Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy (16 page)

I am on my own and really miss Dr. P’s pearls when I see the dirty steps leading up to the parlor. I know Grandma Katie is pushing me to walk up the steps. I had no idea what to wear to a tattoo parlor, but I knew I had to look cool. I chose dark sunglasses and all black, except for the red heart on my T-shirt. My heart is going to guide me to the tattoo parlor. If my mind chickens out, my heart will make me stay. I am so sick of wearing my heart on my sleeve that I have decided I need it permanently etched on my boob instead. I need to remember my mojo.

I know I don’t look like I belong in a tattoo parlor even though I have bought a satin leopard-print push-up bra just to fit in. Wearing the leopard bra feels racy. I feel the satin sliding between my shirt and my skin and I realize that it is the first time I have actually felt something other than a needle on that breast. The fabric is so soft. I have tried to feel my husband’s hands on that breast, but I couldn’t really feel much of anything but pain.

I need to walk around the block, and strange images of myself keep flashing through my head. I still think of myself as the goody girl, the preppie, the high school newspaper editor, and the prude. Can I pull this off?

I need to show what I feel inside. I need to tell my story of fear and the courage that came from it.

When I floated the idea of getting a real tattoo instead of a nipple tattoo my parents told me that I could never be buried in a Jewish cemetery because Jewish law prohibited desecrating one’s body. So I enlisted my Grandmother Ruth’s husband, Irving, the most religious member in our family, for a fact check. He left me a message on my answering machine three days later.

“Geralyn. This is Irving. I met a rabbi named Shmuel. He has three tattoos.” Coast was clear.

I pulled every Internet article I could find about tattoo artists and began to call around New York City. Every man who answered the phone sounded gruff, like he was covered with very scary tattoos—daggers or swastikas.

“Joe’s Tattoo Parlor.”

(I was feeling shy, but I knew that I was going from the kiddie pool to the deep end and there was no changing my mind now.)

“Can you do a tattoo on a breast reconstruction after a mastectomy? Will the implant burst?”

I was obsessed with my implant bursting—exploding—in a tattoo parlor. It would be a very dramatic scene. My chest would just collapse, and someone would scream,
Call the paramedics! Her implant burst!
I would be taken away in an ambulance (would they turn on the siren and run a red light for a burst implant?) and when I arrived in the emergency room there would be whispering among the hospital staff that there was a burst implant in the house, picked up at a tattoo parlor. Medical students in the hospital might line up to see my deflated boob and I might end up as a case history photo in a medical textbook. Either that or as an urban legend.

And I imagined being back in Dr. P’s pristine Park Avenue office and having to explain to her the trouble I had caused. She would be in her scrubs with her pearl necklace, her forgiving but rolling eyes looking at me like I was her crazy teenage daughter who had done something very naughty.

I was terrified of what would actually happen if my implant burst. Would my chest be flat and really show me there was nothing between that implant and me? That implant was blown up with some sort of hope, and maybe I was a little terrified that the tattoo needle might burst that layer of hope. The thought of getting expanded again in Dr. P’s office was almost enough to make me change my plan. Strrrrretching, pulling, yanking at my skin again was too much to think about.

Until Joshua answered the phone. His voice sounded so sweet and reassuring that I thought that I had misdialed and gotten a New Age spa or a therapist’s office.

“Tattoo Heaven, Josh speaking.”

I heard buzzing in the background and I knew that I had reached a real tattoo parlor.

“Hi.” My voice sounded way too high and sweet to be calling a tattoo parlor. I tried to deepen it a little for my next sentence. “I was wondering if you could do a tattoo on a breast reconstruction after a mastectomy? Will the implant burst?”

I was waiting to see if he thought this was a crank call and if he might start cracking up on the other end of the line, but he seemed very knowledgeable, and serious.

“There are ten layers of skin until your implant and I would only need to go three deep.”

I suddenly felt like we were having a quasi-medical conversation. I felt so relieved and thought that Dr. P might even approve of my finding such a knowledgeable and competent tattoo artist. Then he added the most important piece of information.

