My Friday nights have a cadence about them. I call my parents, grandparents, and siblings for Shabbat. I make “ladies night” dinner with Vince and my coworkers. I walk around the corner to Catherine street to overeat tortilla chips and watch Drag Race. Then, my friends and I head out to a bar or club before I inevitably get overstimulated around 11pm because I do not drink anymore.

Instead, I spent this past Friday night weeping on the phone with my mom, drowning in my dirty comforter. I did not make my Shabbat calls or “ladies night” dinner, I didn’t walk around the corner to Catherine street, and I certainly didn’t have the willpower to slap on some purple eyeshadow and shake my ass at the club or pretend to drink at the bar. A recent voicemail about a lump in my left breast left me reeling and (metaphorically) paralyzed.

They found the lump, originally when I was 18, by breast exam, then ultrasound. I had it biopsied the week before my first day of college, and my entire left flank was black and blue. My mom said it didn’t matter because “it wasn’t like anyone should be seeing me naked anyway.” At that time, the biopsy came back benign.

This past spring, during my last semester of college, I went back to the doctor to check on that same lump, which was now painful, and had quadrupled in size. Lying on the ultrasound table, I wanted to punch the radiology tech. She pressed way too hard with the probe and scoffed when I winced. When the wand grazed over my trouble spot, she didn't even have the decency to keep a poker face, too-thin eyebrows reaching for the sky. I shook on the table, tits out, covered in freezing lube, being groped by a stranger and confronted with the foreign, almost lunar, black and white mass on the screen behind me. She told me not to look.

My mom came into the room to hold my hand, carrying shopping bags full of the business casual clothes she’d just bought me. We’d just finished shopping for clothes for my first big girl, post-grad job I was set to start in just a month. The male radiologist said a bunch of stuff but all I heard was “referral” and “people get this procedure all the time”.

It’s one thing for you to rationally know that there is a lump in your left breast that needs to come out because it is… sketchy? It is an entirely other thing to open up your phone expecting to judge other people’s Instagram posts to instead hear a receptionist your age tell you that she’s calling from the “Dubin Breast Center at Mt Sinai Hospital Surgical ONCOLOGY Department”.

The word played over in my head. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. . Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncology. Oncolo- my life began at Mt. Sinai Hospital and I don’t want it to end there. The lump’s new status as suspicious really put a damper on my senior year of college.

I came to my Feminist Theory class soon after I received the voicemail to find we were discussing “The Cancer Journals,” by Audre Lorde. In it, Audre describes her own journey with breast cancer — her suffering, and the various things she did to try to suffer less. Without asking if she could join, Audre was on this journey with me — and I despised her for it. By her own description, she was so good at DOING things — while I was frozen in fear, too tired and overwhelmed to be anything but a human lump in my bed.

I tolerated Audre for as long as I could — but after some time, she struck too much of a nerve for me to participate, or, at the very least, sit quietly and not audibly grit my teeth. I stormed out of class.

I knew that the “procedure” my doctor told me about at our appointment really meant “surgery”. Last year, I got heart surgery to remedy a congenital arrhythmia and my parents, too nervous to admit what was happening to themselves, referred to it as a “little procedure” up until the moment I was on the table, which made me IRATE. I was a cardiac tech at the time and knew for a fact that what was about to happen to me was risky and intrusive. If your parents are praying as you’re wheeled into the operating room, it’s surgery.

And I knew that the “people” who “get this procedure all the time” were, for the most part, in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. As I thought about it, I began to think again about one of these people: Audre Lorde. She was around sixty when she wrote about a predicament similar to the one I am in). These people – Audre included – had lived long lives. They’d gotten married, and graduated college and grad school, and had kids (maybe even grandkids), and made lifelong friendships, and traveled the world. Ok, maybe all these things require a certain degree of privilege and luck and choice, but at the very least their frontal lobes had a chance to develop. I didn’t get to do all the cool shit that Audre Lorde did before she got her diagnosis. I am twenty-two years old. A spring chicken, and a chicken as well.

Before I worried about my own mortality, though, I worried about school, my part-time job as a caregiver, and my upcoming post-grad job. I don’t have time for all these gynecologist, radiologist, genetic counselor and oncologist visits – let alone the “Procedure” itself and the recovery and the results post-recovery. This is all going to get in the way of going to class or showing up for my shifts. And mentally, I can’t show up to class and philosophize with my peers about potentially living with….the thing… because that’s what’s actually happening. My surgery is scheduled right when my post-grad job begins, and I’m worried that they’ll be upset with me in the case that I require even more medical care and miss more shifts.

