Chuckles, the cancer clown

It’s a gray, muzzy Saturday here in Seattle and I have to say the external weather and my internal mood are perfectly matched.

I’m not sure what happened. Last night, I went out with a slew of journalistic types — smart, snarky sorts with more quips up their sleeves than tattoos (which is saying something for Seattle) — and I had a perfectly lovely time meeting new people and yammering with old buds. One of those buds was a colleague I hadn’t seen in more than a year, which meant we had a lot of catching up to do.

In other words, there was a lot of cancer talk.

As usual when I’m out with a group of people who know about my situation, I became Chuckles, the Cancer Clown, cracking wise about the double mastectomy, the chemo, the hair loss, the radiation, the daily doses of tamoxifen — the whole nine yards. Listening to me talk about my breast cancer experience, you’d think it was all a big hoot. You’d think I wasn’t a bit fazed by the loss of my beautiful breasts and the fact that my chest now looks like a 10-year-old boy’s that’s been badly ironed.

Sure, my nipples are crooked and there are wrinkles and folds where there used to be lovely feminine mounds. But so what? I’ve got fabulous new fake boobs, given to me by a friend of a friend who got them at Nordstrom for $300 each. “I call them my gummi boobs!” I tell my editor buddy. “Aren’t they great? I can just hand them to some guy if he wants to feel me up and I’m not into it. And when I get tired of ’em, I can just tuck ’em away in a drawer!”

Watching me laugh and joke about my wig — made from my own hair which I had to shave to save (one of the hardest decisions of my life) — you’d never imagine me pounding my bathroom mirror, sobbing “Come back! Come back! Oh god, please come back!” at my patchy bald pate during those horrible long months following chemo.

I hide the pain, the anguish, the grief, the whole horrible mindfuck that is cancer treatment quite well. At least when I’m out with friends.

Once I’m home, though, things are different. Chuckles slips away and I’m left with Cancer Chick, the girl who winces as she pulls off the wig (the double stick tape is attached to new growth now and takes out a chunk of hair with each wear). After the wig is gone, Cancer Chick then changes into a nightgown and diligently rubs castor oil all over her chest — or what’s left of it — hoping it will soak into the skin and the muscle beneath and make it possible for the skin to stretch enough to hold tissue expanders and eventually implants. Hopefully, not implants that will encapsulate or explode once they’re inside.

Of course, this may all be for naught. Thanks to radiation — you should hear my stand-up routine on that particular topic — the skin on the left side might not stretch. It might not heal. So I may be forced to have some kind of complicated surgery that harvests a chunk of muscle and tissue from some other part of my body in order to build a boob there.

“I may end up with a butt for a boob,” I told my friend last night and we both howled at the wackiness of that.

I’m sure part of it was the beer. Part of it was the discomfort of having to talk about cancer in a group setting. Part of it was my almost fanatical insistence on making others feel comfortable about the fact that I’ve somehow ended up with this lousy, terrifying disease. And part of it — and this particularly grim blog post, no doubt — is the tamoxifen that has me swinging back and forth like a emotional version of Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to have a stick up your ass about your problems all the time. Black humor is what got me through my warzone of a childhood and it has served me well through this current cancer zone, as well.

But it’s also good to remember — to acknowledge to myself and to others — that sometimes my cancer is not going to be amusing. It’s actually going to make me cry in front of you. Or stay at home curled in a ball under my coffee table. And despite the fact that I’m no longer in treatment, my grand cancer adventure is not over by a long shot.

Although, thankfully, neither is Chuckles’ brave little standup routine.