Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge Day 4: “the stones of silence”

05 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Editor in Uncategorized

Tags

Army of Women, breast cancer, HAWMC, Health Writing Activist Monthly Challenge, NBCC, Paul Tsongas, taking stock, Why do I write about health?

I write about my health because …

It’s been the kind of day where I’ve had to tell myself more than once that my career is but one facet of my life, that my family matters most, that my health is most important. How easily these words roll off my tongue, but unless they are reflected in daily practice, they ring rather hollow. Practice, as one of my teachers tells her students every day “makes permanent.” So why do I write about my health? I write because it helps make permanent the practice of putting first my health and my family. Staying silent would be as bad if not worse as continuing to accept as truth the myths that lulled me – and so many like me – into a false sense of security about my breast health.

On 11.11.11, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Subsequently, everything changed and nothing changed. I looked the same, just a little thinner. I could be contemplating my mortality one minute and paying bills the next. Shifting, in an instant, imperceptibly from the philosophical to the pedestrian. That doesn’t happen so quickly now. It shouldn’t. These moments that make up a day and a life, are not of equal weight. But for years, I have made them so, my priorities slightly askew, perhaps not terribly different from those of late Senator Paul Tsongas, who said in a 1992 interview:

Pre-cancer, I was one of the pettiest people you’ve ever run into … I would get angry at my wife for leaving the top off the toothpaste. I’d get angry at my kids for the dumbest things. Looking back on it I feel mortified. I was a fool.

The cancer diagnosis required him to take stock. In Heading Home, Tsongas explains that it was a letter from an old friend, Arnold Zack, that helped put in perspective the senator’s promising political career, “No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.” In this same year, he also said it had been a mistake not to disclose the recurrence of lymphoma five years earlier, and he made a pledge to submit his medical records for review by independent experts should he ever run again.

I disclosed my diagnosis at first to family, friends, and select colleagues. I didn’t know much about breast cancer other than I had it. Because there was no family history and none of my friends knew anyone else who had breast cancer, I turned to the online community to learn more about its vocabulary, the jargon and acronyms, that seemed to grow larger as I progressed from detection to diagnosis to surgery to treatment. I’m a relatively quick study, so it wasn’t long before the politicization of breast cancer dawned on me, before the realization set in that we really haven’t come very far at all. As I wrote in Small Steps are Not Enough, in 1975, years after we had already boldly gone to the moon – the moon – the odds of a woman developing cancer in her lifetime was about 1 in 11. Today, it’s one in eight women. That’s just not good enough. In conversations with my family and my friends, it became clear that they, like me, had been blithely unaware of our lack of progress. They too had fallen for much of the mythology of breast cancer, and so I began to write as much for them as for myself.

To date, I have only written twenty or so posts, most of which I was afraid to publish at first. My diagnosis had arrived on the heels of a very pink Breast Cancer Awareness month. Given so many uplifting stories of celebrities who had “conquered” cancer, I felt almost as if I would be speaking out of turn if I expressed aloud the indignation and rage I felt towards a disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence. I have moved beyond that initial fear, buoyed by the encouragement of bloggers like Marie Ennis O’Connor and Jan Hasek who are cheering me on while they lead the way in this Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge. The writing is indeed one way I can attend to my health and that of others.

I write to help change the conversation, because if we keep doing what we have always done, the National Breast Cancer Coalition estimates that by 2030 – when my little girl will be 31 years old – 747,802 women worldwide will die each year from breast cancer. To remain silent about a deadly disease is just not an option for me.

On that, I am drawn once again to the poetry of Seamus Heaney. In,”Punishment,” harrowing and haunting to read, he evokes a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, and killed. A primitive, barbaric act which he juxtaposes with the ‘tarring and feathering’ in the Northern Ireland of his day. I took a powerful lesson away from this poem, which I have applied to all manner of situations in my life. My health is no different. He says to the dead woman,

My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know the stones of silence.

He admits, like those other onlookers, would not have spoken out against her punishment.

So I write because I will not cast the stones of silence. Silence will not help us find what causes and prevents cancer. Science will. Good Science. I write to support that search. I write to ensure good health for my daughter and her children. I am not alone. In fact, I have enlisted in an army, T he Army of Women and I have joined a network of bloggers, all committed to using their words to advocate for doing what it takes to eradicate breast cancer. Write on.

