In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler
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A BUZZ CUT
In India, head shaving is practiced by many Hindus and seems to have more ritual significance than any other kind of hair removal.
At first I think we will do a head-shaving ritual. I will invite all my friends and I will take the bodhisattva vow. I imagine bowing down, humble, bald, stripped, away. But in the planning, the whole thing feels a little over the top and not so humble. Then my friend Sonja, who is super hot with a shaved head, tells me about her Italian barber on Tenth Avenue who charges only twelve dollars, and it seems so straightforward. So I go with Toast, Paula, Sonja, and Sonja’s lover, Claire, to an old-fashioned New York City barbershop. A whole group of Italian men debate my hair. Two of them wonder why I would want to get rid of it, and one super fit sexy man with a tattoo and shaved head keeps saying, “Go for it.” I don’t say I just had cancer, it’s not a choice, or that I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night with Silkwood clumps in my hand and bald patches in my scalp. I don’t say that this is a kind of eviction from a hairstyle that had become my home, or that my bangs and Louise Brooks bob were me. I don’t say it took me a lifetime to find that haircut and I swore I would never change it, or that when I was ten the boys in my class stripped me and called me “seaweed hair” because my hair was stringy and oily and pointless, and that having lousy hair was more painful than being half naked in front of most of my class.
And before I can say an absolute yes, Antonio is suddenly standing behind me with loud boy 4 clippers that are moving very close to my head. It never occurred to me that he would begin with my bangs—the fringe, the curtain, the veil. In less than a minute—gone. I watch Paula taking pictures of clumps of my dyed-black hair like little animals on the barber’s floor.
Some people think I look sexy with a shaved head. Some say I look like a boy and it turns them on. Some get that I’m sick and this is not a hairdo at all. Many think I look like a dyke. I feel exposed. Present. Humble. Clean. Clear. I don’t have to DO ANYTHING … with my hair. It is not who I am. I am suddenly face. All face.
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GETTING PORT
There is something about getting anything foreign inserted into the body that is both downright creepy and fabulously supernatural. It didn’t hurt; they were careful at Beth Israel. I was wide awake and I could feel the knife slitting the opening of my skin right under my collarbone, making a kind of pouch for my new port. Port. Port. All week I’d been saying the word. “Friday I will get my port.” “This week they will insert the port.” The port was to make chemo easier. It was a steel piece, like a pendant, that was placed under my skin and lived in my body. It had a tail, which was a tube where the chemo flowed into my blood. Veins filled with poison like Taxol and carboplatin can collapse and burn. My veins were elusive anyway. After weeks of poking and prodding and slapping, who could blame them? The port eliminated the anxiety of yet another search for veins. They put the needles directly into the port.
When I thought port, I thought water. I thought ocean. I thought summer. I thought harbor. I thought ships and cargo. But mainly I thought of leaving, of departure. Funny, I did not think arriving. From the moment the steel port was inserted into my flesh, I knew I was being taken somewhere. I was a passenger with a port. The port was the fixed spot, where the chemical load could moor itself and enter me. I couldn’t stop touching it. It was lumpy and scary at first. I could literally feel the steel rising under my skin. I started to like it. It became a talisman and a weapon. I showed it off at dinners, flashing it to people who seemed severely privileged and ungrateful. They were so horrified they stopped whining, at least with me. A hard foreign object under the skin separates you from those who remain only flesh. It gives you secret powers and access to a new world, a world where there are no more countries or claimed borders, where life happens and death is near, where the only real harbors are the ones we carry in our chest.
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THE CHEMO ISN’T FOR YOU
The day before chemo, Lu surprises me with a wall-size photograph of Muhammad Ali, the moment after he knocks out George Foreman in Kinshasa. It’s one of those almost impossible photographs where time has stopped—Ali is standing, Foreman is on the ground. Ali has clearly won, but it’s not the glory that hits you, it’s the shock and the stagger of the struggle. It’s clearly one second before Ali realizes he is champion, and you can imagine him a moment later prancing around, raising his gloves, bragging and celebrating. But here he is dazed and empty. Toast and I hang the photo on the wall and it becomes a kind of visual mantra board. I will turn to it many times a day over the next months. Ali is me. Foreman is my cancer.
I watch Toast arranging my chemo pills in our new purple pill tray box. He is parceling out the capsules like Pez, doing it so perfectly and exactly. Monday: Emend, Zofran, Advil; Tuesday: Emend, Zofran … I want to kiss him.
Then Sue arrives. She has not been my therapist for many years. We are post-therapy friends, which means we have dinner occasionally in vegetarian restaurants and talk about death and trauma. I call her when I have insufferable anxiety or when I need a reminder that my self-hatred is really massive anger. She heard from a friend that I had cancer and is giving me free sessions as a gift. I can hardly believe it. I can tell she is pretty shocked to see me. I am super skinny and wobbly, with a buzz cut. We sit on the couch, a stunned Ali as our backdrop. Sue was the shrink I finally found after all the others. I first saw her when my marriage was falling apart. I had just come back from a trip to Germany where the Berlin Wall was coming down. The first night in Germany I had a terrifying dream. My father was raping me with an object and my mother was calmly watching. I woke up screaming. This was after ten years in New York City therapy with two different shrinks, both telling me, like Freud, that everything I thought happened with my father was just my fantasy. Sue was the first person who was not afraid of my memories. When I told her my dream, she said, “It could be a dream, Eve. But sometimes dreams are also memories. I sense you have been terribly abused. I think I can help you.”
