Heather King - Stripped: At the Intersection of Cancer, Culture, and Christ

Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.

C. G. Jung

So the help goes away again without helping.

One of a series of notes written when, due to tuberculosis of the larynx, Franz Kafka could no longer speak

It is characteristic of the true lover that the more he loves, the more he wants to love.

anonymous English mystic, The Cloud of Unknowing, circa 1370

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2015 Heather King

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Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover art credit: imagesource/Veer

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8294-4263-2

Based on the print edition: 978-0-8294-4262-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939790

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The century of health, hygiene and contraceptives, miracle drugs and synthetic foods, is also the century of the concentration camp and the police state, Hiroshima and the murder story. Nobody thinks about death, about his own death, as Rilke asked us to do, because nobody leads a personal life. Collective slaughter is the fruit of a collectivized way of life.

Octavio Paz, from The Day of the Dead

At 4:28 on the afternoon of January 3, 2000, I breezed into the lobby of Mercy General Hospital, just west of downtown L.A. Glancing at the heart-shaped Mylar balloons, the saccharine greeting cards, the cheesy arrangements of carnations and babys breath that spilled from the gift store, I wondered which would be more depressing: sickness itself, or having to lie in bed surrounded by that schlock. Then I clipped a visitors badge to my arty black sweater, took the elevator to the second floor, and signed in at the radiology department. Under Reason for Visit, I wrote Mammogram.

Id purposely taken the last available appointment of the day so as not to cut into my schedule of writing and errands, and having squeezed into the previous three hours a trip to Supercuts, a clothes-buying spree at the Hollywood Goodwill, and a visit to the library, I found the waiting room eerily still. The only other patient was an old black woman with bandaged legs, dozing in a wheelchair. Sickly fluorescent light trickled from the ceiling, a series of air-brushed sunset photos hung from the opposite wall, and beneath a sign that said Coffee for Patients Only, the hot plate sat empty.

A pleasant young gal with the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on her neck made a copy of my insurance card and motioned for me to take a seat. Littered over chairs, strewn across end tables, and overflowing from two plastic holders bolted to the counter were copies of a breast-cancer magazine called MAMM. The name made me snicker: years ago my husband, Tim, and I had seen a friend in a stage production of Little Women, and he sometimes still called me Marmie. Marm. Are you coming to bed, Marm? Im going out, Marm; do we need anything at the store? A marmogram.

I picked up a MAMM, paged randomly through to a table showing survival statistics, and quickly put the magazine down. Id had a mammogram every year since I turned forty, seven years before, and though I always acted as if I were performing a civic duty under mild duress, as if the whole thing were a big waste of time because, of course, I was fine, deep down I always approached the appointments with dread. That the payoff for conscientiousness might be disfigurement, suffering, and death seemed so unfairif so typically one of lifes myriad ironies.

I sighed, opened the book Id broughtRilkes Letters to a Young Poetand began reading:

In the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied [to] you to write. This above allask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple I must, then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must[]

Miss King! I heard, and looked up to see a pretty, dark-haired woman in a polyester op-art smock.

Right here, I said, scurrying to grab my purse.

You were reading, she scolded. I called your name twice, and you just kept on reading.

Sorry I mumbled, thinking, So is reading a crime now? My forays into the real world tend to be halting and tentative, and I enjoy them for only limited periods of timelike visits to relativesuntil I gratefully retreat again to my books.

I followed the woman down the hall to a windowless cinder-block room, painted pale orange, where she flung me a wrinkled paisley johnny, motioned to an enclosure in the corner, and ordered, Undress from the waist up.

Behind the makeshift curtain, I draped my black muscle shirt and black bra over a padded chrome chair, donned my johnny, told myself Id be back in ten minutes, and emerged. Against the far wall hulked a large, insect-like machine of beige metal. I approached gingerly.

Turn to the right, the technician said, and I instinctively stiffened. I knew exactly what to expect, but that made me more, not less, nervous. She hefted my left breast onto a glass plate; massaged my treasured appendage flat, like a piece of dough whose edges might spring back if released; and electronically lowered a second piece of glass, snatching her fingers away so as to prevent mangling them, and leaving my own flesh compressed in a painful, viselike grip. That a single breast could cover so much groundsquished out flat down there, the thing could have been a pie crustwas mesmerizing.

Then she stepped behind a screen to take a picture, repeated the procedure on the other side, and slapped some labels on the slides. Hold on; Im just running these down to the radiologist, she threw over her shoulder, and disappeared down the hall.

I perched on the edge of a plastic chair with my book, but all the people in scrubs and lab coats walking by made concentrating difficult; besides, my johnny was missing a tie and I needed both hands to clutch the front shut. I tried to empty my mind, the way the contemplative mystics I so admired were able to do. But Id planned on taking a walk afterward, I wanted to be home by six when Tim, an intensive-care nurse, left for his night shift, and after a few minutes I started getting edgy. When the technician finally cruised back in, I was all set to jump up, get dressed, and bolt. And then I heard the nine words that ripped my world apart.

He wants a second picture of your left breast, she announced, casually loading a new slide.

Adrenaline jolted through my body like electricity; I had a sudden urge to sink to my knees and grab her around the ankles.

WHY? I pleaded, in a weirdly loud voice.

Oh, he thinks he might have seen a little shadow, she said, beckoning me back to the machine with the merest hint of impatience.

I was incapable of responding with any degree of alacrity, as the part of my brain that governs motor skills had been appropriated by a mile-high neon sign pulsing CANCER! CANCER!! CANCER!!! Eventually I shuffled over, weak with frightit was as if, in the space of seconds, Id been transformed into an old ladyand robotically removed my arm from the johnny.