Belly Rings & Breast Cancer

posted Monday, 5 March 2007

From an article in the Washington Post ("After the Tears", Emily Wax) ...

The man in the white lab coat at Georgetown Hospital's Lombardi Cancer Center took one look at my bellybutton ring and sighed.

"You can't have your CT scan with that in there," he said.
The demand for the piercing's removal last summer was just another way cancer was trying to pry away at my 32-year-old life. But the silver hoop wouldn't budge.
That's how my husband and I ended up racing in a cab to an M Street tattoo parlor hours before I was scheduled for the test that would tell me if the breast cancer had spread. And if I would have a better chance of undergoing surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and surviving, or slogging through the treatments and possibly dying.

The parlor's electronica music spinning from a laptop seemed way too loud. The hipsters in skinny jeans and puffy boots eyeing the latest Chinese symbol tattoos seemed blissfully carefree. Amid the tattoo-splattered walls, I turned as ashen and as soaked in sweat as I would during the height of chemo as I sat down on a cold metal table. "Sweet!" purred a tattooed Burly Man, a cliche with wrench: "This trend is so over."

Me: "You have no idea."

This is the bizarre world of being young and having cancer diagnosed, when at the peak of your beauty, confidence and fertility the rhythms of your life are propelled into what we believe are the problems of the old. Total hair loss, bone pain, stomach issues, and chemo-induced menopause leave you as un-hip among your friends as, well, a cancer patient.

It's hard enough being a young woman -- with the pressures to be beautiful and shiny-haired. Try it after chemo -- bald and without eyebrows or even eyelashes.

Hmm, I removed mine for the barrage of CT scans & each surgery, but I've still got mine... but then again, I've never claimed to be very trendy...

Emily Wax hits the nail right on the bald, bald head with her description of the bizarre world into which we've been cast.

PS -- Unfortunately, 4 hours of surgery, a heavy artillery of narcotics and 3 drains kept me from making it down to the conference this year (it figures! I was able to make it to Denver for last year's conference, but I couldn't make it to DC for this year's!).