traumatic that will be.”
“You’re right, I can’t imagine how I will feel. But it’s the lesser of two evils. I’ll be more traumatized if I wake up with cancer.”
My mind was made up, so Dani insisted on accompanying me to meet Dr. Ward, the plastic surgeon Dr. Anderson had recommended. Danielle felt a responsibility to oversee the aesthetic aspect of this endeavor now that our mother was gone. If I was going to do it, she felt I’d better have a surgeon who did fastidious work and she didn’t trust me to judge. There was merit to this. I could analyze a play, book, or film with expertise, but I glazed over when it came to seeing to matters of physical beauty that were instinctive to my mother and Danielle. I knew what I liked in a general way, but my vision was selective. I could not tell you about the cut of a dress or the shape of a coat, even if I wore it every day. I found most of my close girlfriends beautiful and could note and admire qualities that appealed to me, like a lovely complexion or long eyelashes, yet I never noticed when a friend gained some weight, nor did I recognize when women had nose jobs or boob jobs unless the results were Hollywood extreme. I probably wouldn’t think to ask questions about breast reconstruction that were obvious to Danielle. Already, Dani had asked me things like “Would you want round or tear-drop shaped implants? High or low profile?” and I’d just stare blankly.
Dani and I were ushered into the plastic surgeon’s office and Dr. Ward stood to greet us. His appearance was slick and Botoxed, and I instantly disliked him. He never looked me in the eye, and he talked fast and with manufactured enthusiasm. Before Danielle or I could get a word in, he steered us to seats and announced he’d be making a presentation. Dr. Ward flipped a switch that activated a slide show of reconstructed breasts and launched into a monologue. I found it hard to comprehend what he was saying because there was no feeling or natural inflection behind the words—he was motoring through to the end of his spiel. Pairs of breasts in different shapes and sizes flashed before us—the images were cropped above the belly button and below the neck. It reminded me of one of those subliminal scientific experiments. Twice Dani and I tried to ask questions and he shut us down like a put-upon schoolteacher, admonishing us to wait until he was finished. His manner offended me. Yet even as I realized how much I disliked this man, I had to admit the breasts on the slide show looked pretty and real. The reconstructed nipples were most impressive—no one would have guessed they were inauthentic. The only obvious imperfections were the mastectomy scars, which were pronounced on some of the breasts and less so on others.
Finally, the presentation ended, and Dr. Ward allowed a few questions. I asked what sort of reconstruction he would recommend for me. He glanced at my body and said, “Implants. You don’t have enough fat for a TRAM flap.” Danielle asked about the safety of silicone versus saline implants and he waved his hand dismissively, cutting her off with “Unquestionably silicone. All of that about the ‘dangers of silicone’ is rubbish. Saline implants look and feel like water balloons.”
I mentioned that I’d always wished I’d had smaller breasts and wanted to take this opportunity to downsize. “I’d like to be a B-cup,” I said.
“Oh no!” Dr. Ward replied. “You’re an attractive, large-breasted girl—you can’t go with anything smaller than a C.”
“But that’s not what I want,” I replied.
“You don’t have to worry about that now. Trust me, I’ll make you beautiful. I guarantee you’ll look better than when you started.” This did not sit well with me. I had a strong feeling that Dr. Ward’s idea of beauty was not mine.
Last, I brought up the slight rippling I had noticed on Suzy’s reconstruction. For the first time, the plastic surgeon looked me straight in the eye.
“If you ever repeat this to anyone, I will deny it. But I recommend that you do not use Dr. Anderson as a breast surgeon.”
“But Dr. Anderson sent us to you,” I said. “What would make you say that?”
Dr. Ward gazed at me from under his frozen forehead as if we were co-conspirators. “Dr. Anderson is too aggressive—he scrapes out every bit of breast tissue and leaves me nothing to work with. If there’s no breast tissue left to cushion the implant, it’s impossible to get a good cosmetic result and there will be rippling. I suggest Dr. Deborah Vogal. She’s much more sensitive to … shall we say, a woman’s needs.”
