A weekly breast
cancer support group teaches one lesbian how to value
what she has by embracing what she's lost.
The eight of us
sitting around the large round table in the restaurant
are as boisterous as any group of women can be. But the
unique roll call we perform before even looking at the
menu sets us apart.
“OK, OK,
how many breasts do we have here tonight?” one of us
invariably asks with a chuckle. “One, zero,
zero, two, one, one and three quarters, two,
zero,” we obediently shout out in turn. “Seven
and three quarters real breasts among the eight of
us,” I declare, never in my wildest dreams
having suspected that I would use my math skills for this
computation.
“How many
ovaries?” another asks. It turns out: fewer than last
month. Those of us with estrogen-positive breast
cancer or one of the breast cancer genes have opted to
have our ovaries removed to hopefully increase our
chances of survival.
Welcome to the
group none of us wanted to join yet are glad we found --
lesbians with cancer, which meets at the local LGBT
community center on Thursday evenings.
Some issues we
grapple with are specific to women who partner with women.
Whether to come out to doctors and medical staff, or
instances of homophobia related to our disease, for
example. When I took sick leave to recover from
surgery to reconstruct both breasts, a supervisor said to
his secretary, “Why is she having the surgery?
She’s a lesbian. It’s not like she needs
to use them or anything, not like a real woman
would.”
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Forsten is a
writer and the cofacilitator of a lesbian cancer support
group in New York City. Photo by Alberto Vargas.