Day 2: Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge #HAWMC

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Anna Quindlen, Army of Women, Arts & Entertainment, Awesome Women, Books, breast cancer diagnosis, Edna O'Brien, Friendship, Health Writing Activist Monthly Challenge, Influences, Inspiration, Library, Memoir, Mother daughter relationship, NBCC, Northern Ireland, Reading, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, WEGO Health Activist Writer's Month, Writing

Day Two: Quotation Inspiration

We want things to be easy for our children, and we know from sad experience that the world can be unkind to girls who do not please, who speak out, who go their own way. But we know from experience, too, that the role of the good girl can be a hollow one, with nothing at the center except other people’s expectations where your character might have been.

She doesn’t know it, but Anna Quindlen has been one of my best friends since I began my life in America. Helping me navigate my way through a new country, a new culture, was the Op-Ed column she regularly penned for The New York Times, aptly entitled, “Public and Private.” In 1990, before marriage and motherhood became milestones in my own life, I learned lessons about both from a woman I most likely will never meet and. As I turned 30, Anna Quindlen turned 40. The mere decade between us belied the often motherly wisdom I found in her writing, which was at once intensely personal and sharply political. So it is as my mother’s daughter and the mother of a daughter, that I am drawn once again to her words about women in the world.

As a child, I was an avid reader, much preferring to stay indoors with my nose stuck in a book than playing with all the other children on the big field outside our house on the Dublin Road. Our house was full of books, but still I borrowed as many as was allowed from the mobile North Eastern Education and Library Board van that parked around the corner every couple of weeks. Also, once a week, an impressive variety of comics was delivered to our house by a lanky newspaper boy. First came The Twinkle, “the picture paper especially for little girls,” when indeed I was a very little girl. Next, more comics named after more girls,most notably The Bunty (although I have yet to meet a real-life girl named Bunty), The Judy, and The Mandy. By the time I was a teenager, there was The Jackie – a little less childish and more ‘with-it.’ In my mind, it was a bona fide woman’s magazine, complete with fashion and make-up tips, and the much anticipated pin-up of pop singers of the day. There are many women, of a certain age, who will remember with fondness a very special issue – circa 1975 – featuring a very young “heartthrob,” David Cassidy.

Between all the girls in the comics and those created by prolific children’s author, Enid Blyton, I was never lonely. My best friends were her ‘famous five,’ and her girls who attended the very posh boarding schools, St. Clare’s and Malory Towers. Written in the late 1940′s, I know Enid Blyton has been lambasted today as politically incorrect and sexist, reinforcing class and gender stereotypes, but her books were real page-turners, providing hours and hours of delight and pure escapism for a working class girl in Antrim, Northern Ireland. I just cannot bring my enlightened and evolved self to criticize Enid Blyton. That would be sacrilege!

Add to this print-rich environment three black and white TV channels from which to choose – Ulster Television, BBC1, and BBC – and there you have my recreational options as a child (which later expanded to include Channel 4, its color commercials and edgy content pushing the envelope).

By the time I got to Antrim Grammar School, I had expanded my horizons a bit with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (which led me to her sister, Emily’s, Wuthering Heights), and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. But, for a period, it seemed I was only reading the novels, plays, and poetry of white men, most of whom were dead. Chaucer, Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens. Where were all the women? Surely they had something to say too? So it was altogether thrilling when in college I was reintroduced to the writing of women, Irish women in particular, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and my favorite, Edna O’Brien, whose work helped reform censorship laws in Ireland, following the banning and burning of her book, The Country Girls, in 1960. She spoke out, went her own way to craft exquisite literature, and the world was often unkind to her, but Edna O’Brien blazed a trail through it, changing it for so many. She changed it for me.

Years later, when my daughter was less than a year old, I worked part-time as an adjunct English professor at a local college. There, I took advantage of the academic freedom afforded me, and I milked every opportunity to introduce my students to writers who were actually alive and female. I wasn’t required to teach Shakespeare, but when I felt like it, I would take my students through some of his sonnets, like his clever Sonnet 138 instead of rehashing Hamlet’s soliloquy. Again. Just going my own way … and I brought good company with me.

