It's Always Something (19 page)

As the month following the last chemo went by, my strength returned. I could taste wellness. I felt so well that I got depressed because I had to go into the hospital again. I also found that I was angry about the whole second-look surgery. There I was in what I hoped would be the last steps of this cancer, but I hated that I had to take a couple of steps backward in order to go forward again. After the surgery, I would have to wait four days to find out the results of the biopsies. I couldn’t help but think about how I would feel if they did find more cancer. I worried that it would destroy my faith in my own sensibility and my sense about my body. I felt so clean and clear and healthy that if they found something, I would really feel out of control. The issue of control plagued me—that despite the war I was waging, and my endurance, I couldn’t control the outcome.

Joanna said to me that in a way it didn’t matter what happened because I had learned to live with cancer. I had learned that life goes on and you can still feel well and accomplish things, and that I really had nothing to be scared of because I knew, even with cancer, life would go on anyway. It was true. In the last six months my life hadn’t stopped. I certainly had days when I didn’t feel well, but I also had as many days of joy when I accomplished things—met with old friends, made new friends, rediscovered sex and life with my husband, began writing my book, started managing my home and career again. It wasn’t easy. It required a lot of inner strength, and a lot of support. I had to use my imagination to get through it. The most important thing was what I learned from Joanna, not to let my life stop while I was battling cancer. Lots happened that was fun and wonderful while I was in treatment. I laughed and saw movies and read. My life didn’t stop. If I had to go through chemotherapy again, I would, because it’s an investment in my future. I invested ten days of yuck to get ten good days and then to get forty, fifty or sixty years of life. That was what I wanted.

If there were more cancer, I could handle it, but boy, would I be pissed off. You would hear me screaming wherever you lived. People would hear me stomping and raging everywhere. Enough was enough. I wanted to get on with my good health. I wanted the direction of my life back under my control.

I remember when I was eight years old in Florida, there was the cutest little boy. His name was Mark and he used to ride his bike around our block. He must have been a couple of years older than I was, and he was always riding around the block. This one day I was sitting out on the front porch and he rode by and stopped his bike. He was standing there straddling it with one foot on the curb. He yelled to me, “The other morning I saw you outside in your underwear.”

“You did not.”

“I did—you were out there right on the front porch in your underwear.”

“You did not! I never was!”

He said, “I did.”

It went on and on like that, and then he rode away, and I sat there thinking,
Did I go outside in my underwear? Could I have made some horrible mistake? Did I go into a trance or some temporary insanity where I walked out on the front porch in my underwear and Mark happened to be riding on his bike at the same time and saw me?
I made a pact with myself right then, at eight years old, that no one was going to catch me off guard like that again. Mark made me feel out of control and I wanted to be in control. My father’s death made me feel out of control, and now cancer had me in its uncertain clutches.

Comedy is very controlling—you are making people laugh. It is there in the phrase
“making
people laugh.” You feel completely in control when you hear a wave of laughter coming back at you that you have caused. Probably that’s why people in comedy can be so neurotic and have so many problems. Sometimes we talk about it as a need to be loved, but I think with me it was also a need to control. I’ll make the decision whether to come out in my underwear or not, and I’ll make the decision whether you see it or not. It’s like standing in front of a whole group of people and having them under your spell, having them in your power, and not letting them get at you first. The hard part about illness and cancer is that it feels so out of control. At The Wellness Community they teach you how to take charge—to participate in your fight for recovery. But they are careful to explain that participation can become a variable in favor of getting well, but sometimes the outcome of the disease is totally out of a person’s control. Whatever happens, it isn’t the patient’s fault. There are so many overwhelming factors involved—environment, genetics, the progress of medical science. Our own actions can aid in our recovery, but having cancer made me realize that we can’t control the outcome.

