A tête-à-tête with a breast cancer survivor

I’ve heard women say that there is no greater joy than to unhook their bras when they get home at the end of the day and throw them randomly over their shoulders as far away from humanity as they can.

Women seem to have a love-hate relationship with their bras. I imagine it can only be compared to when a man is pressed and needs to go to the loo as fast as possible. So we drive fast, park quickly, run up the stairs and almost kick in the door while unzipping frantically and finally releasing a furious gush of urea into the toilet bowl. What follows is a slow grunt of satisfaction after that much-needed release. Freedom is made of this.

Does that not come close to the feeling of removing a constricting bra at the end of a long, hard day? I suspect it doesn’t and as a man, I might never know how imprisoned women feel in bras or the freedom that comes with taking them off.

Talking of bras and breasts, last week I sat across from a breast cancer survivor at a café. A mother of two who sipped her hot lemon and ginger thoughtfully. I asked what it feels like to have cancer in your breast. She said it felt like having something very dirty inside you.

Something smelly. Something that forced itself inside your body, made itself comfortable and threatened to take over without your invitation or permission. You feel violated. She had found the lump a few months after her husband of five years left her.

DREADFUL NEWS

The doctor broke the dreadful news on a sunny afternoon. He told her she had stage 3 cancer and she thought, “Who will take care of my children?” She recounted how she sat with her friend in her car at the parking lot and cried for hours. The sun was shining brightly outside, but her world had suddenly turned dark and cold.

Later she had gone home and looked at her children – both barely 10 years old – and thought, “They are going to grow up without a mother. What will happen when their father comes for them? My goodness! My children will suffer in the hands of that man!”

At the hospital, they cut a hole in her breast and removed the dirty cancer. The wound that was left refused to heal. For the longest time it just oozed liquids. She would cry at night when the kids couldn’t hear her. She went through chemotherapy which was so intense, she could smell it going into her veins. “It smelt of fumes,” she said. I tried to imagine how that must have felt; smelling fumes in your veins. Lying there as the yellowish liquid is pushed into your body, and your body responding to it: changing from it, suffering from it, and making you feel sick before it started making you feel better.

She talked of doctors who didn’t know how to handle her case, doctors who see cancer patients as case studies. She talked of her doctor who made a pass at her while she was fighting the cancer. There she was fighting to stay alive and the doctor wanted to get into her pants. I was genuinely horrified and disgusted.

“That is the sickest thing I have heard this year!” I screeched. She shook her head and said, “Oh well, what can’t a man do?” and I sat there feeling defenseless and ashamed on behalf of men.

She is fine now. Her children are fine now. She started a trust that supports cancer patients. Every year she organises this massive concert called Twatukuza and people who love to sing show up and sing and raise money for cancer patients.

WAITING GAME

When our meeting ended, she didn’t want to leave. Rather, she wanted to leave, but didn’t have the resolve to leave. She sat there weak and glued to her seat from having to recount the horror of fighting breast cancer. Her hot lemon and ginger remained largely untouched. I said, “Sorry for dragging you down that rabbit hole,” and she smiled over her cup, a smile that was both brave and haunted.

I left her seated there, staring into the horizon and I knew instinctively that even after talking to her for two hours and over, it was difficult to get into her shoes to feel the gravity of being told you had cancer and thinking that you your children will grow up without you. Or having your breast cut to remove a lump or crying every night because you are scared of dying and living your children behind.

But she is alive. They saved her breast. God pulled her out of that cruel path of mortality. And she praises him fervently, every day. The cancer changed her. It changed how she thinks about life, hers and others. It changed how she thinks of worldly things. It changed how she lives her own life. “I’m a different person,” She said. She is alive because of many things, God being the key of them. But she is also alive because she touched her breast and she found a lump and even though she was in stage 3, she moved fast and she got saved.

This month is breast cancer month. It’s simple really: ladies, go for breast cancer examination and gentlemen, go for the prostate cancer examination if you are over 40. At least that’s the much we can control. Otherwise we are all sitting ducks when it comes to cancer. All we do is wait. I remember something powerful the lady said to me when we met. She said, “I enjoy being alive.” You have to have looked at her in the eye to see the weight of that simple statement.