And the Holiday Parties Begin...

Even though I have not yet returned to work, I decided to make an appearance at my firm's holiday party. It was an opportunity to catch up with colleagues and watch the articling students perform their highly anticipated skits for the evening's entertainment, and it all seemed like a peachy idea until the day before the event, when butterflies began to take up permanent residence in my belly.

You see, unlike other work events that I had attended while on leave, the holiday party included more than just the lawyers. Pretty much everyone at the firm attends the event, from law clerks, to assistants, to kitchen staff. The holiday party is in fact more of an annual staff appreciation evening, where nine-to-fivers and overtime employees are thanked profusely for putting up with the demands of quirky, workaholic lawyers.

While I had already made numerous wigged appearances in front of my fellow lawyers, this would be my grand debut as a blond in front of the staff. Admittedly, this may sound a little self-centered - who really cares if I show up, and why does the colour of my hair even matter? The world does not revolve around me, whether or not I have been on a six-month cancer vacation. And why would the staff take particular interest in the arrival of a chronically absent mid-level associate?

When you work in a law firm, you quickly find out that it is the assistants who carefully cultivate and fuel a sophisticated system of gossip that rivals the London Underground in its vastness and complexity. If you want to know which lawyer is having marriage troubles, who is leaving the firm to work with a competitor, or who is expecting, you simply need to tap into the Network of Assistants who Gossip (NAG).

Lawyers would probably want to gossip as well, but they don't, mainly for lack of time. Plus they are isolated in their offices, working independently most of the day (and night) and often remaining at their desk during lunch. This frequent isolation and intense focus on work is why a number of lawyers at my firm actually have no idea that I am on leave (and this includes lawyers who work in my department), despite the fact that I have not stepped foot into the office for six months, and that a jet setting colleague from the New York office uses my Toronto office so often he practically has squatting rights.

Unlike lawyers, the assistants work in open-concept cubicles in the company of others, a veritable breeding ground for gossip, and every day at noon they meet in Ikea style lunchrooms where they can disseminate all the latest firm news. So perhaps now you can appreciate the anxiety that was building up inside of me during the hours preceding the holiday party, where I would make my entrance in a voluminous wig (to cover up my pathetic wispy hair) and in a high necked blazer (to hide my gross radiated skin), the Schadenfreude practically palpable among the assistants.

As luck would have it, on the day of the event, I was having an undisputed good wig day. You may initially assume that a wig will always pretty much look the same because, well, it's a wig. While synthetic hair isn't quite as unruly as natural hair, wigs still vary considerably in how they will look on a given day. Some days, they just have too much volume and you look like you are stuck in an episode of Dallas. Other days, they are a mess of static flyaways. But once in a while, they can actually look pretty decent. And on the day of the holiday party, I looked like I had just stepped out of a salon sporting real, actual, honest-to-good fake highlights and a great blow-out. In a world of bottled blonds, hair extensions and Jessica Simpson hairpieces, natural hair is a relative term and wiggies like me are just a little further down (okay, way down) on the spectrum, especially on a good wig day.

So the moment was finally upon me and I ventured into the Royal York hotel, past various other corporate parties until I found the right one. As planned, I arrived just as cocktails were winding down and dinner was about to begin, wearing my carefully selected BCBG Christian Jacket, which not only managed to have flair and remain professional, it also had the distinct advantage of having a collar high enough to cover up my peeling skin.

As soon as I entered the cocktail room, I bumped into colleagues and the conversation was neither stilted nor awkward. There are a cluster of lawyers who follow-up with me regularly to chart my progress, and it was good to see them.

I gradually made my way into the reception and to my pre-assigned table, which consisted of a semi-circle of assistants, facing a semi-circle of lawyers. It was clear that the hour-and-a-half of cocktails had gotten the party started. One assistant, sitting directly opposite me, shouted from across the table that it was good to see me, and when was I going to return from my leave. Well, anyone at the table who might not have been aware of my questionable status now certainly knew. I politely replied that the plan was to be back in January, and then attempted to divert the attention away by complementing her on how well her necklace matched her blouse, which seemed to do the trick.

