The Big Reveal
April 10, 2005: My world was rocked with five little but devastating words: You have the BRCA gene.
I was barely keeping my head afloat with three kids under the ages of five and going to school to become a dietician. I remember getting in the car after I was told the news and there were torrential rains. I thought to myself how the weather reflected my dreary mood and the raindrops were my tears. I could barely breathe, my chest tightening with each inhale and the feeling of being lost engulfed me. What the fuck was I suppose to do with this information?
By the time I got back home, after what seemed like an endless drive of tears and cursing the world, my parents were waiting for me. My mom’s eyes were swollen and red. My dad’s face was colorless. As I stormed past them pissed as hell with my allotment in life, all I could hear coming out of my mom’s mouth was, “I’m so very sorry.” I knew this was serious and I was going to have to take drastic measures. I was paralyzed, confused and scared that my three little girls could lose their mom to the BIG C if I didn’t take action.
Action? How could I take action? I’m the girl who overthinks everything to the point of inaction. You know that old adage, analysis equals paralysis? I’m convinced it was created for me. This time however there was no time for hesitation, no time to feel pain, no time for a pity party. The life I knew was lost, gone, in the rear view mirror. My present moment was filled with doctor appointments, geneticists, blood tests, mammograms, MRI’s and dreaded decisions in which none of the options were good. Would I forge ahead and be a pioneer and remove my breasts when it was still considered by many, including some of my closest friends, barbaric? Or would I curl up into a ball and hide under my covers praying that this was all a bad dream and ignore it?
I still remember how my dad, an obgyn and someone who was on the frontline of finding out about the BRCA gene and how it ravaged my mom’s maternal genetic line, looked me in the eyes and told me this was serious. My first thought was of my beloved grandma suffering from ovarian cancer as I watched. My dad declared with conviction, “You need to get double mastectomies and have your ovaries removed.” My knee jerk reaction was to yell back, ”I’ll remove my boobs when you remove your balls!” Who did my dad think he was making such a bold statement?
The discovery of the BRCA gene and it’s future life sentence was still so new. I struggled trying to process it as anger turned into fear and misery. Seriously, don’t touch my eggs. I mean my boobs weren’t anything to brag about, they kind of looked like eggs, but they were mine and I thought they were healthy. Then I had to deal with the removal of my eggs. The eggs that were stored in my ovaries. The ones that made me feel like a woman. The ones that allowed me to have three beautiful girls. The ones that were potential unborn children that I could have, if I decided to. It’s amazing how protective I felt of those eggs now that I faced having them taken away forever. I was only 36 years old. My husband and I had discussed the possibility of having another child. We discussed freezing my eggs but decided against it. Now, the decision was no longer mine. I was a medical experiment handed over to science. I was no longer Lorelle, wife, mother, dreamer. I was now a cold, hard statistic.
Months marched forward and my head was swirling, my heart aching and my body crying. Everyday, I looked at my innocent little daughters and cried a little as I held them tightly. I knew inside I needed to be strong for them and go ahead with the operations. It was a balance between pure fucking excruciating FEAR and courage. Would I still be sexy to my husband? Would I survive the surgeries? I mustered up my strength and chose life. In order to do this, I relied on my coping mechanism of shoving my emotions down, suiting myself up with emotional armor, and going into survival mode. I read books, strengthened myself mentally and physically by increasing the daily miles I ran, and lifted heavier weights.
As fate would have it, my brother met a woman who recently went through the same surgeries and he told me she wanted me to call her. That call took me a few months because that meant I would have to face my situation and admit that this wasn’t a nightmare. The uncertainty of what my future would look like was eating away at me every time I looked at my boobs in the mirror. I thought my head would burst with the buildup of emotional pressure. I finally called my BRCA “sister” and with a chipper voice she reassured me that the anticipation of the surgeries was worse than the surgeries themselves. She invited me to a lunch where a group of “previvors” met for support and connection. Oh man, I’m not one of those lunch ladies, is all I could think but my desire to see what my future boobs might look like and hear their stories was a powerful motivator.
The day I walked into the Urth Cafe in Beverly Hills to meet the “Slate Mates,” a term coined by this group of woman who used my chosen doctor, Dr. Slate, I was nervous, curious, anxious and slightly panicked. I pictured them as dumpy, disfigured, maimed women. Instead, they looked like Charlie’s Angels: beautiful, successful, creative, strong, and loving moms with whom I immediately connected. After eating, chatting and listening to each of their stories I was told that it was time for The Reveal. My heart started to quicken as we all got up from the table and went to the public restroom.
What? Were we actually going into the bathroom? How odd, I thought.
We stood in the handicapped stall, the five women lined up in a row and I felt the cold, white walls closing in on me. My first thought was that this was like a police lineup and mug shots would be taken. Then I snapped back to reality and felt my chest pounding, breathing racing and shortening, palms sweating and tears welling up. Before I could stop them and run out they lifted their shirts and five sets of boobs, all created by Dr. Slate and all at different stages of reconstruction, were staring at me. Within a minute I must had close to 100 thoughts: This is so much better than the pictures Dr. Google showed me. Then, not me. I’m not one of them. Then a weird thing happened, I looked into these women’s eyes and saw they were shining. They radiated life.
I saw myself in future bathroom lineups bolstering the next group of “previvors, the name for those that remove their boobs and/or ovaries before they get cancer. I knew, at that moment, I was going to be okay.
