Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy Read Free Page A

like in the movies when there is bad news. But his tears are real. He looks at me and finally says it.
    “You do have cancer”—pause—“but we will cure you.”
    Strange, I have never heard the words “cancer” and “cure” in the same sentence before. Is he lying to me?
    I understand why Tyler is crying. I know that we said in sickness and in health, but there has got to be some sort of exit clause when something like this happens. Dr. B, I understand his tears, too. He probably has done this scene hundreds of times in his office. I wonder if delivering bad news got easier after some practice. Clearly, he is not immune to it. But there is an extra level of bad news here. I am his colleague’s wife. It is personal.
    Now, if two grown men, doctors, cannot handle this information, how am I supposed to? But somehow I hear myself rally like I always do. I should not have been cut from the seventh-grade cheerleading team. I do not cry.
    “It will be okay,” I am trying to convince the doctors. “I’ll be fine.” That last sentence hangs in the air, and they both look at me like I don’t get it. Like, “Oh, we just told her that she has cancer and she’s in denial.” I am not in denial. I am scared, though.
    I realize in that small windowless office that this is about having no control. This is something that just happened. So, if I didn’t cause this, how can I fix it? My body has betrayed me. How can I count on it to get better? To fix itself? I have always been a good “fixer.” I am the one my parents call to tell my younger brothers what to do. I instruct my friends about how to break up with their boyfriends. Now I see that this might be unfixable.
    “Do I need to have chemotherapy, will I lose my hair?”
    I am so embarrassed that the only lame thing I can think about is whether my hair will fall out. I must seem so vain, but I have always pictured cancer patients with bald heads.
    Dr. B tells me that it is too early to make that decision, that we will have the full pathology report back tomorrow and I will need to consult an oncologist.
    I am not prepared for this scene to unfold in my life. I never had a biopsy. The word biopsy even sounds serious. I never even had my tonsils out, or broke my arm. I ate a cheeseburger before my biopsy and I saw white dots when Dr. B was cutting into my breast to get to that lump. During the biopsy I could still taste the ketchup in my mouth even though the smell of alcohol was so heavy in the room.
    I knew when I first felt the lump in the shower that it felt like trouble. My fingertips just knew it was bad news. I should not have been worried because my mom and grandmothers had never had breast cancer. But I was worried. I was dripping wet, still in my towel when I told Tyler about the lumps. There were actually three of them.
    “Geralyn, you’re being a hypochondriac. Just because you found a lump you think you have breast cancer? Women always have lumps. It’s nothing.”
    Tyler was annoyed with me—I could tell by his tone of voice.
    I didn’t understand why he was so annoyed, considering he was the one who had taught me how to do a breast self-exam in the first place. When I first met Tyler, he was doing a rotation as the breast resident. Aside from it being especially intimidating to show him my breasts, it affected me to hear him so devastated by what he had seen. On our first date he told me all about the young mother with breast cancer he had just done a mastectomy on. She was only twenty-eight and he thought she was going to die. He couldn’t believe how many women, especially young women, had breast cancer. He made me learn how to do a breast self-exam. He had told me that one of my friends, someone I knew, would get breast cancer—it was pure statistics.
    We both never imagined that the woman who would get breast cancer would be me. Meeting Tyler would save my life.
    But now that I had actually done the breast exam and I had found lumps, he