Another bosom buddy

It's like an underground sorority -- friends and friends of friends who've had breast cancer. The other night I had dinner with Marianne, whom I've known casually for years.

Slim and elegant, Marianne has a great sense of design that shines forth in everything from her chic purse to her precisely angled silver bob. She had breast cancer 13 years ago when she was in her early 50s -- my age (that itself suprises me, because I thought she was my age now). It had spread to her lymph nodes. That means it had metastasized - which is one of my fears; I'll find out my lymph node status after my next surgery on Sept. 2. Despite having the more-extensive lymph node surgery, she never had a problem with lymphodema (another one of my fears) and neither did any of the eight women in her cancer support group.

Along with a mastectomy, she had a hysterectomy and oophorectomy (removal of both her ovaries) because there was something suspicious on one of her ovaries.

"I just wanted them to take it all out because I didn't need it anymore," she explains. "I wanted to be done with it didn't want to be worried about it." After surgery she went through months of chemotherapy.

That all sounds grueling. Yet she says it wasn't an ordeal.

Chemo side effects weren't that horrible. She never got outrageously nauseous, just had that slightly "off" feeling you get in early pregnancy.

"Somehow I just sailed through it all. I lost my hair, which was upsetting, but then I got a really cute wig, mainly because I commute by BART and I didn't want to stand out. That wig was so flattering that I remember someone at work telling me I had never looked better. I just had to laugh."

She apologizes that she doesn't remember more specifics.

Actually, that vagueness is more reassuring than a detailed, harrowing war story. The message I get is that this wasn't cataclysmic; it was just a brief chapter and then her life flowed on, not forever cleaved into Before Cancer and After Cancer.

Did she decide to have reconstruction? Nope. "I'm not going to be posing for Playboy, but my husband likes me."

That's a great mantra; one I could take to heart.