“As I understand it, the entire purpose of a prophylactic mastectomy is to remove as much breast tissue as possible. I’m taking this radical measure to avoid getting sick—the more breast tissue that remains, the higher the risk of cancer.”
The doctor broke into a condescending smile. “So, your risk will be reduced by eighty or eighty-five percent instead of ninety. But your new breasts will look fantastic.”
I left the office shaking, indignant. Should I call Dr. Anderson and tell him? Should I post a warning to women on the FORCE Web site to watch out for this creep? I felt Dr. Ward was not only unethical but dangerous. Danielle, the connoisseur of beauty, wholeheartedly agreed.
That night, I repeated the story to a friend, who said, “You’re in Hollywood, what do you expect? If I were you, I’d have my breasts done in New York.”
THOUGH THE INTERVIEW was still a month away, Courtney, the producer from Nightline, called me at work to say she was sending a local cameraman over to my office at Gilmore Girls. They needed some footage of me in my “natural environment.”
“He’ll be there Thursday,” she said.
I hung up and tore into Rebecca’s office.
“Thursday?” Rebecca asked. “That’s only three days from now!”
“I know! What do I wear? What about makeup? And my office—what about my office?”
On my first writing job, I’d heard the superstition that a television writer should never decorate her office, because as soon as you got too comfortable the show would invariably be canceled or you would be fired or the guild would launch a strike. I’d always followed this rule, and it hadn’t been uncommon on my former writing staffs. But Amy’s decorating excesses at Gilmore Girls seemed to trump the superstition, because all the other writers had decked out their offices, exhibiting individual creative flair. In this context, my bare office was a sad, sorry, empty shell.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Rebecca.
Rebecca was kind of a hybrid of me and Danielle. She and Dani looked somewhat alike—both head-turners, the same height, with long blond hair. Danielle had our mother’s talents for design, yet she’d also been a math major at the University of Pennsylvania. Rebecca’s parents are scientists—her father is a Harvard astrophysicist—and she’d inherited those mental faculties. Rebecca shared my love of literature, film, and art (we constantly traded books, had reading dates, and could spend hours debating the merits of Leni Riefenstahl or Truman Capote). She also had Danielle’s gift of style, though Rebecca’s taste was much more theatrical. If Danielle was the contractor of my breast reconstruction, Rebecca was the artistic director of the Nightline production.
With only a couple of weeks left to the television season, the final scripts had already been written and there was little work to do, which meant that Rebecca and I had lots of free time to go shopping. I drove us to Beverly Hills, which was an event in itself. Apparently, I’m a terrible, reckless driver, but on my own I’m blissfully unaware of the fact. It’s only when I have a passenger that the subject comes to light, and Rebecca was always my most miserable passenger. “Jess, you’re going to great lengths not to die of cancer!” she shrieked. “Can you put a little more effort into not killing us in a car crash?!”
Rebecca swept through Barneys, choosing dresses, telling me what to try on and in what order, while I followed in her wake. Midway through the pile, I modeled a dusty-rose-colored dress and Rebecca declared, “That is what you must wear during the actual interview. It’s elegant, it’s sophisticated, it’s perfect.”
“Okay. With what shoes?”
“I would say tall, heeled brown boots.”
Off we went to the shoe department. Rebecca made a beeline to a pair that cost half a month’s rent, but we were manic, on a spree, and money was no object. The budget gods would wreak their vengeance later.
“I believe we’re all out of this boot,” the salesman said. “We haven’t ordered more because it’s a winter shoe. It’s out of season. I doubt you’ll find it anywhere.” Suddenly, these boots were of dire importance to me—all of my anxiety over the breast cancer gene, my love life, my ticking clock was channeled into the compulsive need for this very specific pair of Jimmy Choos.
“You just have to have them,” I said. “Will you check in the back?”
“I’ll check,” he said doubtfully.
