#24 A Biopsy Induced Stream of Consciousness

Life in a 48 hour fever dream.

I get a biopsy on tissue in my left breast that seems discontent, an outlier of tissue that doesn’t quite look like the rest of it. It’s the tissue that doesn’t look like it belongs, but it is there and so I am here. Everyone in the unit offers me a sad smile along with a “How are you doing?” but I’m not sure if it’s because the world is burning, so what does it matter, or that the Effexor is finally working, but I’m not interested in worrying about what this is until it presents itself as something. Somehow in this moment, I subconsciously take my cues from the little I know of Daoism - living as a part of the chaos of the universe knowing I have very little control over anything else. Or maybe it’s not Daoism, maybe it’s Joni Mitchell.

Every brand in the world could take a cue from the breast radiology department at Pennsylvania Hospital. I doubt they have a brand architecture anywhere, but they live, laugh, love their brand of live, laugh, love. There is not a man in sight and everyone has a sad smile and/or an over-the-top demeanor. There are inspirational quotes everywhere - in needlepoint, on beaded bracelets, on posters, and framed signs. The saddest places in the world are the ones that want to convince you to be happy. Disneyworld is not the happiest place on earth, it’s the nucleus of late-stage capitalism covered in bright colors and fireworks. 

I now have a metal marker in my left breast from where the tissue was taken. I feel like I am micro-chipped, that now if I am lost, they will be able to identify me. Just like they can identify my aging canine companion. I ask too many questions during the procedure, but it’s not every day that you can watch a long needle entering your body on a screen in front of you and I want to know everything. I watch the ultrasound of this foreign object making its way around the tissue that doesn’t belong, like the sperm in the opening credits of Look Whose Talking. Look Who's Talking, a movie that doesn’t get the credit it deserves for being the true innovator it is. I take issue sometimes with society and those who get to decide what’s good and what isn’t, what deserves space in the canon and what doesn’t, and of course, my decades-old argument about why Adam Duritz is just as important as Jeff Tweedy and Billy Joel as Bruce Springsteen (sorry, Dad). 

I take the day off from work after having my microchip implanted to deal with the other important things in life - a manicure, a pedicure, a spray tan. As if a biopsy were just another part of the ongoing, ever-expanding set of things you do as a woman to retain a semblance of control in your life as you age and your body act like a petulant, angsty teenager who HATES you and wants nothing to do with you and will rebel as she pleases, thank you. I walk through the square on my way home and the Hare Krishnas are out and sitting on a beautifully woven blanket with their hand instruments chanting their chant 108 times. My mom forced me to watch Hair when I was a child, which now I love, but of course, then didn’t understand. I say this only because the Maha mantra has lived rent-free in my head since I was about seven and it was only a few years ago that I realized that not every Hare Krisha chanted with such a catchy melody as the one by Ragni / Rado / McDermott. Beads, Flowers, Freedom, Happiness, and all of it or none of it or whatever. 

Hare Krishna offer their food to those around them before they eat. Hare Krishnas and I are very similar in this way. I imagine though, that for them it’s a symbol of respect and I’m pretty sure that for me it’s a symbol of control. I think about what I will eat or won’t eat when I get home. I guess the Krishnas derive their pleasure from the otherworldly as they chant the name of the source of all pleasure, Krisha Rama. Apparently, there is another derived meaning to the chant as well when referring to Hari - he who removes illusion. But I wonder in a world where every other podcast has a guest who tells us that we aren’t too far from robots taking over the world, isn’t everything basically an illusion? 

(cue Jurassic Park theme)

I notice a deep rumble in my stomach when I walk. Once (and sometimes still if we’re being honest) a deep point of pride, this emptiness pulls me from the depths of this Maha mantra swirl. A rapid thirty-pound weight gain has me on a righteous diet of Metaformin, over analyzing and out of network, deeply out of pocket costs. When I think about what I eat in moments of trauma, I always think about salad pizza. 

It’s something I find wildly important, pizza with salad on top. 

Before millennial chefs with glossy blonde hair and abs and books featuring only sans serif type suggested that salad pizza was the new thing that you really should be eating to show people how much you don’t care about what’s cool, I used to eat salad pizza at a place called Silly’s in Portland, Maine. I’m pretty sure that small plates and tasting menus and license plates from New York killed Silly’s, but it could have just as easily been mismanagement of money or an unsustainably large menu or the rent could have just become too damn high, or maybe all good things really do just come to an end. 

