Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 4

The lighter side of cancer

By Roger Owens

Attention on deck. Our interim action report today will start with a subject near and dear to my heart: boobs. That’s right, titties. Tatas , tits, bazoomas, gaboonzas, breasts, bosoms. The top hamper, headlights, hooters. Jugs, melons, cans, knockers, yabbos, tetas grandes! I like ’em. Love them in fact. I like to look at them, see them move, touch them. Most guys do. Guys have code to talk about them when their wives are present: “Look at the nuts on that dog,” to a buddy, refers to a fine set going by at the mall when the wife might not appreciate a more direct comment. Even gay guys can appreciate a shapely rack. Some guys like them so much they want to get a pair for themselves, and, thanks to modern medicine, they can have them!
    But I have to say, under certain circumstances, things change. Once your wife has somehow contracted breast cancer – excuse me, invasive ductal carcinoma – you just can’t see them the same way. Even that word, “contracted,” seems to fit in with my concept of having been served with a summons by Satan himself, demanding you attend the dance, like it or not. You will RSVP, or you will pay a staggering price, and, even if you do RSVP, you may pay it anyway. When you realize the object of your desire can go bad, like chicken left too long on the kitchen counter, and literally kill the love of your life, you gain a different perspective. You still look, you still desire, but you cannot help your thoughts going in a different direction.

As I said in Part 2, we lost our office manager of many years, Sharon Carlton, to breast cancer just last year. She hadn’t had a mammogram for eight years, and it cost her, big time. It had gone to her lungs, her lymph nodes, and eventually her brain. Yet she kept her sense of humor to the end. Hers had progressed beyond any hope of cure, and they started giving her hormone blockers, which did wonders. She lived for another four+ years, and had surgery only late in the game. I asked her many times if she didn’t want to retire, take time off, but she told me flatly, “They are gonna have to carry me out of here feet-first,” which I told her she had earned, and they damn near did.
    Sharon eventually had to have a double radical mastectomy, and it was no small thing for her; she was no small woman. In fact, she had boobs as big as cannon balls. In spite of that, she recovered swiftly, and was back to work in less than two months. She once pulled up her shirt and showed me her scars, and cracked, “Well, I lost about twenty pounds!” She said no one but her husband, Lenny, long dead, had seen her chest since she was thirteen, and by God I had better be impressed. I dutifully told her I was impressed indeed.
    Sharon was an old Sears Roebuck executive, and never failed to come to work looking the part, in spite of the fact that my business, Sunrise Pest Control, is a one-horse operation with three technicians and an unimpressive little office in a strip of old motel rooms now housing a thrift shop for, of all things, a breast cancer charity, a church-operated car lot for the down-and-out, and a tattoo storefront run by ex-gang-banger black guys who had to escape downtown Fort Pierce because, black or not, they got robbed so often they would have gone out of business otherwise. She wore ironed blouses, creased skirts, nylons and heels, hair done short and bleached, makeup perfect, and nonexistent eyebrows painted on with pencil, every single working day. The black tattoo bangers, stone druggies to a man, smiled and called her “Miss Sharon” whenever she came or went, and backed any fool who dissed her against the wall with promises of imminent mayhem if they didn’t back the fuck off. To this day they lament her passing; they were upset they weren’t told about her viewing at the local funeral parlor and would have been there with their families had they known. I blame myself for that failure. As she lay in her casket, awaiting transport to the military cemetery in Minnesota where Lenny, a Korean War Army vet, awaited her to rest beside him, she had no eyebrows. It wasn’t because of her chemo, but I made it my business to tell the funeral home tech to by God paint her some eyebrows on before she went into eternity or she would curse him with the fleas of a thousand camels in his crotch and he wouldn’t want that, now would he?

My dad died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001, a few days after 9/11 and a few days before his 73rd birthday. He’d been sick off and on for five years, and he too kept his life-long sense of humor until he went into a final coma. A few months before he died, I was helping him to the toilet, and after cleaning up he repeated one of his signature jokes, sticking his finger under my nose. “Here,” he said, “smell this and tell me if my finger went through the toilet paper.”
    He had a million of them, as they say. If you said something made your skin crawl, he would ask, “OK, what does it smell like when your asshole gets around to where your nose is supposed to be?” If you were driving him to appointments and someone didn’t go when the light turned, he’d say, “We got red, yellow, and green. If you don’t like any of those colors, we have a problem.”
    Not long before he died, five years in, with a dozen chemotherapies under his belt, none of which had kept his illness at bay, he told me the worst thing was having to do everything on somebody else’s schedule. What a pain in the ass, he said. “If I’d been hit by a truck five years ago, you would all be over it by now.” The dutiful son, I said, “Yeah, but we wouldn’t have gotten to have you for those years, say good-bye—” He shook his head. “For the guy who has to put up with this crap? I’d have taken the truck.”

I have been doing laundry and some of the heavier cleaning, which Cindy usually does just to practice up, in case the chemo really knocks her out. She is a body-builder, but she is so small, her dainties are little scraps of cloth and lace you could mail in a number-six envelope with no extra postage. Somehow, when she folds them, they come out in these neat little packages that stack and fit in the drawers. When I fold them, they wind up as these pathetic wads that fall over when piled and you have to stuff them forcibly into the drawer, from which they seem determined to escape at all costs.
    She is a gem. Her innate sense of humor is undimmed. She had a left lateral mastectomy, and rather than pay for any prostheses she simply bought a bra-padding insert from Walmart. I said she’s small. More than once since then, she has asked a friend, “Want to see my boob?” And she pulls it out and waves it in their face. Our friend who is an old Navy barnacle we call Swabbie Edwards just about dropped his teeth when she did that. The look on his face was priceless. We were on our boat, which we had already sold, just to have a bottle of champagne on the old girl for fifteen years of good times. But the boat had to go. One more casualty of war.
    So, you see, there is a lighter side, and even when we lose friends and family, we can keep smiling, keep laughing, as long as we have breath in our own frail bodies. Don’t let the bastards drag you down, I say. No one knows how long we have, but we all laugh anyway, so why stop now?

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens