The Minotaur of Greek mythology was a genetic mutation, born of the union between the daughter of a king and what was apparently a particularly attractive bull gifted to her father by the god Poseidon. The Minotaur was so fearsome the people of Crete hid it in an underground labyrinth where it killed every youth sent to try and get rid of it. Theseus, who finally slew the Minotaur, had to travel so deeply into the labyrinth to find the mutation that he needed a ball of thread gifted to him by a woman in order to find his way back. Without the thread, like all the others who entered the labyrinth before him, he would have perished.
A cell divides because nature tells it to. A mutation divides because it, too, is a product of nature. Inside our bodies there are things constantly following the prompting of nature, shifting and changing, attacking and healing. Nature mutates so it can survive, and sometimes, like the Minotaur, it mutates just so that it can kill.
The breast center, like the labyrinth, is underground, a maze of rooms filled with equipment that can kill. Radiation is a miracle, death and life moving together as energy. But it must be contained, and the mammogram machines that shoot radiation into breasts in order to produce a series of shadowy images are hidden away in the basement of what I have started to refer to as The Boob Building.
In August I went to see Oppenheimer (Barbie was better), came home and felt something weird in my left breast – not the hard lump you’re supposed to be on alert for but more of a thick wall of tissue that hadn’t been there any time in the past year when I’d poked and prodded my breasts like you’re supposed to every month (week? day?). Nothing suspicious had shown up on the mammogram I’d had the previous year. But something was there, the Minotaur, the mutation, a few cells hidden away in a duct that had exploded out into the tissue.
At 52, with no children and no uterus after a surgery to correct endometriosis five years ago, my breasts are pretty much useless. But they have been a defining part of the way people perceive me since they showed up when I was 12 or 13, rapidly turning from something requiring a “training bra” into something massive, heavy, unwieldy. My breasts are, for lack of a better word, huge. A group of guys at my high school once held a vote for “biggest boobs” and I won by a large margin.
For decades men have grabbed them, clung to them, stared at them, fetishized them, groped them, shouted at them. Women have told me that my chest is something to envy, something people will spend thousands of dollars to surgically replicate. For me, it has mostly been a source of pain. The tissue is dense and heavy, thick slabs of meat. My neck and back never feel normal, wrap tops and button up shirts have to be pinned and stitched into submission, and mammograms are a wrestling match between the tech and a breast so big they have to heave it onto the plates of the machine that compresses it down into a manageable shape.
By the time the surgeon’s office calls me to ask what size bra I wear, I start laughing, an outburst of embarrassment at having to say it out loud. 36 H. The biggest cup size most bras come in is D. When I learn they are both going to have to be removed, out of curiosity I put my bathroom scale on the dining room table, take off my bra, and lift them onto it. My breasts weigh fifteen pounds.
The denser a breast, the harder it is for anyone to see when it mutates. The tissue looks like a white wall of snow on the mammograms I keep getting shown at meetings with doctors. After Oppenheimer, I go back to the basement and have a mammogram (unclear), a 3D mammogram (still unclear), then an ultrasound (initially benign, then “suspicious”), then an ultrasound guided biopsy, then something called a stereotactic biopsy which involves putting the breast into a mammogram machine and performing the biopsy while it is pinned there.
This is the most painful, invasive procedure I can remember having, just brutally bad, and in spite of the tech sweetly rubbing my back throughout it, I can feel every movement of the thick needle as it punches out a dozen chunks from my breast. I’m handed a gift bag after each procedure containing a pink nail file, a pink pen, pink bottle of hand sanitizer, and a pink re-freezable ice pack. Each time I throw everything in the trash except for the ice pack. Eventually I just hand back the bag.
The chunks show cancer. The Minotaur is in the labyrinth, and now it must be vanquished. You know it’s cancer because they call instead of sending your results on MyChart. It’s an afternoon, and I’ve managed to actually show up for class that day and teach after having missed a few sessions already due to all the tests. After four classes, I already know all of my students’ names. My first response, when they call, is to start asking questions. Nicely, I’m told the answers will take a while to arrive. I don’t like this at all. For the first time in this process, I go numb in a way that veterans describe happening in combat when they’re being bombarded by mortar fire.
Everyone has been very, very nice to me in the Boob Building. After this they are even nicer. I meet the surgeon (intensely capable and bossy, I like her immediately). A plastic surgeon takes a photo of my breasts and promises it will never show up on social media. I have an MRI in a different basement and A PET scan in a trailer. I make jokes and make the techs laugh and talk to everyone in the waiting room just for the distraction even though I’m the kind of person who leaves parties after ten minutes because small talk is the worst.