“My grandmother died of breast cancer. I want to donate my time to do your tattoo. I’ve never done an implant before. But I’ve done women who were not reconstructed. I’ve done beautiful oceans and rainbows on their mastectomy scars.”

“Josh, I’m so scared. I’ve never been to a tattoo parlor. I am really embarrassed to ask, but do you use clean needles?”

It sort of felt like a safe-sex conversation, but I knew we needed to talk about safe needles. I already had cancer, I had just finished chemo, and I did not want hepatitis C. When Josh assured me that he used clean needles there were no more excuses. I scheduled my tattoo appointment for today.

But now, standing on the grimy steps, I am scared. Josh sees me outside and comes to get me. In person, he is as beautiful as he sounded. His eyes are green and soulful, and he is so gentle, except for the bad-ass thunderbolt tattooed on his neck. I am trying to be cool but I am really worried that I have left Dr. P’s museum world. If she was an impressionist, Joshua is, at best, a graffiti artist. There are bold, shocking images covering the wall. The floors are grainy, it looks like sawdust has been sprinkled on them, and there is a faint buzzing coming from the back room—the sound of a needle burning dye into flesh.

Now I am scared because tattoos are permanent. What if I don’t like it? It will be there forever. But I sort of like the idea of it on my body, especially if I do die of cancer. Maybe it will make the undertaker smirk? Maybe, when I am being prepared for burial, they will see I was a fighter, that I was a feisty one who did not go gentle into that good night?

Josh must see my reluctance and decides now is the time to review his rules with me. Well, actually, it was just one big rule. No guy’s name on my boob. He personally knew that Johnny Depp had to change his
Winona Forever
tattoo to
Wino Forever
, and still seemed slightly traumatized by the experience.

I already know exactly what I want for my tattoo and after I explain it, Josh spends two hours sketching the tattoo design. I want a heart. Not the kind of poofy heart you draw in high school—I want a serious heart to remind me how courageous it is to follow my heart. I want wings on the top to represent all the angels who showed me that I would get my life back: the one-balled cab driver; the stripper who was giving it away but still swaggered; the nurse who helped me wipe myself when I was trying to be glamorous and not use a bedpan; my Amazons: Meredith, Rena, and Jane.

The placement of the tattoo is key. I tell Josh that I want it right at the lower end of my scar, much lower than a nipple would be. It is not replacing the nipple and I do not want it to be perfectly centered. I want the heart to look like it’s flying up, soaring away. Where my scar ends, my courage and hope begin. The heart should be outlined in black but inside will be the shade of the bright red lipstick I wore to my surgery. In the right corner of the heart, there will be the two wings outlined in black. Josh thinks we should shade them in with white, but I like seeing only my skin through the wings.

When I take my satin leopard bra off and stand in front of Josh, I know that my mound really is a breast because of the way he is looking at it. At me. This is the first time a man has seen the mound, the first time that I am topless in front of another man except for my husband (and my breast surgeon, but he doesn’t count). I cannot believe how hard Josh looks. When I look at him just looking at me, I start to apologize for how awkward this must be for him to have to see me like this. There is a sort of an unspoken conversation where Josh tells me that he still thinks I am hot without my boob and that he really can’t help but take a long look. I am shocked, and just to prove I am not imagining his interest he looks me straight in the eyes: “Geralyn. You are a very foxy woman.”

As he starts the tattooing, the pain on my breast reminds me of all the pain I have been through: the drains, the stitches, the bandages, the stretching—and I black out. Josh gets me Oreos and we continue. I am not leaving with half a tattoo. As the pain continues, I feel a sudden burst of euphoria; Josh says that my natural endorphins are kicking in to combat the pain. But I know that this is what courage must feel like.

When he leads me to the mirror to look at myself I feel the same fear as when Dr. B removed my bandage in the hospital. I am scared to look and start thinking I have made a huge mistake.

I close my eyes and slowly take a peep. The mirror is playing a trick on me. When I first see the red of the heart, I think—for a flash—it is my nipple, and for a flash I see my old breast. I hold the mirror so that I will see just my new breast—it is still too painful to compare it to my other one.