If the second-look surgery is all clear, I will feel like the most powerful person in the world because I’ll feel like I have beaten cancer. It must give you a big sense of confidence because even now I can feel cocky in a way I never have in my life—even pudgy and with no hair. I have my red badge of courage. I feel like I have been so courageous, like I have medals on, like the guys coming back after the war, the confidence they must have felt.

Memorial Day 1987 was the first time I went out anywhere without my head wrapped in a turban. I just felt bold that day. I put on lots of makeup and went to a party in Malibu. There were a few people I didn’t know but mostly it was my friends who had been through the whole thing with me. I walked in and they all knew how proud I was of myself. I had a big smile on my face. For some reason my hair was growing straight out with no curls in it. It looked like a long crew cut sticking straight out. A friend at the party said I looked like one of those newborn Easter chicks. Everyone kept patting me on the head. They couldn’t resist it because if felt like a baby’s downy hair.

I got in a very funny mood, even feisty. They had a big buffet and I took cuts in the line and kept saying “Get out of my way” to everyone. I did it on purpose to make them laugh. I was pushing people in the line and cutting ahead of them, and saying, “Get that spoon out of there!” It was almost like a little child stood up and walked around and started pushing people around. They were laughing.

I walked on the beach. I had had something on my head for over six months. By the ocean I felt that my head was back out in the wind and sunshine. I was happy and felt so clean and fresh. Gene was proud of me, and there was a man there who took a photograph of me. Weeks later he sent me the photo and it was so ugly and dopey I couldn’t believe it. You can see right through to my scalp. There are bald places and my face is pudgy and round from steroids. My reflection was ugly, at least in my opinion, but I remember I felt beautiful.

On Wednesday, June 3, the day before my second-look surgery, I felt a little giddy and excited just because I was actually at the last step of the prescribed program. The phones had been ringing all day. It felt just like before opening night in show business. Everybody calling and wishing me luck—break a leg. Feeling the love from people, feeling how strongly they wanted me to succeed. With that kind of support and love, I didn’t see how anything bad could possibly happen. My forty-first birthday would be June 28 and I was already planning a huge celebration party with all my friends, my nurses, my doctors and their wives. Gene and I planned to travel back to Connecticut a few weeks after my birthday. We hadn’t been there for almost a year.

But I was also terribly nervous. I kept singing my little cancer battle song over and over in my head. I was on an all-liquid diet and down to eating just Popsicles, Jell-O, bouillon cubes, gum and hard candies. Fortunately, these are all my favorite foods. I made a trip to a store called the Bodhi Tree to buy an amethyst crystal. I found a real pretty amethyst crystal that fit right on the chain on my neck, and then I drove back home.

Check-in time at the hospital was 5:00
P.M.
—same room, same bed. I had everything packed and ready, and Gene came home and packed to spend the night at the hospital with me. As soon as we got in, I had the usual tests: weighing in, blood tests, and so forth. All were normal. Then came the parade of doctors telling me what would happen the next morning. First came the anesthesiologist, whom I told I wanted to regain consciousness quickly after surgery because the Lakers were playing—the second game of the Boston-Lakers play-off series was at 6:00
P.M
., and I wanted to see it no matter what. So he decided to give me some kind of epidural needle so I would be up by 6:00
P.M
. to see the game. Aha, the little devil woman still trying to keep control and have her surgery. That evening, Gene slept over in the next room, and we watched TV and laughed, and I actually went to sleep quite peacefully.

At 5:00
A.M
., Jodi and my night nurse woke me. More enemas (I’d had them the night before, too). Gene was sleeping peacefully in the next room. By 6:00
A.M
. they had me all ready and rolled me down to surgery. There I was on the table in the hallway seeing all my doctors, all the familiar faces in their blue scrub outfits with little blue hats. I had one on, too. I sang my cancer song to the gynecological surgeon. Just as I finished and saw his face brighten up with laughter, I slipped out of the conscious world. The next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room with Jodi there saying:

“It was all clean.”

And then I saw Gene and he said, “It was all clean.”