And then a miracle occurred on the first floor of Barneys: The salesman emerged from the stockroom gingerly carrying a long, shiny box as if it contained two dozen long-stemmed roses.
“I can’t believe it,” he said with amazement. “There was one pair left and they’re in your size.”
“The ghost of my dead mother sent them to me!” I exclaimed like a raving lunatic. “She would insist on chocolate brown Jimmy Choos. Thank you, Mom!” I directed to the ceiling. Rebecca was doubled over, laughing at my madness and the madness of the situation. The irony was not lost on either of us that we were dressing me up like a doll to go on national television and talk about my plans to remove my breasts. Why be pious about the subject when we could turn it into a party? Why treat the interview like it was funereal when we could celebrate it as a joyful theatrical event? There were many layers of homage to my mother at play. After witnessing the disease ravage her, I would sacrifice what were arguably the most feminine parts of my body to prevent cancer. I would follow in her footsteps, emulate her fierce battle for life by offering up the beauty of my natural body in exchange for my life. Yet I could still wear Jimmy Choo boots (on occasion) and retain my inner and outer beauty and exuberance.
The day before the Nightline cameraman was due at Gilmore Girls, I loaded my car with pillows, fabric, and artwork—the raw materials for reinventing my office. I’d looted my apartment, ripped the framed photography off the walls, borrowed the white marble reclining Buddha from my entryway.
Bill Prady, the co–executive producer on the show, walked by and saw me and Rebecca standing on chairs, laughing and bantering as we hammered nails into the wall. “We have three weeks left of work and you’re decorating now?”
“A crew from Nightline will be here tomorrow—we’re making this place camera-ready,” Rebecca exclaimed.
“You want everything to look good for the cameras?” Bill asked. “To help you out, I’ll call Robert Downey Jr. and ask him to play me for the afternoon.”
The next morning, the camera guy from Nightline shot some footage of me typing at my desk, then he followed me and Rebecca to the writers’ room and the set. He rigged a camera to the golf cart and set us free. We drove around the lot, babbling about any subject that came to mind—safaris in Africa, the photographer Lee Friedlander, Tasmanian devils—as people stared quizzically at the two girls on the loose in a golf cart with a movie camera aimed at them. Of course, when the show finally aired, they used ten seconds of footage from that day. My stylishly decorated office was never seen, and our carefully chosen outfits were merely glimpsed. But that had never really been the point. I was getting attention from a news show because of grave matters—my mother had died and I had inherited the gene that had caused her death. Rebecca’s friendship helped me retain a certain joie de vivre. We were turning the proverbial lemons into lemonade. At a time when I could have been weighted down with depression, I felt alive and full of joy.
BY NOW, I was addicted to the FORCE Web site. I spent hours on it every day. Because I hated the Hollywood plastic surgeon, I’d decided that everything he’d told me was suspect. He’d recommended silicone implants and had insisted they were safe; I investigated his claims on the FORCE message boards. In this instance, Dr. Ward had not been wrong. I learned that the FDA was about to approve the availability of silicone implants for breast augmentation (elective boob jobs), lifting a fourteen-year ban. (Silicone had always remained available for women who required reconstruction for breast-cancer-related issues, which included prophylactic mastectomy due to BRCA mutations.) Extensive studies had examined whether silicone gel-filled implants were associated with connective tissue or autoimmune diseases and concluded there was no evidence of either. However, I learned on FORCE that silicone implants do not last a lifetime. Women with silicone implants would probably need to replace them at least once. Rupturing of the implants is most often silent; an MRI would be required to determine if rupture had occurred. Some people suggested replacing the implants every ten years, to be safe.
