Scars

Scars

Healing Words

“PAT,” I BARKED at the receptionist through her tiny green sliding glass window.

“They didn’t call you?” she asked.

The radiation machine was down again. The staff was supposed to call me so I didn’t have to ride the bus across town, and waste my time pretending to read last year’s People in the waiting room for two hours while the techs attempted to reboot the new machine with its myriad knobs and server brain.

“Phones—they’re easy to use,” I said, slamming her glass window so hard that it bounced in its frame.

Only one other person sat in the room. I recognized him: Bear Paw. On a normal day, Nose Cancer would also be there with his wife, Skitzo, and their daughter, The Worried One. Lung Cancer would be there with her husband, So Devoted. On a normal day, the radiation machine hummed in the other room while Skitzo darted wild-eyed around our waiting room, unable to sit or focus. On a normal day, the rest of us would slump in our seats, turning pages in year-old magazines. By now, we had read them all, issues so old that the time-warped celebrities were now starring in different movies, married to other people, having second or third or fourth babies.

Today, though, it was only me and Bear Paw, whose hand was swollen worse than usual, I noticed. The skin looked taut and red.

He stuck it out. “Chemo, ya know. Got under the vein. Look what it did. To my flesh.”

I tried to look without making a face, but I felt the corners of my mouth turning under as I squinted.

“Porta-cath?” was all I got out.

“Those under-the-skin poison suckers?” Bear Paw spat. “No, I didn’t partake of porta-cath,” he continued. “I don’t know why I even bother to do this much. Postponement, I suppose. Of the death sentence. My cancer’s incurable.” With that, he hurled his old magazine, the one with Tori Spelling on the cover, high into the air. He couldn’t wait any longer for the reboot. The door swung wide. He was gone as Tori’s face fell flat on the carpeted floor.

That was five years ago, but the memory is imprinted as if it were yesterday, today, now. I had breast cancer then, but it is as if I have it this very moment. Even if you don’t die from the disease, you come through “your journey” (as my trying-to-be-wise ex-friends referred to it) with a lot of scars. The severest of these are not the visible ones. Not the lumpectomied right breast with the purple line bisecting it, nor the fleshy dip where the porta-catheter used to rest underneath your left collarbone. The worst are the memories. Bear Paw, whom I never saw again. Sixteen hours of continuous chemo vomiting, in response to which my oncologist shrugged his shoulders. “That’s just the way it is,” he said. The semi-transparent 11-year-old girl wheeled into the cancer ward on a sit-up gurney, her arms wrapped around a worn-out brown teddy bear with its remaining glass eye dangling. The grandmother freshly diagnosed with lung cancer, coughing into her cell phone: “I’m not dead yet.”

These are the scars that won’t fade to unnatural pink, or lose their sensitivity over time. These are the ones that tell me that my cancer is still raw and biting, hurting deep inside my breast, not because that’s where the physical pain resides, but because that’s where the memory lives.

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Wichita Sims is the pseudonym of a writer who lives in Northern California with her husband and two dogs. The year after being diagnosed with breast cancer, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She decided either God hated her or He was giving her a whole lot to write about.


Healing Words

Scars | by Wichita Sims

My Beating Heart | by Gail Coufal

Harmonica Lessons | by Susan English Fetcho

Beyond the Spin | By Diane Dodge

 

Faces of the East Bay