The remainder of the evening went relatively smoothly. There was the odd employee or too who exclaimed, "Where have you been!" - to which my cheeky reply is always, "Where have YOU been?" One computer tech person, after asking how long I have been married and hearing my reply of four years, seemed absolutely flabbergasted and asked "And you don't have kids?" I chose not to promptly disintegrate into a spiral of depression and instead gritted my teeth and excused myself. To his credit, he is a nice guy and did try to recover by saying, "waiting to become partner, are you?"

By the end of the evening, it was clear that NAG was in full effect, since all the assistants who said good-bye added that they would see me in January when I was back at work. Which led to some puzzled looks from the lawyers who asked if I had been away. To which I replied that I was just hanging out for a bit and would be back soon.

Wigs Can Fall Into Toilets - And other perils of an afternoon out after chemo

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Life can get a little more complicated when you've had cancer and prefer that passing pedestrians were none the wiser. Simple things, like an afternoon of shopping and exercising, now take cunning, skill, determination and balance.

The afternoon might proceed as follows: Walk into stores blasting "All I Want for Christmas Is You". Try on belted dresses, frilly tops and cropped jackets in search of the perfect outfit for upcoming holiday parties. After slipping on each outfit, carefully reposition wig. Exit fitting room, since store strategy is to place mirrors outside of stalls so that salespeople can walk up to patrons and gush over how perfectly the garment fits while thinking how dreadful it really looks.

Complete shopping experience without any luck and continue on to gym. Walk into said institution, step into locker room and dart straight for the bathroom. Remove wig, tuck into gym back, and retrieve pink and grey bandanna, carefully chosen to coordinate with pink and grey Lululemon ensemble. Gently comb out pathetic wispy hair that survived chemo onto forehead and tuck behind ear to try and create illusion of boundless tresses. Check hair in tiny makeup mirror. Ensure that top is zippered all the way up to the neck to hide spectacularly unappealing, or more accurately, unapeeling, skin from radiation burn. Exit bathroom stall. Attend class.

Following class, repeat steps in reverse, carefully balancing wig, bag and bandanna in tiny cubicle and gracefully catching wig just before it falls into public toilet bowl and floats there like a dead rat, mocking all Herculean efforts to appear normal. Place pageboy cap back on top of wig so that blond hair becomes less conspicuous relative to mousy brown hair seen peeking out of bandanna. Leave gym and walk home.

All I want for Christmas is hair! And all I want for Chanukah is health.

What Does it Mean to be Sick?

When I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, there were a lot of things that I wanted to learn. In addition to educating myself about the disease, I wanted to understand more about what it meant to be sick in general, and to have cancer in particular. There is a whole language associated with having cancer that reveals how emotionally charged and socially constructed it is. You hear about someone's "battle" with cancer. The person who has it is admired for being "strong" and never complaining and "fighting" through it and is often considered a "survivor" whether or not they survived and whether or not they are cured.

I was already beginning to feel the stigma associated with having a disease like cancer. One or two well-intentioned family members advised that I keep very quiet about my diagnosis and that I should limit the number of people who I told. In their view, there just wasn't any need for colleagues or acquaintances who didn’t really care about you to find out and to start gossiping. There was a concern that these people would then see me only as the one dimensional "sick person" rather than as "Andrea".

When it comes to cancer, there is just such a range of perspectives and beliefs. Some people, whether consciously or unconsciously, even feel that reading an article or seeing a movie about someone who is sick could bring on bad luck, or that cancer is somehow contagious and that you might "catch" some terrible disease by being around someone who has it. This is sometimes called magical thinking. I for one have skipped reading obituaries due to a very irrational fear that they would somehow result in bad luck. (So much for that theory...)

There is certainly a tremendous, raw sense of fear, partly rational, and partly irrational, that a great number of people associate with the disease. Cancer is associated with many scary things, like chemotherapy and hair loss. Oh yes, and death.

So I set out to learn about different perspectives on what it means to be sick. As it turns out, there is a whole area of anthropology devoted to this very topic, referred to as medical anthropology. I went to various McGill libraries and loaded up on textbooks and papers, which I found to be interesting although perhaps a little too dry and scientific at times.

