Boobs. They’re just a whole lot of trouble, aren’t they. We spend our youth worrying about bras and nipples, too big or too small, and then we get older and BOOM! it’s all indeterminate calcifications and suspicious nodules and heterogeneously dense tissue and hours upon hours of being offered blankets and water in the waiting area before getting squeezed and pushed and repositioned and scoped with lubed-up tools. It’s the endless Google searches and the waiting for business hours to call the three different offices to try to get an appointment and nervously refreshing the phone app to see if the test results are in yet. (You’ll get an email, but still.) Boobs. 

We all have only as much time as we have. Everyone dies. Sometimes it’s sudden, and if not, then it’s a result of the inevitable breaking down of our bodies. Gonna happen at some point. Matter of time. No surprise there. But, still: it’s always news, and news is a break in the routine. Something noteworthy. Not in the plan. And then come the decisions. And then come the experts. We want to trust the experts. Be polite to the experts. Be deferential to the experts. Ask them to tell us what to do, want to trust that if we do what they say then things are more likely to be alright. Or less not-alright. It’s the translation of the scans and the reports and the percentages and the millimeters and the centimeters and the counts and the descriptions of the shape of the ducts and the glands and the nodes.

When my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at 68, she immediately began to die. She had lived through her own mother’s painful death from the same disease at age 50. There was no living with cancer: for her, cancer was death. She performed obedience to the chemo regime - to an extent, at least, when she was not skipping weeks and trying to give up - so that we would see her performance of fighting and be proud of her. (By the end of her life, my mother had become a young girl, again.) But when she got the diagnosis, she got into bed, and she assumed the position of death. She stopped showering, she stopped walking, even as - at that point - she was perfectly physically mobile. And then, after her last trip to the hospital, she was ambulanced back to her home and lifted into the hospital bed in her and my father’s living room, where she stayed for the last two months of her life.

So my associations with cancer, in other words, aren’t shall we say great ones. You get the picture. More on that later.

Soon after my mother's diagnosis, and knowing that she was not willing or able to share information from her doctor about her condition, (the whole communication and mental health situations being what they were, my father didn’t understand that my mother was going to die and that this wasn’t just another stage of her long series of illnesses that would continue indefinitely, morning at chemo, swing by the deli to pick up lunch after, get some more of the fruit punch flavor Ensure from CVS, tuck in at home for whatever’s on HBO, nice little routine, etc, and so he was devastated when she was deposited in the bed for home hospice, only then realizing the nature of the situation, the communication and mental health situations being what they were), and knowing that this multigenerational cancer was now a pattern, and gradually realizing that despite my repeated requests and her repeated assurances she was not, in fact, going to get genetic testing done, it seemed prudent to check into things on my end and, lo, after many doctor office visits and some genetic testing and counseling thrown in there for good measure: we had a hefty-sounding diagnosis of Familial Pancreatic Cancer. (FPC. You know a medical condition is impressive when it has its own kicky acronym. I like to drop it into conversation when I’m wearing my Ray-Bans. Flip of the hair, snap of the gum.)

So: FPC. The year of my mother’s monthslong dying was also the year of my own deep dive into IVs and hospital gowns and all of the oscopies, the mammograms and more mammograms and hell why not, even more mammograms and the MRI’s and the ultrasounds and the blood draws. The Gatorade laxative cocktails, and the nodules and the calcifications, the entities in my body that were suspicious or probably benign or inconclusive, the please come back in 6 months for more tests. The variant bile duct morphology and the polyps. The every-year-for-the-rest-of-my-life sorts of things, the we-need-further-imaging-to-tell sorts of things, the learning-the-hard-way sorts of things (that an IV would be needed after I arrived at the hospital, that hydration before an IV was important), the gowns that open from the front, the other gowns that open from the back. The importance, for the single woman of a certain age living alone hundreds of miles from loved ones, of the concept of the “colonoscopy friend.”

So that’s all fun. But I’m digressing, because we’re here to talk about boobs. Who needs ‘em, really. (I mean, ok, I love boobs just as much as anyone else does don’t get me wrong. But once you start looking inside of them, once you cross the rubicon of imaging and scans and such, you can’t put the mammary monster back in the box. Heisenberg uncertainty and all that: by observing a thing, you change it. The thing here being: boobs.)

My mother seemed to orient to her boobs according to things her boyfriends had said about them. These became like mantras in our house, growing up. “You don’t need anything more than a handful.” “Something something teacup something something." Or the story about the time when the guy reached across the table and grabbed her bra off of her. (She recounted this story wistfully; it was presented as a romantic thing. The wise older man, teaching the misguided younger girl a lesson. About something, I was never exactly sure what, but definitely it was somehow about boobs.) This tended to come up in conversation at home because until I was in my 40s I was always quite thin and flat chested, and I was self-conscious about it. The models of womanhood I learned from TV all seemed to be well-endowed and consequently desired by men who thus decided to claim them and to take care of them. (The model of romance I grew up with was fairly parasitical: like a lamprey, your beloved attached itself to you and thus began the dream of lifelong codependency. Partner as caretaker. Took me decades well into adulthood, and two marriages, to be able to see and then grow out of that.) The boobs seemed crucial to the whole operation. Tough luck for skinny me. I think my mom was trying to be reassuring with the handfuls and the teacups and the bras unceremoniously torn off in the restaurants and such.