Sue was a psychic surgeon who reattached shards of body sensations to memories. She had never been in my loft and it never occurred to me she would ever sit on my couch or actually touch my things. Shrinks live in offices.
“Tell me everything,” she says. I start to cry. “I have been very sick. There was a huge operation and then an infection. Now they are going to poison me. I do not think I can do the chemo. I am not good with things in my body. It’s why I never did ayahuasca in the rain forest. I knew I would embarrass myself in front of the shamans and the elders. I don’t do well vomiting. I could never be a bulimic.” I remind her I am totally claustrophobic.
Sue tells me that she has never understood how I have not been sick before. She tells me she knows I will survive everything because I am the most resilient person she’s ever known. It’s funny, I feel different when she says this, maybe because I know she knows how fragile I am. Then she tells me that ever since she heard about my cancer, she’s been thinking much more about how my father battered me, and I say, “Me too.” She says, “I feel we didn’t spend enough time on the battering.” And this makes me think of the chemotherapy battering my insides. I tell her I am very afraid of having poison inside me. And then she does what I call a Sue. She gives me back the same information I am giving her but with a genius spin, a way of seeing things that immediately and spontaneously unlocks the neurosis. In this case, she gives me a way to reframe the entire chemo experience. She says, “The chemo is not for you. It is for the cancer, for all the past crimes, it’s for your father, it’s for the rapists, it’s for the perpetrators. You’re going to poison them now and they are never coming back. Chemo will purge the badness that was projected onto you but was never yours. I have total faith in your resilience and the magical capacities of your body and soul for healing. Your job is to welcome the chemo as an empathetic warrior, who is coming in to rescue your innocence by killing off the perpetrator who got i
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TARA, KALI, AND SUE
The day before chemo starts I am in bed holding a soft, multicolored pink shawl (a gift from Pat), almost petting it, and repeating Sue’s words: “The chemo is for the cancer, the perpetrators, the rapists, not for you. The chemo is for the cancer, the perpetrators …” I find myself rising, slowly walking to the center of my loft, toward the window with the antique golden sari curtains. I lay the pink material down on the floor carefully, as if preparing for a picnic on a beach. I walk back to the bedroom and face my Tara statue. Tara, mother of all Buddhas, who appeared in a woman’s body. Tara, who fights off danger, fear, demons … hopefully cancer. Tara, who came through the Buddha’s heart.
I lift Tara and I hold her in my arms. My heart is pounding because she is very heavy and I am weak. I should wait for someone to help me but I can’t. I carry her out of the safe nestle of my room and rest her on the outstretched pink cloth. I need you now, Tara. I need you in the center of this space, this room. I lower her. I dress the pink cloth around her feet and make a kind of shelf. Then I find a turquoise stone and a medal and a collection of trinkets that friends have sent to make me better. These are my offerings.
I have spent a lifetime building altars—a very odd thing for an atheist. I remember being in Lhasa, Tibet, on the roof of the Jokhang Temple, almost twenty years before, and looking down at the prayerful throngs of pilgrims who had come from everywhere to prostrate themselves in front of the temple. Some had rugs for their knees; others did not. I stood there for hours, transfixed, as if this dance of prayer hands pressed on crown, throat, heart, kneeling, lying flat, kneeling, standing, prayer hands pressed on crown, throat, heart, kneeling, lying flat were the only thing I had ever wanted to do, the only gesture I ever wanted to make. This was not something I admitted to myself consciously. Before I lifted Tara I was too embarrassed, too hip, too feminist, to prostrate myself in front of anyone or anything, too angry, too empowered, too self-directed, too cynical. Now the I of me had run out. I didn’t know how I was going to live and I needed strength and guides to walk through this chemo forest of claustrophobic annihilation, violent puking, six treatments, numbness, infection, death. Prostration: placing the body in reverence, to submit, to surrender. In many faiths it is used to relinquish the ego. In Tibetan tantric Buddhism they do one hundred thousand prostrations to overcome pride. In Islam, prostration has been known to overcome many diseases.
All the hundreds of cards and letters and e-mails I received say the same thing. “We have no doubt you will make it. You are a force of nature. Nothing can stop you. You will beat this, Eve. You’re a fighter.” I know people are trying to give me support and make me feel strong, but sometimes it makes me anxious. What if it just isn’t true? What if I can’t beat this or it has nothing to do with me? Will it mean I’m a failure and or a failed force of nature, like one of those New York City hurricanes that never show up after you’ve put huge taped Xs on your windows? What if this isn’t about fighting? I mean, how do you battle your own genomes?
