The Longest Date: Life as a Wife (4 page)

I
t was recently pointed out to me that when it comes to dealing with illness in our marriage, Ian is the more nurturing one. The fact that it was Ian who pointed this out (and it wasn’t the first time he’s done so) makes me feel he should lose a few nurturing points. I can’t imagine Mother Teresa bragging about how much more nurturing she was than everyone else in the leper colony, but, putting that aside, I have noticed that whenever I wake up with a sore throat or cold, Ian rises to the occasion almost eagerly, heating water for Theraflu, arming me with the remote, plying me with vitamin C, and getting chicken soup or sometimes even
making
chicken soup.

I am reluctant to mention this other thing—my “dingaling privileges”—because Ian sounds disproportionately devoted (or deranged) already. But there have been times while we were trying to get pregnant that I was bedridden (sometimes for hopeful reasons, sometimes for tragic ones), and in order to keep my spirits up, Ian announced that anytime I called, “Dingaling!” he would rush to my bedside, respond, “Yes, my love?” and do whatever I asked. Then one year he took it a step further and got me an actual brass dinner bell engraved with the words “Cindy’s Dingaling Privileges,” which he said I could ring whenever I was sick, or for the full nine months if I did get pregnant.

Wow, right? I know. It’s not as sugary sweet as it sounds (well, maybe it is), but I would at least like to assure you that the bell has not been abused by me, or used for sexual favors (which would make for better reading), and I would now like to unring that bell and have you forget I ever mentioned it except as an example of how over-the-top kind Ian can be when he is called upon to nurture.

I, on the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, do not enjoy taking care of a sick husband as much as I had imagined I might. I had visions of bringing my spouse soup on a tray accompanied by a flower in a bud vase and a carefully folded newspaper, like movie spouses do. Like Ian does. But that was not to be.

I would like to believe I will get better at nurturing with age (it will certainly become more necessary with age), but despite the example Ian set with the kindness of the bell (damn that bell!), I maintain that there is something about seeing your husband with a cold (even if he’s a very nice husband) that is just not appealing.

Of course, if Ian were seriously ill, that would be another matter. If he had something life-threatening or immobilizing, I feel certain I would rise to the occasion as I have for many friends over the years, but we’re talking about a cold.

I would like to add here that I rarely get sick. I get sick maybe once every year or two, and only for a few days. So taking care of me could be considered almost a novelty.

Ian seems to get sick more often (“like a regular person,” he would insist, because he thinks it’s weird that I get sick so infrequently). But when the fuzzy sock is on the other foot, when I wake to hear him sneezing in sets of seven without covering his mouth, coughing seemingly for dramatic effect, unable to open his eyes when he hoarsely talks—especially if he was out drinking the night before (which is sometimes the case, in my defense)—he just seems . . . weak.

And he
is
weak at that moment, I know! He is legitimately weak and compromised and in need of love and nurturing, and for some reason I find this state so unattractive in a spouse, especially a male spouse, that it renders me unable to be as kind and empathetic as I should be.

By now it should be clear that I don’t deserve a husband, let alone a bell. If it helps, I am as shocked and disappointed by this failure as Ian probably was. Until I got married, I was completely unaware that I had this bitchy inner nurse who just wants everyone to get up and get back to business, but I do, and—what can I say?—she hates her job.

Meanwhile, who would have thought that Ian, the guy who said he didn’t even want a relationship, would turn out to be such a loving, caring knight in shining armor, literally?

Luckily, or unluckily, I didn’t have to wait until I married him to find that out. I discovered it right before our wedding, on my fortieth birthday, because on my fortieth birthday I got a mammogram.

Not as a gift. And not as a celebration, in the way that you might get a tattoo on your birthday, or go skydiving. It wasn’t something I had always wanted to do. I simply had made a routine appointment at Sloan-Kettering in New York, and I didn’t appreciate the lameness of the timing until the receptionist asked for my date of birth.