I didn’t like the idea of having to have breast surgery every ten years. Maybe using my own body tissue was a better option. I read that the use of your own soft, warm, living tissue re-created breasts that feel extremely natural and would last for life. It was true that I didn’t have enough stomach fat to make two new breasts, but a GAP (gluteal artery perforator) flap using tissue from the tush and performed by microsurgeons was apparently an option. There was a medical center in New Orleans where two doctors had perfected this technique and were able to make breasts from your buttocks no matter how slim you were. Many women on FORCE had flown to New Orleans for this procedure and were thrilled with the results. In a crazy small-world coincidence, my lawyer’s nephew turned out to be one of the two pioneers of this microsurgical perforator flap method in New Orleans. We spoke on the phone. The surgeon said he’d read my Op-Ed piece and had been wanting to find a way to get in touch with me. He explained the benefits of his method. My new breasts would feel and act like normal breasts. They would change in volume as my normal weight fluctuated. We could do mastectomy and reconstruction all at once; if I chose to have implants, I would likely have two separate operations. (However, taking fat from my tush in addition to mastectomy and reconstruction would require an extremely long surgery and additional scars on my behind.) I was hesitant about the idea of having major surgery in New Orleans. This would require staying in a hotel in a remote city after being released from the hospital. I’d have to transplant my dad and sister; none of my friends would be around to visit or relieve them. But it was my next question that was the deciding factor. I asked the surgeon if my new breasts would sag as the years went on like real breasts do. He said yes. Suddenly, I liked the idea of implants again. Breasts that never sag and never require a bra? To me, that was the unexpected silver lining of this ordeal.
THE GILMORE GIRLS season came to a close. On the last day of work I wished everyone a happy hiatus, skipped out on the wrap party, and waved good-bye to Joe the security guard as I drove off the lot and headed for the airport. I caught a red-eye to New York, where I planned to spend two days hanging out with friends before flying to D.C. for the Nightline interview. I was run-down from stress and emerged from the plane the next morning with a pounding head, watery eyes, and a stuffy nose. I got sicker as the day wore on. Kay had a party for us to attend that night and would not hear of my canceling. “Some orange juice and vodka will do the trick,” she said. The party was for the World Voices Festival of International Literature sponsored by PEN, and I’d been looking forward to it. I was excited to be out of Hollywood and agreed that a night out with Kay among the New York literati would be a far better tonic than sleep. Kay came over to fetch me and was wearing a striking turquoise dress. I rifled through the closet, past my old reliable dresses, and pulled out a robin’s-egg-blue, Grecian frock that I rarely wore because of its deep neckline. “I might as well give my breasts a last hurrah,” I offered. I downed Sudafed, stuffed my coat pockets with Kleenex, and we were off.
Heads turned as Kay and I entered the dimly lit bar in our conspicuous blue dresses. I noted instantly that all the other women in the room were dressed in black. Apparently, it was the female intelligentsia’s uniform. The one other woman wearing colorful, sexy, eye-catching garb was the model Padma Lakshmi, Salman Rushdie’s then-wife. I had a twinge of regret over my outfit, wishing I could blend in with the women in black, but there was nothing to be done, so I pushed the feeling down. “Kay, where’s that orange juice and vodka?”
Within minutes, Padma glided across the room to strike up conversation with Kay. They’d never met, but both were stand-outs in the crowd—tall and unapologetic beauties. Birds of a feather, I thought. I was chatting with a young journalist named Ann when a German woman in her late forties with a curtain of blond hair and a martini spun around from the bar. She looked me up and down with dramatic flair, lingering for a moment on my cleavage. Then she pounced.
“That’s some dress you’re wearing.”
The insult was so blatant I thought I must have misunderstood.
“Thank you.”
“No. What I mean is that’s quite a dress. When I’m getting ready to go out, I think about where I’m going and what might be appropriate to wear.”
No mistake. The German dragon lady had called me a bimbo for sport. Several onlookers were now gaping. After a moment of shock, rage surged through me. My nose was runny, my head was still pounding its reminder that I hadn’t slept for days, but this bitchy attack was the last straw. I locked eyes with the German.
“I’m thirty-four years old and I’m about to undergo a double mastectomy because I tested positive for the BRCA genetic mutation. I’m in the prime of my life and my body’s still intact, so I figured I might as well enjoy it while I can—that’s why I wore this dress. And I’m looking for someone to father my child because I also need my ovaries removed, so if anyone comes to mind, let me know.”
