What cancer does
Body horror, The Substance, and becoming a wreck
Bacteria are opportunists. Whatever opening in a body is available, they’ll take advantage of it, colonizing the tiniest physical spaces, breeding in the warm snug caverns of animal flesh.
Bad teeth, the story goes, immigrated along with my great-grandparents. A starvation diet of starches and weeds will do that. Starving will do that. Throw in a jaw so small that chin and neck are largely indiscernible, add the usual number of human teeth, and the ensuing crowding will ensure that you will visit a dentist so frequently the equivalent of a new car will be spent every couple of years. My dentist’s kids will never need to take out a student loan.
Over the summer, three days after the periodontist said the bone in my palate and gums had degraded to the point that it could no longer hold my upper canine teeth in place and that they would have to be pulled, I got a stabbing pain in my lower jaw. A different tooth, twice root canaled already, just a thin shell, had become the happy home of a colony of bacteria that had formed an abscess around a tooth root.
In the course of a month, the periodontist pulled that infected molar, dug out the abscess, scaled my gums, grafted a piece of bone from my palette onto the deteriorating bone, and pulled the canine teeth that were so loose they’d started to rotate in their sockets. Then we waited six months for the bone to grow back. In the x rays you could see the shadows of the rotted teeth, slowly filling with human gravel. Two days ago he drilled holes in the newly grown bone and screwed in two titanium screws. If I’m lucky, in a few more months the bone will be strong enough to support the fake teeth he’ll attach to the screws. Nothing covered by insurance. If he has kids, they’ll never take out a student loan.
Bad teeth, they say, run in the family. And so does breast cancer, and chemotherapy pummels your immune system until bacteria slip under your gums, and oh, some people are just unlucky after chemo, says the dental hygienist, the dentist, the endodontist, the periodontist. After the screws are inserted, the next morning, a pouch of bloody fluid blooms under an eye, and the yawping mouth full of blue stitches and blood.
Body horror is just what you get along with the wreckage of cancer. In The Substance, Demi Moore’s middle-aged character, deemed too old for TV, eventually mutates into a ball of skin, teeth and hair, a monster born of ego and hubris and modern medicine. In the final moments of the film, she degrades into a puddle of goo. I don’t think I could have stomached this movie before cancer, but what’s been done to my body over the past year made me feel like Lizzie Sparkle had it easy in comparison.
Saint Agatha of Sicily and her severed breasts, artist unknown.
When you learn you’re going to lose part or all of your breasts, you see the plastic surgeon’s photos of breasts recreated after cancer, missing nipples, blasted bright red by radiation, one side of a chest flat and crisscrossed with scars while a normal breast is poised as its opposite, a mountain overlooking the destruction of a minefield. Much like any other plastic surgeon’s office where you can pick and choose body parts, you’re offered breasts as a menu of options: silicone, saline, your own muscle, carved out and shifted around, your own fat, sucked free of your stomach and injected into your chest. The last one, they call it a “mommy makeover.”
Male critics thought The Substance was about Ozempic, which it partly is – the obsession with physical perfection is just as much part of the filmmaker’s gaze as it is on social media, in TV, in film. Demi Moore’s own perfection is that of the kind of plastic surgery that doesn’t leave scars, what people call “good work,” versus the kind you get after breast cancer, the leftover flaps of skin and scars that arc into your armpits and the scooped out musculature that means you cannot raise your left arm all the way ever again. Or else Demi Moore is actually perfect by nature. The younger version of her that emerges in the movie certainly is. But The Substance isn’t just about Ozempic, or aging, or perfection. It’s about the horror of what our bodies really are.
You see this up close in cancer and in its aftermath, the click of your teeth as they hit the stainless steel tray, the medical bill for “disposal,” the chemo nurses putting on shields, gloves, capes and eye covering just to touch a bag of the medication that goes straight into your veins. And like the sheer audacity of The Substance’s view of women’s bodies, the things you see during and after cancer (there really is no “after” when it comes to cancer), these sometimes make you laugh out loud, like when you rub a finger across your eyebrow and the entire thing peels off, or when you see yourself toothless for the first time, high on Norco, two bloody tubes of gauze protruding from the holes in your jaw, it’s fucking hilarious, it’s comical, bits and pieces of your body falling off, being carved out, being yanked free, while the bacteria throw a party and the hospital incinerators roar.
It’s me, you’ll say. Now I’m the monster. Now I’m the wreck.