I next turned to bookstores and always beelined for the cancer section. I wanted to read about people's experiences with cancer in order to try and contextualize my disease. I read Dr. Marla Shapiro's candid account of her battle with breast cancer in Life in the Balance . I read John Robert McFarlanes touching, even charming stories of how cancer has changed him in his book, Now that I Have Cancer I Am Whole.

I also tried to prepare myself for what lay ahead and to gain a better medical perspective on cancer.
My all time favourite book in this category was, without a doubt, Chemotherapy and Radiation for Dummies. I also read Cancer is a Word, Not a Sentence: A Practical Guide to Help You Through The First Few Weeks . The main thing that I got out of this book is that "cancer" is a misnomer. In fact, there are disparate kinds of cancers and they are each vastly different diseases. Lumping them all together is like lumping all viral infections together, from the common cold to HIV. If "infection" were a term as loaded as cancer, then it would be hard to cope with hearing that you had an “infection”, even when all you have is a cold.

I do think that the author, Dr. Robert Buckman, makes a valuable point. But at the same time, there really is something concrete that binds together most cancers, and that is how they are treated. There is a real bond you share with others who have gone through chemotherapy or radiation. And so, there is a veritable culture that has developed around cancer. There are sub-cultures for survivors, and for their family members, for children, young adults, and for women. The list goes on. And then there is the culture of cancer that has permeated society as a whole. There are pink ribbons and yellow bracelets and runs for cures and enumerable charitable foundations.

From time to time, I planted myself in a little corner of the cancer self-help section of Chapters and Indigo and read excerpts of many other books, for as long as I could in a single sitting until a dutiful bookstores employee asked me, as politely as possible, to stand up as I was not permitted to read on the floor. (How annoying is it that there are so few chairs in bookstores? But I guess that's the whole point - they aren't libraries).

Along my literary journey, I learned so many interesting perspectives. I encountered the feminist photographer Jo Spence, who used phototherapy (literally using photography to heal) to document her experiences as a patient with breast cancer. Some of her views were a little too extreme for me, but the point is that she presented her disease as a social experience.

I watched the documentary, Crazy Sexy Cancer, about a young woman, Kris Carr, who is diagnosed with an incurable type of Stage 4 cancer, and as she notes, there is no stage 5. Kris sets out on a journey into alternative medicine, and discovers various treatments, some helpful, some counterproductive, and some plain wacky. She meets fellow survivors along the way, including Glamour editor Erin Zammett Ruddy, who has leukemia but was able to control it by taking a drug called Gleevec. She makes the difficult decision to go off the drug in order to get pregnant, and we find out from her blog that she ultimately gave birth to a gorgeous baby boy. But lightening struck twice when Erin's sister Melissa was also diagnosed with a blood disorder - Hodgkin's. I had read about Melissa's story before the documentary came out and we actually exchanged a few emails when I consulted her about radiation. She was incredibly compassionate and responsive.

I also went to an amazing young adult cancer support group in Montreal, and in our sessions have cried but have also laughed very hard. I approached the first session with a great deal of trepidation and uncertainty (what would these people be like…? Oh yes, I was one of them…), but since then have felt tremendous warmth and camaraderie from the group.

So, what does it mean to be sick? What does it mean to have cancer? It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It means that life is fragile. It means sleepless nights. It means pain and it means that wounds heal. It means that life is not always fair, and that you sometimes end up in a club that you didn't ask to be a part of. It means summoning inner strength and courage and discovering there are reserves of it deep within. It means that some people care and some don't. It means get well cards and telephone calls and packages and lunch dates. It means love and fear and compassion and reaching out. It means finding what you need from the most unexpected people and places, and being able to give in the most unexpected ways. It means hope and faith. It means that we are all going to die and it can mean a new lease on life. It means treatment and support and self-healing. It means acceptance and it means fighting back. Perhaps it comes closest to being a microcosm of life, of experiencing life in its most concentrated form with all of its ups and downs and lows and highs.