Then I remember Sue talking about burning and death and I know that I need Kali too. There is a picture of her that Purva brought from India a few weeks ago. Kali: I seat her next to her sister Tara. Burn it away, Kali, burn it away. Make it new. Take me to the core of holy destruction and death and let me survive your excruciating heat. Let me throw what isn’t useful into your flame. Dissolve it there and make me new, make me whole. Burn off the cells that are compulsively dividing and subdividing. Burn off all the parts of me that create separation and division. Burn off the stories. Burn off my contempt and my self-pity. Burn off all the ways I get ahead of myself and try to get ahead of others. And Tara, open my heart. Make me one with all sufferers.
Mainly, take my fear. And please, make it funny. I do not know why I was given cancer, why I have a tumor the size of a mango that has fistulaed and spread and broken through walls. I do not know why I am stage IIIB, really IV.
I need you to take it now. Let me prostrate myself at the altar of your insight and mercy. Tara, Kali, and Sue. Prayer hands pressed on crown, throat, heart, standing, kneeling, lying flat. Flat flat pressed pressed down as far as I get get into the floor.
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CROWD CHEMO
I arrive at the infusion suite with a posse: Toast, Lu, Paula, Diana, Pat, and Purva. It’s like crowd chemo. There are way too many people and not enough chairs, and we are causing a stir. Toast organizes everyone into shifts. This will be the pattern for all of my treatments. It is an embarrassment of riches. Dear Diana, always the first to arrive, dresses in skirts that are so sparkling and flamboyant that the suite becomes a swirling circus. She rubs my feet when the Benadryl kicks in and my legs are filled with anxiety. Pat is always running between two things or groups of people and almost always arrives with a present. She keeps me connected to the world. Paula can never settle—every day someone in her life seems to be dying of cancer. Purva brings the most amazing Israeli hummus from the neighborhood. It is so strange to see people eating burgers and fries as they’re being pumped full of poison. Toast runs my life by iPhone, distracting me with daily questions. Lu finds the nurses when we have worries, takes me and the IV to the bathroom, and covers me with blankets.
There’s still time to back out. In theory the cancer is gone, so I do not need this poison. It’s overkill. I see Toast and Lu catch each other’s eye. They quote the “all you need is one bad cell” story. I think of all those much more evolved people who cured themselves with juices and diets. As the nurses prepare me for the first treatment, I think of a documentary I recently saw about assisted suicide. The man in the film was dying from ALS and he was only a few days away from not being able to swallow. I repeatedly watched the part where he drinks the poison and then slowly dies. His death was totally mundane, almost relaxing. My death from chemo will not be like that. It will happen within minutes. There will be choking and green toxic vomit and writhing. Diane, a tough-talking nurse from the Bronx, senses my terror and ambivalence. She launches into a cautionary tale of a chemo resistor (with Bronx accent): “There was this patient who came in here with her breast literally hanging off from the size of her tumor. She was giving herself those fancy vitamin C treatments. After about two weeks on the chemo her tumor shrank and began to disappear. Then she tells me, ‘You see, Diane, the vitamin C is finally working.’ ” Diane is hysterical, and funny people can get me to do just about anything. Her partner is Regina, a woman who is so much a nurse that you instantly stick out your arm when you see her coming. They are kind and weathered and know their chemicals and antineoplastic drugs. It’s always people. Dr. Deb and her enveloping kindness, Dr. Handsome who walked around the table. Dr. Katz who made a house call that saved me. The nurses at the Mayo who took me for walks and bathed me. Now Diane and Regina.
Regina has to stick a huge needle through my chest skin to go into the port. And that first stab is so deep and painful, it punctures my soul. I follow Sue’s direction. This is my medicine and these women, Regina and Diane, are my medicine women guides. There are no trees in the infusion suite. There is no moon or night sky, but the suite will be my rain forest. There are bags of liquids hanging above my head—Benadryl and more steroids. These enter me first and pump me with heart-racing adrenaline. I am taking off. Then it’s time for the Taxol. Lu
The whole ritual will take almost five hours. I will do this five more times. Each time I will close my eyes and feel Kali and her raging fluid. Each time she will ravish and char me deeper, and each time I will look at my fellow patients in their cozy bedlike chairs. The Dominican woman in her fabulous hat, the stunning Egyptian girl who looks just like her attentive mother, the twelve-year-old African American boy with his raging headphones, the elegant Waspy woman whose husband always comes to fetch her later. Some are dozing. Some are staring off. Many of them are here alone. I will look at their faces and know they are my tribe. I will say a silent prayer for each of us that our potions burn away our sickness and despair. I want to live, of course I do. But right now what I want the most is to be swimming freely alongside the others in this burning river.
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THE OBSTRUCTION, OR HOW TREE SAVED ME
I was flying through days one to three of the first treatment without even the slightest reaction, and I was a little spooked. It might have been the steroids that had me amped and busy cleaning out closets at two in the morning. Or the Zofran, a very effective antinausea medication, that had kept the side effects at bay, but suddenly on day four the chemo was in me, on me, through me. It began with mild skirmishes and then, within minutes, there was all-out body war.