I think about Monet’s waterlilies and remember my old nipple and something about this one is so bold that it forces my eyes to focus and I look and look and look until I think I see what is there. There are no waterlilies. No soft hues. No dancing and blending color.

Va-va-voom! It is red. And bold. And powerful! A karmic boomerang hits me and everything that was robbed from me, my breast, my nipple, my hope, my innocence, my beauty, returns for that moment and then some. Because so much has been taken from me, that much more is now here, almost screaming its existence at me.

I see that I am sort of pieced back together. I think maybe I have found my new right breast right here in this tattoo parlor in the East Village. I am finally able to say good-bye to my real right breast, which I still hope is in a Tupperware container in a pathology refrigerator as my husband had promised.

I was
born
into a certain body, but I have
become
this one, I have fashioned part of it and I feel powerful. This is the breast I have chosen. It is not hiding its battle scar—it is wearing it proudly. This is its story.

I go back to work at
20/20
after I get my tattoo. I show several colleagues—it is bad judgment but I am delirious. In order to show my tattoo (which is not in the center of my boob, but in the corner, at the end of my diagonal mastectomy scar), I need to pull my shirt and bra all the way down and it shows my whole new boob. I don’t think of it as a boob—to me it’s just an expander implant mound, but the looks I am getting make me realize it is more.

When I come home, there are a dozen red roses from Tyler as a vote of confidence for the tattoo. I make sure he closes his eyes and that I have the wings positioned so they are jutting out of my leopard bra before he takes a look. I want him to love it, and he does! It is not a nipple, but it does excite him.

I am so pleased with my tattoo that I become something of an exhibitionist. It’s ironic considering how scared I was initially about anyone ever seeing how different I really looked. I show my doorman, and I even show the Amtrak conductor who has a letter of his name on each knuckle: S-A-L-L-Y. Each time I show the tattoo I pull my shirt and bra down. Each time I am learning that my implant mound has become sort of a breast, at least to other people. I like that my tattoo makes people smile instead of the scared faces I am used to seeing when people see my scar and that I was missing a nipple. The tattoo makes me laugh and is now my constant reminder in case I ever forget.

It is so important to follow my heart.

15

Vomit

I want a baby. I am back in the same hospital, having my blood drawn. But in this blood test they will look for signs of a baby, not like my routine blood tests that look for signs of a tumor and the blood tests from my chemo that measured my white counts. I hate the way the needle feels in my vein. It is too familiar.

I have been vomiting again, constantly, and I think I might be pregnant. Even though it might be a baby that is making me vomit, the vomit tastes like my chemo vomit.

I was told that I needed to wait at least two years before I could even think of getting pregnant, to see if my cancer would come back. It has been four. And I was told that pregnancy was dangerous and could make my cancer come back even if it hadn’t already, because my hormones would be hundreds of times my normal levels. The doctors are worried that any small cancer cells floating around could go wild with those hormones. My mom and my sister-in-law Wendy offered to be my surrogate. They must love me a lot to be willing to vomit for me.

The waiting has been excruciating. I was unsure if my body could have a baby and if I could, was it even fair to have a child if I might die? And what about my eggs going through all that poisoning? Were they still normal? I did research. I found studies about women who went through chemo and then had babies. Their eggs seemed okay. I read the fine print—the profiles of the subjects. I got the entire way to the bottom of the scientific paper, and on the bottom of the page was print so small that I had to squint: Subject 34 had seven children after her breast cancer treatment. Seven! Was it a typo? Seven! Silly number seven made me believe during all my tests to see if my cancer had come back before I got pregnant. I sang sevens in the bone scan, when I was told to hold my breath with the heavy lead apron on during my chest x-ray, and I swear I could make out the number seven on the sonogram screen during my liver profile.

And then I met Erin. She was assigned to me as a story at my job at
20/20
. She was a young mother dying of cancer and she had a toddler daughter, Peyton. Erin decided to videotape certain lessons for Peyton to watch after Erin had died. The man who gave me the assignment was not Mr. Sensitive, he was very matter of fact.