As she wished me a happy birthday, I was reminded of a time, decades earlier, when I first moved to Los Angeles. I was taking a stand-up comedy workshop, and although my 99 Cents store bit was a crowd-pleaser (the “crowd” in this case being the four to five people who were not taking a turn at the mic), it soon became clear that I was a better writer than performer, so a girl in the class asked me to write jokes for her. And that girl was . . . nobody you’ve heard of, because she wasn’t that good, and neither were my jokes. But by way of thanking me, she took me to this trendy restaurant, and for some reason she showed up looking as if she hadn’t showered for days, with no makeup and hair under a scarf. She was slightly strange to begin with, but she usually showered, so this seemed odd. Especially since we were at a trendy restaurant of her choosing.

Now maybe, since I mentioned mammograms, you’re thinking this is going to be about how she was getting chemo and losing her hair, thus the scarf. It’s not that poignant of a story.

It’s about my birthday, because she decided to lie and tell our waiter it was my birthday so he would bring us a free dessert, and as he and the rest of the waitstaff were singing, I was thinking what a sad fake birthday this was. Why would I be out with only my one weird friend (who didn’t even shower) on my birthday? Where were the rest of my fake friends? And my fake boyfriend? And the fake gifts? Even back then, with no fabulousness to back me up, I felt too fabulous for that fake birthday.

So now, at forty, I was definitely too fabulous to be getting a mammogram on my actual birthday. But there I was at Sloan-Kettering, putting on the cotton robe and waiting for my name to be called.

I have some close friends who are breast cancer survivors, and they all benefited greatly from early detection, so I am a believer in the power of the breast sandwich.

That’s what it looks like when you get a mammogram, by the way. Especially if you have large breasts, which I do. I don’t say that to brag. I would be perfectly happy, maybe happier, with perky breasts, but I was blessed (or cursed) with large ones. Of course, I did not know how large they were until, at age thirty-seven, I got my first mammogram, and they were spread out before me in all their flat, fleshy glory. Once, when I was seventeen, I went skydiving, and I can tell you that looking down at the ground from 3,500 feet was not as scary as looking down at my breast sandwich. So, my advice to women who want to live longer and be healthier and happier: do not avoid mammograms, but do avoid looking down when getting one.

Since that first mammogram (which, thankfully, came back normal), my health insurance had changed its policy so that you had to be forty to get a mammogram covered—even though you don’t have to be forty to get breast cancer, thank you very much. In fact, that’s what I argued to some poor, overworked insurance claims person when I called to see why I had to wait. She explained that insurance requirements vary state to state, carrier to carrier, blah blah blah. So anyhow, that’s how I came to be at Sloan-Kettering on my fortieth birthday.

Well, that and also, as I mentioned, I was getting married in a month, and my life was so full of appointments and plans that I hadn’t really thought about what I was scheduling, or when. I only thought about how I could check something, anything, off my to-do list, and eliminating the possibility of breast cancer was a good candidate.

Only that’s not what happened.

The appointment itself went fine, especially since I knew not to look down this time around. And the rest of my birthday was lovely. (Where is there to go but up after a mammogram, really?) But the next day I got a call from Sloan-Kettering saying something was irregular with my left breast, and I needed to come back as soon as possible. “Irregular” and “as soon as possible” are not words you want to hear from a doctor’s office. Even just “left breast”—you don’t want a breast singled out. Breasts come in pairs, and when all is going well, they are treated as pairs.

I immediately began seeing my life as a bad TV movie. I would be a bald bride walking down the aisle, and everyone would be saying how brave I was instead of how beautiful and happy. I imagined the wedding planning getting sidetracked by doctor’s appointments, maybe even the wedding itself getting sidetracked, maybe the wedding being moved up so I could get married before I left the planet. By the time I called Ian at work (thirty seconds later) I was in tears and practically writing my obit.

