Humor Rhymes with Tumor

There were several of us women, around the same age, hanging around the place where we all volunteer. One woman, down on her knees unpacking boxes of books, wanted to know if I had thought about my retirement. What was I going to do when I couldn't work and had to live on Social Security and probably couldn't afford to live in Santa Cruz?
I took a deep breath and passed up the opportunity.
I said, hm, I hadn't really thought about it much...What did she think about it?
It was a rare moment for me, a consummate party pooper. I'm the one who talked about childhood sexual abuse on my first date. I've silenced more than one family Thanksgiving...Easter...Christmas table with conversation starters like nuclear annhialation, U.S. foreign policy in Central America, apartheid. Since I was diagnosed, I have shared the tragic news with just about anyone who ventured anywhere near that territory and even with people who didn't ask.
But this woman wanted to talk about retirement, not the statistics that say I don't have to worry about aging.
So I shut up and thought about Richard.
Richard was a figure skater. When I met him, he was emaciated and could no longer get out of his bed at the hospice where I worked. I met a lot of men in the same straits as Richard over the three and a half years I worked at Rosehedge. It was the first hospice of its kind in Seattle: a six-bed facility for people with AIDS who were knocking on heaven's door. Richard was one of the crankiest of the men I met (and fed and bathed and dressed and tended herpes and kaposi and radiation burns) out of nearly 100 guys who lived and died in that old Victorian house surrounded by rose bushes.
He was mean and he was funny and he had lots of great gossip from the days he skated with Dorothy Hamill and others in the Ice Follies.
One day there was a documentary crew visiting the hospice and they were in Richard's room interviewing him about his religious beliefs about death (Richard was Catholic). In a break from shooting, one of the filmmakers noticed Richard's portable morphine pump and marvelled over it.
"How did you get one of these?" he asked innocently.
"Bend over and I'll show you," Richard replied.
I still laugh when I remember the look on the guy's face.
But I got to where I didn't want to go in Richard's room. He'd told all his Ice Folly stories and the only thing he wanted to talk about was being sick. Sure, it was pretty much the center of his life and it got more and more dramatic with every opportunistic infection that attacked his frail body; more and more compelling with the pain that wracked his days and nights despite the morphine pump.
And he wasn't the only one with a sad story to tell.
Maybe that's why I walked out after the first few sentences of the guest speaker at a recent fundraiser for the local women's cancer organization. She had cancer, but now she was better.
I didn't want to hear about it. The cancer or the better.
Both for different reasons.
I didn't want to hear about the better because it's a lie they've been telling us for too long. Very few women stay better once they've had cancer.
Why didn't I want to hear about the cancer?
(Pull my shirt up and I'll show you.)
Because I already know way more than I ever wanted to know.
Because just about every day someone asks me something about cancer..."my" cancer.
Because there aren't enough good cancer jokes to break this spell.


My favorite cancer joke:
A guy's waiting in his doctor's office and the doctor comes in and says "I have some bad news and then I have some really bad news....which do you want first?"
The guy says, "Sheesh...okay, the really bad news."
The doctor says "You have incurable cancer."
Stunned, the guy shakes his head. Then he says, "What's the other news?"
The doctor says, "You have Alzheimer's."
The guy sighs and says, "Well, thank god I don't have cancer."

That reminds me.
One of the funniest and most right on books I've read about living cranky and lively with metastatic breast cancer is called "Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics" by Miriam Engelberg. She's brilliant and savagely honest, and she has saved women with cancer from death by a more painful foe: sincerity.