It’s been 28 years since I took my tentative first steps into a classroom at the old Hopefield High School, in a predominantly Protestant housing estate, where Loyalist sentiment regularly ran amok, outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. Armed only with Great Expectations and lesson plans and feeling very much like the young woman in Kingsley Amis Take a Girl Like You, I can still hear the click-clack of my high heeled shoes echoing in the hallways. I was only 21, and I was scared to death. What if the pupils didn’t like me? What if they picked me up and put me in the wastepaper basket (like they had done to a petite biology teacher)? What if the English Department Head came in and observed the one lesson that hadn’t been planned? What if I sat in the wrong chair in the staff-room (the one reserved for a knitter, the High Priestess of the faculty)? What if they made me teach a novel I hadn’t read? I needn’t have worried – expectations were low. My pupils were working class protestants in a Belfast that often appeared to neither need nor want them, and I was a teacher who was committed less to building a better Belfast for them than I was to getting myself out of there, out of the country and off to America. I was fortunate, my family untouched by The Troubles that plagued our little country, other than what we read in the paper or what we imagined the few times our windows shook because of an explosion in a nearby town. As a child in this time, I knew without being explicitly instructed, the meaning of ’whatever you say, say nothing.’ I imagine many of us felt we had no choice other than going about our daily lives, and in the process hardening ourselves, on the surface, against the senseless bombings and killings of people who looked and were just like us. And so I left. Traveling abroad with a local orchestra each summer had exposed me to places where people did not experience the kind of disappointment we felt almost daily back home. It helped expand my vision of myself, the very possibility of myself in a much bigger world. So I left Northern Ireland. Mentally, at first. The first in my family to ‘go on to school,’ I soon extricated myself from an engagement to a nice boy and what would have been a slippery slope to a domesticated life within what I perceived to be a small-minded hardened country in urgent and desperate need of humane leaders with expansive minds and hearts. Leaders who would see the human being behind the Catholic or the Protestant, the British or the Irish. Ironically, it wasn’t until I left Northern Ireland, that I found the voice to speak about it. I appreciate today what Edna O’Brien told a Telegraph reporter about having been away from her “motherland” for over 50 years:

Certain things are rock-hard within us – the feeling for a person or a country. That is not the same as wanting to live with that person or in that country.

Because today’s post is about health, I should write about why this quotation is so relevant to me now. Now that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I know a little more about its vocabulary, its politics, its culture, and funded, even the level of commitment it requires in the form of endless appointments that quickly fill a calendar for a year, I am ready to speak out. I will be 49 in a couple of weeks, so I don’t care as much about what people think of me any more. I am ready to tell my story, in my own way, about a disease that has just burst in and disrupted our lives. I don’t know that I can sit back, be a good girl, and accept as truth that we are racing for a cure. That I’ll “battle” and “get back in the swing of things” soon.

I am a most unwilling conscript to this battle. We are doing anything but racing. We are moving at a glacial pace, and too often I feel as if I’m holding my breath, not unlike the way I did as a child, wondering if the bomb scare was just that. A scare. A hoax. Except in my new reality, the suspicious devices come in the form of tumors and test results. All this waiting and worrying, all this time spent coordinating more time to spend in waiting rooms, is just too time consuming, energy consuming. One out of eight women will develop breast cancer some time during her life – this means one new diagnosis every 2 minutes. Every 13 minutes, a woman will die of breast cancer, according to the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). In 1973, it was 1 in 11. We have made such tiny steps. Unacceptable.

So, while I am an unwilling soldier in this cancer “battle,” I have nonetheless enlisted in an army, The Army of Women, because I believe this army needs my help to change the trajectory of the lives of so many of us. With science, real science, in its arsenal, this army has the potential to bring an end, forever, this disease. And to change the conversation about it. About my cancer. About the destiny of my daughter.

GET INVOLVED

Thank you for taking the first step in helping us move beyond a cure. Your decision to partner with the scientists who are seeking to unlock the key to preventing breast cancer will help us end this disease once and for all.We need YOU! Take advantage of this life-changing opportunity to directly participate in breast cancer research. Women of all ages, ethnicities and risks — whether you have had breast cancer or not — are needed now!