It was all pink and bright and healthy inside just like the terry-cloth towel I had been imagining for the last six months. They still had to check all the biopsies. They had taken biopsies, but the gynecological oncologist said, “Nothing looked suspicious and there weren’t any hard parts that were scary. It was all pink and well.”

The assistant operating nurse, Joan, was thrilled. She said it was all pink. The whole peritoneal cavity was pink and bright and clear and healthy-looking. Before you knew it, I was back up in my room, and by 6:00
P.M
., sure enough, I was watching the Lakers game. Not the best game in the world; the Lakers routed the Celtics again.

During the surgery the doctors had installed a catheter in my stomach in case I needed further treatment and for diagnostic purposes. Previously, I’d received all chemotherapy intravenously. If I needed further treatment, it would be in the form of peritoneal washes where the chemicals would go directly into the peritoneal cavity through this catheter. As a diagnostic procedure, every month water would be passed through the catheter into the cavity and then taken out and checked for cancer cells. These washes are an important advance in monitoring ovarian cancer. And the catheter was comfortable and hardly noticeable.

So we had a little celebration. Gene was on the phone, talking to my mother and my brother with tears in his eyes; nurses were coming to me with tears in their eyes. I lay there contented. In the back of my mind was the fear that something would show up in the biopsies, but the fear couldn’t compare with the joy of pinkness.

But major surgery is major surgery. It whips the life out of you. Over the next three days I had so much painkiller that I couldn’t tell whether I was feeling good or feeling drugged. The waiting for the lab reports on the biopsies was difficult. Of course I could choose to look at the rest of my life that way, as a time of waiting, waiting for cancer cells to show up. Or I could just live my life each day.

On Monday morning, four days after surgery, I felt the pain of the incision going away. I got all cleaned up, tidied up my hair, put on a little cologne and waited for the doctors. Everybody—the internist, the Alchemist, the gynecological oncologist, the gynecologist, the gynecological surgeon—would be by. I had on a new nightgown that morning and Jodi made my bed with clean sheets. The room seemed fresh.

Jodi was out of the room for a while, and when she came back, she said she had been downstairs at the lab. She had asked the technician who was doing my biopsies what the results were, and he had said, “They’re fine, but I want to wait to talk to the gynecological oncologist.” It perplexed her, and she told me so. That was the first feeling I got that something was wrong. I could tell that Jodi felt something was wrong.

The next person I remember seeing was the gynecological oncologist. He sat down in the chair by my bed. He is a cute little man, my age or a year older. He sat down across from me and he said, “We have the biopsy reports and they have found that out of the forty-two biopsies, there were two microscopic cancer cells still seen. They were not highly active, malignant cells like you originally had, but they are still on the malignancy spectrum.”

He continued by saying the cells were not in my vital organs, but in the pelvic region. The prescribed mode of treatment would be six chemotherapies of cisplatin that would go directly into the peritoneal cavity through my newly installed catheter. The treatments would be a month apart. The side effects wouldn’t be as rough as the ones before and he would not administer the chemicals the way the Alchemist had. He didn’t believe in giving heavy doses of steroids after treatment to delay the nausea; he thought it was better for the patient to have the side effects and get them over with sooner. So instead of my being sick for ten days, he thought I would be sick for three or four.

He said, “I feel very positive. In your particular case, where the cells were left and how much was left, I am sure we can get them.”

And then, very sweetly, he said, “So Gilda, you will just have to put up with me a little bit longer.”

He got up and and walked out, but when I looked over at his chair, I saw he had forgotten his briefcase.

It was like a comedy routine. Even though he seemed secure and confident when he was talking to me, very open and direct, he forgot his briefcase. To me it symbolized the uncertainty I would have to live with. This doctor had thought, like everybody else, that there wouldn’t be any cancer left. No one ever knows for certain.

A short while later the gynecological surgeon, the one who wears clogs, came in and sat down. He was wonderful. He said, “I have thought about this and I think it’s a good thing.”