This was not the first time I’d assumed the worst when it came to my health. At fifteen in the town where I grew up—Tulsa, Oklahoma—I’d secretly plotted for a week how to get to Planned Parenthood to see if I had a sexually transmitted disease. I finally rode my bike there (not a short ride) to learn that not only did I not have the disease, I did not have
sex
. Or “penetration,” as the nurse delicately called it as she rattled through her standard questions. When I asked what that meant exactly, it became clear to her (and me) that the naked fumbling I’d done recently did not count, and to add insult to virginity, she said the blister I was concerned about was most likely from my thighs rubbing together when I walked. So I had cellulite, not syphilis.

Despite that early lesson on not jumping to conclusions, I leapt. In my mind, if not in my breast, I had cancer. Or at least the possibility of cancer. And in that uncertainty, I understood what it meant to be terrified. To know that one test, one call from a doctor, could change your life forever. Thankfully, Ian calmed me down. He said, “Not on my watch. Nothing is going to happen to you on my watch.” That was so sweet and comforting, but it did not stop me from wondering, as he held me in his arms that night,
Who the hell does he think he is? A superhero?! You can’t stop cancer from happening, no matter how much you love someone!

In my fear I felt as if I was totally and irreversibly on my own. Those words had been echoing in my ears ever since my skydiving instructor had said, “When you leave this plane, you are totally and irreversibly on your own.” It wasn’t a tandem jump I had done, but a static cord, so I was, in fact, on my own. And as I floated past the soft green grass of a landing field where you were supposed to land, and headed toward the parking lot of cars, where you were not supposed to land, I realized “on your own” was not the best place for me to be.

While I was attempting to steer (there were cords you could pull to turn slightly right or left), I looked for the giant arrow on the ground that the people who worked there had turned to point me in the right direction for landing, and the parking lot was in the direction the giant arrow was pointing. What I failed to notice (since I was totally and irreversibly on my own) was that, at a certain point, they had turned the arrow in the opposite direction so that I would be heading into the wind, which naturally slows you down. By the time I finally did notice it, it was too late, and I was too low. I remember people yelling supportive things like, “Don’t land on my car!” and I remember that instead of the five-point landing we had practiced over and over (feet, calf muscle, thigh muscle, buttocks, push-up muscle), I did a one-point landing, on my butt, directly onto the gravel.

So I was not so good on my own. And cancer seemed like something you had to do completely on your own, because in the end, it’s a battle inside your own body.

Ian went with me to the follow-up appointment, and this time when I got the mammogram, it was all about the left breast. There were more angles, and more care was taken to get the X-rays exactly right. Then we were told to wait in a special room for results, which looked like a living room, because . . . hopefully I would be?

There was another couple in the room. They were older. They seemed as if they’d been through this before, as if this testing and waiting were part of their lives now, and I feared we might be destined to become people for whom this would become routine as well.

After what seemed like an eternity (twenty minutes?), the nurse asked me to follow her back into the exam area. I remember that Ian did not want to let go of my hand. I thought they might need more film taken, but instead, a female radiologist was waiting to see me. She was sitting in front of my X-rays, which were black and blue and lit from behind. My heart dropped. But she immediately alleviated my worries and told me I was fine. She showed me what had troubled her in the first X-ray, and how the new ones had confirmed that it was just something on the film, or the angle at which the photo was taken. To be honest, I’m not sure what she said. I don’t think I heard anything after “You’re fine.”

So what I learned at forty, a few weeks before my wedding, was that Ian would indeed be a good partner in sickness and in health. He dropped everything to be by my side, and when I emerged from the exam area to tell him I was okay, he cried. It was the first and only sign that he had been as worried as I had been. If he’d had tears and fears before that, he’d kept them to himself.

I also got a tiny taste of what so many of my friends with cancer have gone through and continue to go through every time they see a doctor, not to mention all of the anxious hours and years in between. I feel kind of ridiculous telling this story in light of the real drama my friends and their partners and families have bravely faced. But I think it made me a better person, to appreciate how precious health is, and how everything could change in an instant, and how, even though the people who love you can’t stop difficult things from happening, they will be there when you need them, every scary step of the way.