On the morning my doctor was to insert the port for direct delivery of chemo to my abdomen, he came to see me in pre-op.

“I know what you’re probably going to say, but I want to say this anyway. I want you to change the protocol. I don’t want to lose my hair.”

He sat quietly for a moment, as if spinning his chemo Rolodex to find an alternative regimen, something mild but effective. He didn’t yell, get snarky, or pull rank, as some doctors would have. He just said, “Yeah, well the problem is that it’s the cisplatin that will make you lose your hair, and this kind of cancer responds well to cisplatin. If we’re not going to use it, there’s no point in putting you through this.”

I considered it, but even with the happy drugs already going through me, I didn’t have the nerve to get out of the bed and stop the surgery.

“Okay,” I said. “Will you write me a prescription for a cranial prosthesis?” I’d learned that a wig was now to be called a cranial prothesis and that my insurance might cover the cost if a doctor wrote a prescription for it.

“Yes, I will,” he assured me.

“Cranial prosthesis—it’s almost as much fun to say as gynecological oncologist.” 

I felt like the main character in the play and film “Wit,” who dealt with her ovarian cancer by analyzing words. When I saw the show several years before my diagnosis, I had no premonition that one day, I too would be fighting ovarian cancer. That morning, we rolled as scheduled.

When I left the hospital that evening, I received a laminated card, about the size of a credit card, to carry in my purse. It stated that I had a port implanted in my abdomen. Anyone coming upon me in case of an automobile accident would need to know this fact, even though a helpful friend pointed out that in a really bad accident, the contents of one’s purse were likely to be scattered across the highway. I made a mental note to have no accidents, even though my cancer diagnosis had made me feel more reckless as a driver. After all, what could an accident do to me? I already had cancer.

The port had been inserted just below my right breast, near enough that I feared scraping the inch-long horizontal incision as I put on a bra. I shopped for a front-closure bra, which was impossible to find at the department stores I checked. One clerk suggested that I check back in the summer, but I hoped to be finished with chemo by then. No fan of either high prices or online shopping, I decided I’d simply have to be very careful. One friend had told me I’d quit wearing a bra when I began chemo, but I determined to hold up, as it were, as long as I could. I bought some sports bras, which were soft and had no metal.

I noticed a new tendency to panic over things I would have ignored before. When I found a red spot on my left leg, I feared it was a symptom of something. It took a while for me to realize that it indicated January in Ohio, chapped skin, and the need to apply some lotion.

I was having trouble getting to sleep at night, trying various tricks to make myself doze off. Last night I tried soothing myself to sleep with wordplay, rolling the word ovarian around in my mouth, thinking with satisfaction of the lovely round vowels, the spaciousness they made between the soft consonants. When I added cancer, I was struck by the hard c sound that marred the previous syllables. If that c sound were gone, I’d have ovarian ancer. Answer. Somehow I choose to believe that this experience will be the answer to a question I wasn’t consciously asking.