The woman fell into stunned silence, as another woman chimed in, “You didn’t happen to write a recent Op-Ed piece, did you?”
“Yes,” I said, thrilled at this extra bit of vindication.
“I’m Sarah,” she introduced herself. “I sent that article to many people.”
“I read it, too!” Ann the journalist added.
“I also have cancer in my family,” Sarah said. “I’ve thought about you a lot …. How are you doing?”
Sarah and Ann engaged me in conversation about cancer prevention as the villain deflated on her bar stool. Sarah embraced me and took my phone number, exclaiming that she was going to work on finding me a man.
TWO DAYS LATER, I was sitting in a chair opposite Cokie Roberts on the small set of a television studio. The lights were bright, the walls draped with heavy brown fabric, the cameras rolling. I’d flown in the night before and knocked myself out with NyQuil, had been escorted from the hotel to the Nightline offices bright and early, and the next thing I knew we were mid-interview. It had happened so fast, there hadn’t been time to get nervous.
The segment would be narrated by Ted Koppel. The piece was titled “Mother and Daughter” and aired on May 6, 2005, right before Mother’s Day. I heard Koppel’s introduction for the first time while watching the show:
Tonight is the story of a young woman who learns what she’s inherited from her mother, a predisposition to cancer, and the excruciating choices she learns how to make. The world is probably more or less evenly divided between those of us who would like to know what lies in the future and those who would not. If, for example, you could know the date on which, and circumstances under which, you were going to die, would you want to know? Knowing would give you the opportunity to plan. But likely as not, you would also worry. What if knowledge also carried with it the opportunity to change the future? And that, in one very important respect, is what this program is about tonight.
Because Cokie Roberts was my friend Liza’s mother-in-law, she was protective of me; I felt safe and assured of the fact that the interview would be tasteful. That said, Cokie’s questions were provocative (which, of course, makes for good television). Early on, she asked me why I wouldn’t just opt to get breast cancer and treat it. “Every day there are more treatment options, more therapies available for breast cancer. Many of us are walking around having had breast cancer ….”
This would turn out to be the most controversial moment of the interview. After the show aired, many people would tell me the question had offended them. One of my doctors found it to be outrageous. She said, “There is no guarantee that breast cancer is ‘curable.’ Cancer is a wild card, it doesn’t play by the normal rules. Once you’ve had cancer, you will always live with the burden that it may return. Whether the cancer has been ‘cured’ is a conclusion that can only be made in retrospect.” As I continued to meet people whose lives had been touched by cancer, I found there to be a clear split. Those who had witnessed relatives beat cancer, or who had beaten cancer themselves, often tended to view it as something manageable, something you get through. Others, like me, who had witnessed the death grip of cancer, tended to have a much darker perspective.
My answer to Cokie’s question:
I spoke to many oncologists around the country, one of whom was your doctor, and I think it was she who told me it really is a personal choice; it’s a question of your tolerance for fighting breast cancer. MRIs now are much more sophisticated than mammograms were. It’s likely that in my case they could catch cancer quite early. My answer is that having watched my mother die a brutal, horrific death—to me, cancer is the worst thing in the world, I don’t want to gamble with it. I don’t want to gamble that maybe we’ll catch it early enough. After going through a long, long process I came to the decision that I would do anything I needed to do to prevent it in the first place.
Later in the interview, Cokie referred to my decision to undergo a prophylactic mastectomy and asked, “Do you find that there are people who think that you’re crazy?”
“Yes,” I replied.
Though my reaction was composed, the question rattled me. Crazy is a strong word. Did Cokie Roberts think I was crazy? Would the millions of Nightline viewers now think I was crazy? Was I crazy? By this point, I’d spoken with enough doctors to feel assured that a BRCA-positive woman opting for a preventative mastectomy was not a woman overreacting. Still, the question reminded me of how radical the surgery seemed to most people.
“What do they say?”