The salad pizza at Silly’s came with arugula on top, but I always asked for Greek salad on top. One of my favorite things to do is to take Greek Salad, which is already the best of salads, and add things that make my soul happy.  In fact, there is another place in Portland where the New York license plates haven’t gotten to yet where I used to order a Greek salad with chicken fingers on top, a Sprite, and a Miller High Life, all together. This is the perfect trauma meal because of the depths of the tastes and textures, allowing you to re-focus on a menagerie of sensorial highs instead of whatever is ailing you - a sip of the sweet Sprite, the tangy crunch of the romaine drenched in Sysco Greek dressing, the kind that comes from the 10-pound tub, but that you would believe was Paul Newman if they poured it into a Paul Newman bottle before they put it in front of you. You get the brininess of the feta, feta that is too good to be eating at a Dive bar, that fat-soaked saltiness of the chicken fingers that were frozen only moments ago, the bitterly refreshing wash of the High Life, and then the nothingness of an out of season tomato. Maybe that’s why I loved this salad so much, it was the highest of highs and ultimately the lowest of lows. How much lower would our collective carbon footprint be if we stopped shipping out-of-season tomatoes and wouldn’t a half-melted ice cube in your salad parallel it perfectly instead? 

Ok back to Silly’s salad pizza. I distinctly remember eating Silly’s salad pizza after being taunted by men* with cardboard cutouts of a fetus as I walked out of planned parenthood, cells that may or may not turn into a child one day, gone. Salad pizza in all of its crunchy, salty, fatty, and tangy glory softens the come down as my brain was still being attacked by the hormones that got away, by the Ativan that made everything hurt less, and by the weird euphoria of being done with it. Vegetables marred by anything that we have convinced ourselves erodes our moral or physical superiority is my preferred trauma meal. 

(*Nothing gets me more riled up than Men outside of a Planned Parenthood. Every time I pass them by I turn into Mercutio as he lay dying. A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES, SIRS.)

The existence of food is strange when your life feels out of your hands. In fact, the existence of anything else feels a little frivolous. It is an amazing thing to exist in the world while there is a small piece of your body in a lab somewhere in the hands of a stranger who will determine the rest of your life. Life moves so quickly that it is the small moments when it feels really real, the moment in the office when you realize the Tylenol is wearing off and wonder if people can actually see the growing black and blue mark of the entrance of the needle under your monogrammed jacket. Or sitting in a ballroom in a little black dress wondering if your legs look okay and then remembering that maybe your legs are just fine and what about the tiny piece of tissue? How does that look? 

An hour before I leave for one of my best friends’ weddings, the doctor calls me and tells me I am fine. The discontent tissue it turns out is just one of those things that happens to … premenopausal women. At this moment, an hour before I see a gaggle of people, some of whom I’ve known since I was in single digits, most of whom I’ve known since very low double digits, this takes my breath away. “It’s nothing really, it’s just something that happens to some women… around your age.”  I am of course, full of relief at the sound of benign. Pre-menopausal explains unexplained 30lb weight gains and night sweats and exhaustion, it makes sense. But it’s also a very strange thing to hear said aloud. 

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. Being a woman is a chore. It’s a privilege, but it is a chore. Because as it turns out, my body is not acting like a petulant teenager, it is acting exactly as it wants to act, which if my mind is any indicator, becomes more and more eccentric with every passing year. There will be a next time where maybe I won’t be OK. But because I am OK now I will try to embrace the idea of getting older instead of hiding from it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a simple task.

Like feeding everyone else before I feed myself, I will resume a false sense of control and continue to freeze my forehead, to lift my weights, track my caloric intake and my steps, and my TH4 levels. But like trying to control the dinosaurs at Isla Nublar, or the robots of the modern day, true control of our own physical selves is impossible. However, I’m still not convinced that availing ourselves of it is right either. Perhaps Hari, he who removes illusion, has the answer.  For now, it’s just about finding the point where pandemonium and at least a feeling of control can exist in harmony. 

… talk about candy-coated capitalism.

xo
LCF