The other women in the basement waiting rooms all have faces reflecting the same churning, constantly changing emotions that have overtaken my life. I am no longer a person but a series of feelings, and really dislike it. When you are in diagnosis, you live in the unknown, but I see in our faces that desperate desire to survive that you see in depictions of saints. I take a lot of Ativan, and eat a lot of cannabis edibles. I go back for another biopsy, this time of a lymph node under my arm. During that procedure the radiologist tells me when she talks to older radiologists the things they did to women’s bodies during cancer diagnosis sound “barbaric.” As more women became doctors, the treatments got more humane.
The treatments are more humane, but more and more women (and cis men, trans men, and nonbinary people) are still getting breast cancer. The Minotaur has gotten cleverer, and in the labyrinth of diagnosis, it has learned to hide. We are getting sick younger and younger, too. At 52 my case is “complicated” by the fact that I’m post-menopausal thanks to the hysterectomy, but apparently still pumping out enough estrogen to cause the cancer to mutate and grow. It is easier, my surgeon says, to treat a woman in her 40s (aggressive chemo) or a woman in her 60s (less aggressive chemo). My chemo will probably be like being Gen X: shitty and not very interesting to anyone other than other members of Gen X. She also tells me I should write my next book about this problem of women in their fifties, and how hard it is to diagnose and treat us. I laugh and tell her I’ll think about it. She says she’s ordering one of my other books on Amazon and I thank her.
Sometimes I wonder if I got cancer because I wrote two books back to back while working full time, because stress was the only thing keeping me alive some days during the pandemic and stress has been linked to cancer. But really, it’s just bad fucking luck. The genetic test reveals I don’t have the BRCA marker that would put my sisters or nieces at higher risk. I burst into tears on the phone when the nurse calls with this news, crying in front of a medical professional for the first time in my life.
Both my paternal grandmother and maternal grandmother had breast cancer. It leapfrogged over my mother, but without the BRCA marker, we’ll never know if mine has any genetic connection. The density raised the risk, the 15 pounds of tissue hanging off of my chest the perfect place for a mutation to occur. I don’t drink alcohol, quit smoking years ago, exercise daily, cook and eat healthy food. My BMI is a little higher than it should be after the pandemic. But mostly it’s just shitty, shitty, shitty fucking luck. The biggest risk for breast cancer is having breasts. I have, for a few more weeks, an above average pair, a labyrinth of tissue, ducts and fat that has defined my life in ways I didn’t choose. Losing them might end up being a liberation.
It will hopefully be a liberation from the Minotaur that is cancer, but even though my surgeon keeps insisting this is curable, I’m aware there are no guarantees. My friend died from breast cancer, a cancer that was vanquished for five years, the normal time considered to be “survival,” but it returned with a vengeance to eat away at her body so rapidly she didn’t have time to clean out her house. But I also know science is evolving, and that more money is poured into breast cancer research than any other cancer. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote what is probably the best essay ever written about breast cancer, and you should read it. I've been returning to it a lot in the past few weeks. To be a cancer patient is to be obedient to data. Ehrenrich told us this:
As my cancer career unfolds, I will, the helpful pamphlets explain, become a composite of the living and the dead—an implant to replace the breast, a wig to replace the hair. And then what will I mean when I use the word “I”? I fall into a state of unreasoning passive aggressivity: They diagnosed this, so it’s their baby. They found it, let them fix it.
Temperamentally, I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist when it comes to health. Women weren’t supposed to live as long as I already have; we were meant to have eight babies and then die, and our bodies just erode the older we get. Obviously, I do not want to die – I have clinical depression and know what it feels like when you do want to die. This isn’t it. But I don’t want to be sick, and I don’t want to be a burden. However, you don’t get to make a lot of choices about having cancer. You surrender to the protocol.
That’s what I’m doing right now, giving myself over to the doctors, grateful at least that people will stop stabbing and squishing my poor breast with its surprisingly large tumor and its calcifications and its history of being both a fetish object and a source of misery and pain. I’ll get out of the labyrinth one way or another, but this will transform me. I will look like a creature that lives underground for a while, bald, shriveled and pale. I will mutate. In eight or nine months, when the treatments are done, maybe this will all make sense. Right now, however, I’m just following the threads left behind by everyone who’s made their way through these corridors before, feeling it between my fingers, letting it lead me to the monster we will hopefully vanquish, and eventually, letting it lead me away.
Addendum: I’m not planning on turning this into a newsletter about illness and if I ever become an “illness influencer” you are welcome to come over and throw pink objects at me. I debated a lot about even sharing this news in a public way. But writing is how I figure things out, always has been, always will, and already I’m learning how many other people have been through this particular labyrinth. It’s my hope that we can continue to guide one another through it.