“Well, to my face they don’t tell me that they think that I’m crazy. But you get the sense people are judgmental, and they feel that maybe I’m being melodramatic or jumping the gun, and ‘Why can’t she just do screening? Is that extreme really necessary?’ And I understand, I felt the same way at first.”
The most gratifying aspect of the interview was how much time I was allowed to talk about my mother. In the produced segment, photos of my mom filled the screen as I described her life and death. It was a great gift for me to honor my mother in such a public way.
I was most embarrassed by the questions about my personal life. I had to explain that I was single and wanted children and needed to find a way to have them before the age of forty, when I would have my ovaries removed.
“Talk about pressure!” Cokie said. “I mean the biological clock ticks, but it’s ticking very loud.”
“Yes, that is very upsetting and distressing to me …. But I’ve come to peace with the mastectomy and I’m also at peace with the idea of having a child or two in the next five years, and if I have to do it on my own, I will do it on my own. And if the right person comes along, God bless him ….” (I buried my head in my hands with embarrassment over that line when I saw it on TV. God bless him? Where did that come from?) “But I’m going to do whatever I need to do.”
At some point Cokie remarked, “You say all of that, but it’s all very brave.” That’s how I felt about the interview as a whole. I was giving all of the brave answers and acting confident that the things I said would come to pass. I would have the mastectomy; it would be better than cancer; a man of substance would choose to be with me in spite of it; in the event that the man did not materialize in time, I would have children on my own, after which I would remove my ovaries. Just as I had calmly told Ron Schwary that I would dash off a screenplay adaptation, while in reality I panicked, I was now calmly announcing to the world that I would take these actions and all would be well, while inside I was frantic. I had no idea whether all would be well or if I would fall apart. The only operation I’d ever had was the removal of my wisdom teeth. My romantic pickiness had precluded my finding a partner without the complication of a cancer gene. I’d never even had my own pet—how exactly would I manage if I had to have a child without a partner? However, this approach had been the pattern in my life. I’d set a courageous goal for myself, act as if I could do it, and either sink or swim. Usually, I managed at least to tread water.
I was almost eerily calm throughout the taping of the interview. My formidable neuroses were kind enough to stay asleep that day. They woke up with a vengeance on May 6, the night the segment was to air, and raged like an angry bear. A small group of my closest friends in New York met me at a restaurant called Rain on the Upper West Side before we were to head over to Gillian’s apartment for the Nightline viewing. While en route to dinner, I made the taxi driver pull over because I thought I was going to throw up. Once at the restaurant, I spent a total of two minutes at the table; my nausea had transformed into a ferocious stomachache and I could not leave the bathroom stall. Over the next hour, my girlfriends took turns traipsing down the stairs to the ladies’ room to check on me. “Jess, are you in there? Should we order the food to go? Should we leave and take you to the apartment?”
“Oh no, you guys go ahead and enjoy dinner ….” I said feebly. “I’m too ill to relocate ….” I spent the meal in the restroom, and then was transported to Gillian’s. After I was planted on her sofa, my neuroses took on a new manifestation: Tension seized my upper body and I could no longer turn my head right or left.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that my body decided to break down during the viewing of the interview rather than the taping, but what the hell is going on with me?” I cried, illustrating my Frankenstein stiffness to the amusement of all.
“So you’re about to appear on national television and tell millions of people you’re going to remove your breasts,” Jonathan teased. “What’s all the fuss about?”
As with the article, the interview elicited an outpouring of passionate responses representing both sides of the argument—to know or not to know, to act or not to act. Many people posted letters to me on a Web site called Genetics, Cancer and Prophylaxis. Several women supported my decision and shared their own stories. Others were vehemently opposed to my choosing mastectomy.
One woman with stage IV inflammatory breast cancer that had metastasized to her lungs, liver, and chest wall wrote: “To Jessica—Don’t jump the gun. I did chemo twice, radiation, and had a modified radical mastectomy. It’s not so bad. I had four and a half years of remission before relapse. During that time, I raised my children, went back to school, earned a degree, changed careers, fell in love, and cherished every moment. I have taken Maitake mushroom supplements and Noni juice since first being diagnosed. Try the natural stuff first, have a relationship, have your children, and face cancer IF it comes.”
