A Glass of Water (Or What Normal Means After Cancer)
Reflecting on the concepts of normalcy and adulthood as a young adult with cancer.
Miriam called me at 8h50 that morning. It took years, but I had finally managed to warm up to my doctor’s nurse. In a country that functions on processes, formality, and distance, getting to a first name basis with someone providing a service is no small feat; it’s a sort of Olympic sport and I felt the thrill of finally standing on the podium. The fever I had for four days straight was refusing to come down so I texted Dr. Fritz-Leben a few minutes earlier, asking to see him as soon as possible. He and I developed a special bond since the day we met, a lifetime ago, also on a Monday in April. Whenever my body is in trouble, which happens more often than I care to count, he’s there for the rescue. Miriam told me to come right away.
It’s a beautiful practice in an old, charming Berlin building. The healthcare industry’s timeless and cross-border standard for interior design — vomit-inducing beige tones on the walls and an anxiety-triggering combo of glass, plastic, and steel furniture — is nowhere to be seen. The waiting area has two sets of bright-colored Eames-style chairs in bench format, arranged in an L-shape. In front of them is a long and low mid-century modern coffee table holding contemporary art books. The wall with no chairs displays a set of two large black and white photographs — one of a man, one of a woman. The pictures were probably taken some time in the earlier days of the 20th century. The people, not elderly yet no longer young, are sitting on a stone bank, at the bottom of a monument that appears to be located in a city plaza. Both are indulging in their own activities with the same casualness one would at home.
The man is reading a book with his hat placed beside him and his cane leaning on one leg. He’s wearing a suit with one side of his pant legs pulled above the knee, exposing his leg, sock, and garter. The woman is sleeping with her head tilted to the right, her hands holding each other, and her dress spread wide. The photos are powerful by themselves but the asymmetrical frame sizes, reflecting their individual anatomy, are what elevates it as a single piece of art. The woman’s photo is almost double the size of the man’s, encompassing the full width of her dress and showing the contrast between her larger built and his thinner body. It makes for a poignant contrast with medicine in its tendency to fit us all into the same generic box, instead of our own unique frames.
I was submerged in these figures when Dr. Fritz-Leben called my name for the very first time, still Frau Last Name, not the warm Alice he now uses. It was a symbolic day in a symbolic year. The day my home country celebrates the end of a half-century dictatorship; the year of my 30th birthday. After my examination, this huge German man, straight out of an Oktoberfest promotional poster (yet born, of all places, in Lawrence, Kansas) told me, in perfect English, and with the utmost care, that I had a tumor in my ovary and that we were going to face it together. That was the day my life became another life. Without notice, I was drafted for war and thrown into my first battle, all in a matter of minutes. Ever since that first shot, Dr. Fritz-Leben has been one of my top Lieutenants. Always available, always supporting, always wise, and always funny.
Still, it’s never easy coming here — to enter these doors, to sit on these chairs, to pass the street corner where I stopped afterward to call my closest friend, in shock and in tears. But it undoubtedly was the best place to receive the worse possible news so there’s a comfort balancing out the fear, there’s a pinch of luck in the misfortune, there’s a line in bright silver. Even in his own office, amongst high-tech equipment built to poke womanly parts, the art is incredible. There’s a picture, bigger than my most stretched self, hanging on the wall behind the gurneys, displaying a pop art-ish bottle of milk. Just that, a bottle full of milk against a blue background. It is so random and so unexpected that focusing on it, even if just for a slip second, makes me chuckle and breathe a little easier. I relate to it. My life has the same level of what-the-fuck.
On this particular day, the waiting room was empty probably due to the pandemic still raging outside. I asked Miriam for a glass of water so I could produce enough evidence to confirm that the UTI was back. She brought it to me in the same type of plastic cups available in the bathroom for the urine samples — just like the cup I wasn’t able to fill when I arrived. As I’m sitting there, feeling defeated from my bladder to my soul, I noticed a woman, around my age, coming out of a room where pregnant women do pregnant things. She stopped first at the reception before sitting a couple of chairs away from me. I had nothing to do but wait to be called in so I scanned her every detail.
Long brown hair, styled in one brushed swirl high ponytail. A grey tracksuit, nifty and comfortable. Green, white and grey sneakers matching the outfit. And a grey Longchamp bag that made the whole ensemble pure loungewear class. She must have been 7 or 8 months along and the pregnancy complimented her body’s natural curves. Then I noticed her cup of water. It wasn’t plastic like mine, it was glass. One of the cute little glasses that used to be at the center of the coffee table before the pandemic turned shared pleasantries into apocalyptic contamination hazards. My breathing became heavy. My heart tightened. My eyes kept going back and forward between my plastic cup and her actual glass, increasing the ping-pong speed until tears started to roll down my eyes into my red KN95 mask.
What I so desperately envied about this woman was not her pregnancy, but her normalcy. There’s an extra layer of cruelty when given a cancer diagnosis as a young adult. In modern Western society, adulthood is defined by a few structural pillars: work, relationships, children. We might adjust them, add to them, prioritize one over another, or even reject them completely but whatever our specific blueprint turns out to be, it usually starts to take shape in our late 20s and early 30s. The job that sets a career on track, choosing a wedding dress, memorizing stroller models, or carrying on to the next adventure. Cancer halts it all. Suddenly, you’re stuck in place, watching your peers leave for Mars on their shiny rockets while your own vessel exploded a few minutes after departure and is now a crash site on an open field. The shock is deafening, blinding. You try to stand up, to make sense of what just happened, not knowing what’s more painful — looking up to see the other rockets vanishing in the horizon or looking down at the wreckage your reality just became.
I often wonder how much easier, how much less of a constant struggle, life would have been if I had done the normal, expected thing, even before cancer came knocking. During one of the occasional pity parties I throw myself, my mother reminded me — very matter-of-factly — that I have only ever marched to the beat of my own drum and ‘normal’ would have meant misery for someone like me. For better, and especially for worse, she’s right. There’s been a restlessness at my core since I was a child. I never felt at home where I was born. I never wanted to play the expected role of a woman. I never wanted to be trapped within the limits of a white fence. I never wanted a settled life.
I wanted plane tickets, not diapers or routines. Therefore, I knew, from early on, that my journey would be different, and different always means hard. I was okay with that. I was proud of that. Luck protects the bold, Portuguese wisdom will tell you. And so, I made bold choices and lived them viscerally. However, I never expected it to turn out this different, this difficult, this far removed. I might have chosen to go off the beaten path but, at the end of the day, I hoped to reach the place we all wish to arrive at — one of belonging, of happiness, of love. Or at very least to be able to choose the direction in which I get lost, instead of being at the mercy of the compass held by the beast inside me.
In the moments when I’m swallowed by sorrow and despair, everyone’s grass is greener and the world broadcasts only in black and white. So I’m rationally aware of the projection I’m casting over someone I know nothing about but the comparison is impossible to avoid, even in the dim daylight getting through the window behind me. There I was, sitting on the same chair I had sat on exactly five years prior, waiting to discuss yet another gynecological issue in my mutilated body. Meanwhile, this perfectly put-together young woman calmly awaits to see limbs and kicks on the same ultrasound machine that measures my tumor size and kidney function.
On these darker days, and on the lighter ones too, I scream at the Universe, demanding to know how did my life deviate so much from any metric of normal. As I watch her, it daunts on me — what more brutally accurate metaphor for my life could there be? To be given a half-empty disposable plastic cup, the same ones used for urine samples, while others drink their half-full glass of water.