I am not a “black-feminist-lesbian-warrior-mother-poet.” I do not have Audre Lorde’s ability to use my illness and suffering as meaningful creative inspiration or as a vehicle for social change. I am an extraordinarily flawed, neurotic, cynical New York Jew who uses biomedical science and comedy and complaining to cope. I am white and petulant, self-indulgent and spoiled. I am a feminist and a lesbian, sure, but that’s the least of my concern right now, especially when the shooting pain in my breast makes me want to shoo my partner away every time they try to touch it. I am no warrior: I cry all the time. I need a Tempurpedic mattress. I quit peewee soccer because the goose poop on the field grossed me out. I am not a mother, and I don’t know if I will be able to be one now even though it’s one of my biggest dreams in life. And I am not a poet. I fucking hate poetry. Why do I need to take ten extra steps to understand a piece of writing when the author could’ve just spat it out and saved me some? My time is a precious resource, especially now.

If I sacrifice my breast to keep my life, you bet your ass I’m getting a new, fake one so that I don’t have to discuss it with anyone rather than protesting ableism and beauty norms by forgoing one, like Lorde did. My suffering won’t lead to activism and philosophizing about Apartheid and Marxism and the Holocaust and the murder of MLK. All I’ve got is the present, and the present is for kvetching. Sometimes being sick just sucks. There's no hidden meaning or solidarity building discussion of diaspora or strengthening of character or silver lining. It isn’t poetic to say, but it just fucking sucks balls.

Looking to avoid my feelings about the situation, I got pissed at Audre Lorde. I sometimes wonder “why me and why now?”, as Audre often did. At my Jewish day school back when I was young, we read a lot of Torah stuff where illness and disability were punishments for doing something “wrong”. Am I being punished for something by a vengeful Old Testament God? Did I bring it on myself? Is it because I didn’t fast on Yom Kippur, or because I did homework instead of going to synagogue on the high holidays? Is it because I’m gay? Is it because I gossip too much? Is it because I write out “God” instead of hyphenating it like we were taught to? Is it because I accidentally broke kosher that one time I had that amazing quiche that turned out to have bacon in it?

Bitter and scared and tearing through the pages of The Cancer Journals, I worry that somehow, I deserve this because I am not coping in the same way as Audre, who was “eating less” and “sticking to fruits and veggies” while I scarfed down a DQ blizzard. Audre, who was “controlling her thoughts, actions and feelings” while I vomited negativity through my keyboard and snapped at my friends and family. I obsessively Googled risk factors for breast tumors, trying to find some possible cause. Is it because of the nights I spent chugging bright blue alcoholic swill, when I was lost and closeted? My mom and dad sent me a Yahoo article about a woman who wore sports bras too often and claimed that it caused the malignant lump in her breast – was it that? Did I wear too many sports bras?

I don’t want to be told that I should try deep breathing or painting or tai chi or ashwagandha tea or crystals or swimming naked or thinking “harmonious” thoughts. I will not be getting “homeopathic remedies” to prolong my life. My anger at my own situation warps Lorde’s well-meaning account of her healing journey into a personal criticism. I will never be as good as Audre. It may have worked for her, but I’m far more comfortable with being poked and prodded by doctors than with being forced to face my feelings as Lorde did. I do not have it in me to grow and to contemplate. I want the lump sliced and diced out. NOW. There will be no wasting time on bullshit when it comes to my twenty-two-year-old body. I want to stick around.

“You need to chill the fuck out,” Is that my brain, or the ghost of Audre Lorde, taunting me? “You’re doing it all wrong.” And I am – look at my pathetic ass, wiping snot and tears with a 4-days-dirty sweatshirt. “You should not be crying, you need to practice gratitude. There are people out there who have it worse than you: why aren’t you at some international conference to help them? Where is your Great American Novel? Where are your crystals?!” I picture the ghost of Audre Lorde slapping the Diet Coke out of my hand, replacing it with Ashwagandha tea, and gracefully floating out the door, her one breast leading the way, her flowy shirt trailing behind her.

But I don’t want to write a novel. I just want to curl up in a ball and watch TV and go home to my parents and be babied and validated and served soup. I am terrified and angry and confused. I am in so much therapy. Everything angers me, even stupid things, and I bite my tongue so much that the corners of the gap between my front teeth start to break skin.

I don’t want the lump to be ignored, but I can’t acknowledge it. I don’t want to be a martyr but I also don’t want to be pitied. I want understanding but I know most of my friends won’t understand. Delusion sometimes tells me that I will be ok after my “procedure,” but also that I will die a horrible and untimely death. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Perhaps when I’m feeling better about things, Audre Lorde’s ghost will be less of a dick. And I’ll be less of a dick to Audre — and just maybe, to myself. 

Rachel Troy (she/her) graduated from the University of Michigan, where she majored in Women’s and Gender studies and Biology. Her work as a patient care assistant motivated her to apply for her current job as a research assistant at UofM’s Center for Disability Health and Wellness. She hopes to eventually become a healthcare attorney and legal advocate for queer and disabled patients and providers. Her interests (in order of most to least flattering) include health equity, short stories, simple carbohydrates, and reality television.