Happy Hallo-breast Cancer Awareness-ween!
By Melanie Dale | October 2024 Newsletter
Oh hi, and happy Hallo-breast cancer awareness-ween. Halloween, the month of spooky, and breast cancer, which causes plenty of fear.
Yes, it’s spooky booby season, the time of the year when everything turns either pink or goth and everyone else joins me in my skeleton obsession. For one beautiful month, my year-round creepy home décor makes sense.
I work at the cutest little indie bookshop on weekends and after a summer of selling happy romantic comedies to beach-bound readers, I find people scanning the books in “my” section, the collection of horror books wedged between mystery/thriller and sci-fi/fantasy. The days are darkening and readers are ready to feel scared.
Why do so many of us gravitate to spooky stories? Why do we want to feel fear? I was talking with several other Coffee + Crumbs staff about this. We like controlled fear, like roller coasters that fling us around while we’re strapped in and safety checked. Our kids yell for us to push them higher on the swings and twirl them around in the backyard, trusting we won’t let them fall. As the days darken and we feel a chill in the air (maybe), we like the feeling of our pulse pounding and guts twisting on behalf of fictional characters, the final girls stumbling across our screens and the family escaping the haunted house in our books while we’re tucked in our cozy beds with our tea and lapdog.
Fears range from the severe to relatively benign. I don’t scare easily, unless I have to walk past a fern. I know how ridiculous I sound. This summer, I confronted my fear of ferns while hiking in Scotland, as the fronds closed in around me and I felt their leaves brush my bare arms.
Full body shudder. I’ve been repulsed by the weird spores on the backs of their leaves my whole life. Spiders, snakes, these things make sense. But fern? That’s like admitting a fear of a philodendron or a Ficus. I can watch and read the scariest movies and books out there without flinching. I will lose my mind over fern, just growing, living its leafy life, if it gets close enough to touch me.
There’s a difference between my very silly fern fear and the truly scary fears we face in our lives, when our hearts pound and stomachs clench. The recent school shooting, followed by the hurricane in my state of Georgia, the fear of physical harm and the fear of the choices or influences that threaten our kids’ hearts makes it easy to feel overwhelmed with anxiety. I asked some of the Coffee + Crumbs staff what they fear and they shared, “that I’m not a good mother,” “that I’m not enough,” “kids getting hit by cars in parking lots,” “election season,” and “cancer recurrence.”
Whew. Scary stuff. We feel the panic rise in the back of our throats.
When I think of fear, I think of the little cells that raced from a tumor in my right breast to my lymph nodes in my armpit. I think of how fast they grew. I think of everything I had to go through to kill them for good.
One of the scariest moments of my life was at my first round of chemo. Up until then, I’d soldiered bravely through diagnostic appointments, cracking jokes and asking awkward questions about breast size that made technicians avoid eye contact. I figured the actual chemo would be anticlimactic after so many conversations about it and all the prep. They fitted me with the cold cap, securing it tightly around my head, and my mom helped me slide on the ice gloves and boots. By freezing my scalp, I hoped to save my hair. By freezing my fingers and toes, I hoped to minimize the neuropathy to my digits. If only chemo prep was as effective as test prep in school.
As freezing liquid slushed and swished around my scalp, a nurse in a hazmat suit wheeled over the actual chemotherapy bags on their hooks, with tubing snaking out. These were the meds that would kill the cancer cells, and my hair follicles, taste buds, and all the other delicate cells too weak to withstand the onslaught of life-saving poison.
She attached the tubes from the chemo bag to the tubes sticking out of the port on my chest, which had been accessed and flushed with saline in the room before I got to chemo. The chemo room is like a really sad lounge, with vinyl-covered recliners arranged in circles, like we’re at a book club, except for the IV bags hanging next to each of us and everyone there was forty years older than me.
“Ready?” the nurse asked.
I nodded and said with a swaggery grin, “It’s go time.” Or maybe “Party on,” or “Hit me baby one more time.” Something ridiculous and overly blasé for this moment.
I was fine. Everybody see how fine I am? I crack jokes because I’m not scared of what’s about to happen to me.
Not scared. I eat fear for breakfast.
She switched a valvey thing and I watched as the drips that would make my eyebrows and eyelashes fall off start to make their way down the tube into my body.
Drip.
I wasn’t scared. This was fine.
Drip.
I was fine.
Drip drip drip.
I was leaving my body, falling out of my body, my vision narrowing like the end of Looney Toons and “Th-th-that’s all folks!”
I woke up and stared into the faces of all the nurses in the chemo room peering down at me.
“Is it over?” I asked.
I’d passed out for thirty seconds. I’d swooned, like a pearl-clutching lady from a black-and-white movie.
They adjusted my chair and got me situated. And I admitted to myself that this was scary. I was scared of the moment the meds hit my bloodstream and changed me forever.
And it was okay to be scared. The bravest thing I’ve ever done was show up for treatment, over and over, to tear myself down in order to build back cancer-free. The bravest thing was choosing to fight through the fear.
Deep breaths.
Thankfully, fear eases up a bit when we shine a light on it. When we share our concerns about our health and our kids and motherhood with trusted friends, we discover we’re not alone.
That’s what I love about our community here. We can share our stories, our fears, the things that keep us up at night, and find others who have been there, who are there.
You’re not alone. I’m not alone.
Except about the ferns. I’m probably alone on that one.
Happy Hallo-breast cancer awareness-ween!
Love, Melanie
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“And it was okay to be scared. The bravest thing I’ve ever done was show up for treatment, over and over, to tear myself down in order to build back cancer-free. The bravest thing was choosing to fight through the fear.”
Yes it was, this was really beautiful, thank you.
Melanie, I am afraid of butterflies, and that feels right on par with ferns 😂.