Nothing Left to Lose

By Celia Jeffries

PROMPT — The way I see it ...

Rose Kennedy’s coffin was being transported up Route 3 from the Cape, followed by a couple of buses full of the Kennedy family. It was a cold day in January as I watched the whole procession on the television in the mammography waiting room at Faulkner Hospital. For some reason they kept calling me back in for more pictures. I didn’t realize what this might mean until I saw the faces of the others in the waiting room, startled and concerned each time I returned to a chair instead of going into a cubicle to get dressed. Rose was arriving at the church in the North End when they called me in for the last time and pointed to what looked like snow on the face of a half-moon.

Everyone used war imagery at the time. You must fight the disease. Imagine the cancer cells succumbing to attack or whatever. The usual treatment was slash, burn, or poison: surgery, radiation, or chemo—quite heavy artillery. Faced with those choices I went out and stood in my garden. When a plant has an ailing limb, I don’t pour poison on it, I prune it. Often I would talk to the plant and encourage it to thrive. There was lots of Louise Hay talk going on at the time. Your disease is something you brought on yourself. AIDS meant one thing, breast cancer meant another. She even had a table of references to what body part you had victimized. I ignored Louise Hay and opted to treat myself as I treated my garden.

My right breast was removed a few weeks later, after the surgeon returned from his Caribbean vacation. The oncologist told me I had a 97 percent chance of surviving twenty years. “How can I stay well?” I asked. “Learn to say no,” he said. Of course it was never that simple. March 10, the date of the surgery (I always referred to it as surgery, not mastectomy) flashed off the calendar at me every year. I said no to a few things—the dying marriage, the expensive lifestyle, and yes to others—an MFA program and a stint in the Peace Corps. Until one March day I looked at the calendar and wondered if I was forgetting something—a birthday? an anniversary?

Year twenty came, then year twenty-one and another diagnosis, followed by the loss of the left breast. No prognosis timeline was given, no advice for staying well. I’m still working on saying, "no." This is year thirty. There’s a Kennedy in charge of health care now. I’m glad I have nothing left to lose.

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Celia Jeffries' work has appeared in numerous newspapers and literary magazines, including Westview, Writer’s Chronicle, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Puerto del Sol. Her debut novel BLUE DESERT received a Silver May Sarton Award. Celia writes from Florence, MA.