So you can imagine the bummer it was to finally have gained some weight (thanks, midlife hormones; thanks, pandemic) and and to have started getting to know this new curvy body when it was apparently time to look under the hood, and, lo, to find Problem Boobs there. (Well, the right boob is great: everyone loves the right boob. Top marks for the old gal. It’s lefty that’s the troublemaker.)

Idiot that I am, the first troublesome mammogram result that came back didn’t even register as troublesome. What the fuck did I know: test results said "imaging incomplete," I figured someone had smudged something, blurry photo or whatever, hadn't held still enough in the machine, no big deal. (I am really very extremely smart about some things. And I am quite a cheerful bumbling moron about others.) Two more imaging appointments later, lefty got the all clear. Figured we were through it. then came the next annual screening. Swapped nodules for calcifications this time, and in we went again. I’ve been to the breast imaging center so many times in the span of a single year that I’ve adopted a kind of swagger in there: Hayyyyy, Nurse Whatsyername howyoudoin, These gowns amirite, etc. I bring my leather jacket into the waiting area to wear over my gown for the long appointments. It’s a vibe.

Twice a week, while my mother was in hospice care at home, a nurse would come to the house, take her vitals, change the dressings on her bedsores if we hadn’t gotten to it yet that day. Once a week, a care worker would come to give my mother a sponge bath, if she let them. At one of these visits, the care worker took my mother’s top off (there was no shame by that point; throughout her illness my mother demanded that we see her body, exposing herself to us constantly in what came to feel like a kind of assault) and so this care worker looked at my mother’s chest and sighed and said, So it took your breasts, too. Meaning, the cancer. Meaning, the cancer had eaten these relics of my mother's past as a beautiful, desired young woman who drove men to extremities that included ripping her undergarments off of her, unannounced and uninvited, in public places. Meaning her body was consuming its own history.

Before all of this, there had been two instances in my childhood when I remembered seeing my mother's boobs. The first was in a topless Polaroid my father had hanging inside the door of his armoire. The second was when I came home early from school one day, walked into the house, and found my mother doing some sort of naked calisthenics in the bedroom, ostensibly - other evidence indicated - after an afternoon tumble in the sheets with my father. Boobs marked a woman as a (hetero)sexual object, is what I took from all this. Boobs were sex things. You wanted boobs, because then someone would want you, would take care of you, was the general lesson, here. And if you were a woman, you needed to be taken care of.

You’ll recall that I didn’t have boobs, at this point. I used to put two round pink stickers on my chest, each with a little piece of brown sticker in the middle, and look at myself in the mirror. I’m not sure what I thought I was getting at, but on some level I felt like it was an experiment in Womanhood. I would practice, with the help of the stickers, so that when I finally Became A Woman, I would be prepared. I wanted to know what it felt like, to have the body parts that ensured you would be ok in the world, because someone would make everything ok, all thanks to your boobs. Even in adulthood, I would jokingly ask partners and husbands if they would prefer me with breast implants. Ha ha. … Ha ha ha. (It wasn’t a joke.)

Spoiler, and I’m sorry to be the bearer etc etc if this is coming as news at this particular juncture: there is not, in fact, someone who makes everything ok. There is no checklist of things that if you just gradually tick them all off, at that point and forevermore everything will be Just Fine. There is no doing-the-general-life-stuff equivalent of retirement savings: put the right percentage away every month and eventually you'll be Safe. Boobs or no boobs. No one is coming to save you. 

People are, however, around to care for you, that is, if you can identify that care and receive it when it's happening. This is what they tell me. I’m not sure I know, yet (anymore), what it is to be cared for. How to incorporate that into a life without being overwhelmed with gratitude that's shall we say perhaps disproportionate to the gesture. After two years of pandemic lockdown alone in my house, someone came over and made me a peanut butter sandwich - it was lunchtime, it seemed like the thing to do - and I was undone. Carry my bag at the bus station and it will send me into days of turning over whether and how I deserved such a kindness. The sandwich-maker, the luggage-carrier, my savior, my hero, my small pantheon. These are the kinds of things, I am told, that people do for one another. I have never been good at taking these kinds of things for granted. There comes a point where appreciation can start to feel pathological, disproportionate. It confuses people who are not, themselves, used to being in the constant quiet crouch of vigilant solitude waiting for the coming of The Bad Thing. If you could image that fear in my body, I wonder if it would show up as calcifications, as nodules, dissolved by peanut butter sandwiches.

In another life, I will be the small goddess of taken for granted things. When you open the fridge door, I’ll be there, unobtrusive, handing you unexpired condiments and unmoldy fruit, perishables that have not perished, not just yet.