The Cancer Journals

If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.* For silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

On the day after the stitches came out and I got so furious with the nurse who told me I was bad for the morale of the office because I did not wear a prosthesis, I wrote in my journal:

The emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby, with their own strength.

The pain grew steadily worse and I grew more and more furious because nobody had ever talked about the physical pain. I had thought the emotional and psychological pain would be the worst, but it was the physical pain that seemed to be doing me in, or so I wrote at that time.

My visions of a future I can create have been honed by the lessons of my limitations.

4/6/80

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name

Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression.

It is not my intention to judge the woman who has chosen the path of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility, the woman who wishes to be ‘the same as before.’ She has survived on another kind of courage, and she is not alone. Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

It is not my intention to judge the woman who has chosen the path of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility, the woman who wishes to be ‘the same as before.’ She has survived on another kind of courage, and she is not alone. Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.