The C Squad

Last night was a girls' night out cancer cabaret. My friend Vicky - herself a veteran of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - took me to meet her neighbor, Lori, a beautiful redhead who's a whirling dervish of ironic wit, open-hearted compassion and fabulous style. She's like the madcap heroine of a a 30s screwball comedy but with a hip sensibility -- Carole Lombard crossed with Susan Sarandon.

Lori had cancer at different times in both breasts and lost them both -- "I got struck by lightning twice."

She was a 34B with breasts so pretty that her surgeon cried about having to remove them. For show and tell, she pulls up her shirt to show me her reconstructions. They are as lovely as she is. The lack of nipples and the faded white scars criss-crossing don't matter at all. A tatoo of a winged skeleton arches across one side.

She has some insightful tips - things that I'm bummed to hear, but that are good to know.

Tamoxifen, the drug I'm likely to be taking for the first year, can cause clinical depression and that's something doctors don't tell you in advance. The other estrogen suppressors that generally follow it for another five years have their own funky side effects.

Once you've had radiation, if cancer recurs in that breast, you must have a mastectomy because your body can't handle additional radiation there. And because radiation damages the skin and underlying muscle, you can't have reconstruction with tissue expanders and implants; the only option available would be flap reconstruction - surgically moving skin from elsewhere on your body.

Lori welcomes me warmly as a fellow sister in the C World and showers me with gifts -a silver milagro cat charm, a pottery bowl with a cat's face, a catnip mouse for my tabbies (sensing a theme here?) and a beautiful book of vibrant, Frida Kahlo-esque paintings by an artist chronicling her breast cancer journey.

All my previous cancer-related activities have been depressing and overwhelming, involving some combination of invasive medical procedures, receiving bad medical news or researching medical stuff that's over my head. This was my first C World outing that was actually fun and life-affirming.