Another woman: “To Jessica—I just finished hearing you on Nightline and am stunned by your decision. Please take a very close look at glyconutriants as they are vital to the proper function of our cells ….”
One man posted: “Jessica, it is not my place to tell you not to have the surgery you’ve chosen, but life is strange, you could be hit by a bus a week after surgery, and put yourself through all this for naught! And a cure, or a better test, or treatment could be discovered next week! Sometimes by being too rational and too cautious we hurt ourselves in the process. I believe you will find love, children, and all the dreams you mentioned regardless of your choice, but at least give it as long as you can before; I’d take healthy living and faith in God over such drastic prophylactic protection any day ….”
One young guy who’d watched the piece told a friend of mine that prophylactic mastectomy, to him, was “the equivalent of being castrated.”
The women of the FORCE Web site had quite a lot to say about the Nightline segment. Though FORCE had become a consistent presence in my life, I was still a silent reader. I’d never posted a question or comment or otherwise identified myself to the community. Several women posted warm responses to my interview while lamenting the fact that I apparently didn’t know about FORCE. Others were not as kind. One woman was incensed that I had not extolled the merits of genetic counseling on television. She also felt the manner in which I’d found out about my BRCA status was like a “Three Stooges act” (not an inaccurate description, and an unwitting nod to my grandmother Harriette). She called me uneducated on BRCA issues and lamented that some Hollywood girl with connections would be the spokeswoman for this topic rather than someone qualified like FORCE’s leader, Sue Friedman.
I sent in my first post to FORCE. I identified myself and said I’d been reading the Web site obsessively for months and thought FORCE an amazing resource and Sue Friedman heroic. I explained that in a thirty-minute television segment, the producers had to pick and choose what to use from an interview. I’d spoken at length about genetic counseling, health insurance, and other important issues. All of this had been cut in the editing process.
Once I made my debut online, the letters poured in. So many FORCE women wrote to say they’d watched the piece, had deeply identified with the pain over losing a loved one to cancer, and shared the same genetic struggles. They wrote of their personal histories. The woman who’d written the angry note apologized and removed sections of her previous post. Many expressed how stunned they had been by Cokie Roberts’s suggestion that getting cancer was an option. One wrote:
“Cancer of any kind should not be considered an option, but a horrific, life-changing event, occurring without our consent. I’m currently in treatment and have watched my mom and five of her siblings suffer through their treatments, some successfully, some not. Bravo to you, Jessica, for choosing NOT to take the risk/option of cancer.”
Another: “I have always liked Cokie Roberts—I know she is a cancer survivor as well—but did she suggest that an option for you would be to actually get breast cancer? I realize that there are many women who are living well after breast cancer but your answer was spot on—it is not an option and I was glad you said what you did. As someone who is living with cancer, I was proud of you.”
Though Jason and I had not been romantically involved since the time of the Writers Guild seminar, we were still close. Neither of us had started seeing anyone else, and getting back together had always hung in the air as a possibility. He had viewed the Nightline segment from his apartment in Los Angeles and exclaimed with admiration how poised I’d been. It had amazed him.
“You were great,” he said. “But I didn’t recognize you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were so strong, so together, so certain. You were a woman. Nothing like the girl I know.”
That was the final moment of epiphany. I’d met Jason while in distress and he’d swept in as the knight. That was the dynamic that had remained between us. He was a caretaker who drew out my helpless, kittenish side, not the part of me I strove to embody—my articulate, capable self.
I’d always known that if I remained in Los Angeles for the surgery, Jason would be by my side, and the thought was comforting and reassuring. I gathered my courage and made a decision: I would move back to New York and have the surgery on the East Coast. It was time for us both, finally, to move on, and for me to brave this ordeal by myself.