The C Word ... CAN'T

I've always been a glass half full kind of a gal.  Struck by the normal tragedies of life I would try to look on the bright side.  When I tripped on a soda can on a crowded subway platform at 42nd and Lexington and my purse, along with credit cards, ID, and $200 worth of make-up, flew onto the tracks I picked myself up, brushed myself off and said to no one in particular, "Oh, well, I needed a new mascara anyway."  When I found out that my new fabulous boyfriend was cheating on me with several other women, I said to my girlfriends, "Oh, well, he drank too much anyway."  (I can still see their collective heads nodding in serious agreement.)  When I lost a coveted music job to another singer I said to my sister, "Oh, well, that'll just leave my schedule open for more gigs."  Oh, please, do you really think I believed those things?  Not completely, but enough so that they eased the sting.

It's a human mechanism to try to turn a negative into a positive.  We come up with sayings like "The sun will come out tomorrow," "Every cloud has a silver lining," and "You're not getting older, you're getting better." (By the way, that last chestnut was penned by the father of yours truly and I don't think he ever had a really positive day in his life.)  Yes, most of us hold on to any little thing to encourage us that life doesn't suck when bad things happen to nice people.  But then there are the other times, the times when no perky little platitude will help.  No amount of "ac-cen-tu-ate the positive and e-lim-in-ate the negative" will change a bad to a good -- or so you think at the moment.  Discovering my cancer was one of those moments.

Round January of this year I'd already suspected that something was wrong.  One winter night as I pulled the covers over my body in an effort to get warm, my hand brushed against something that felt suspiciously like a lump in my breast.  I touched it lightly hoping that I'd imagined it.  "No, it can't be," I thought.  So I yanked the blanket over my head and fell into a blissfully ignorant sleep.

Can't, it's the word that most of us use when we are faced with obstacles that are too difficult to overcome or comprehend.  "I can't be fired," "I can't be broke." "My boyfriend can't be cheating on me."  "I can't have cancer!"  We stomp our feet against fate thinking that if we say it enough times the powers that be will hear us and take all the bad things away.  "Denial is a coping mechanism," a good friend recently told me.  Well, if that's true, I was in the coping cabana and I wasn't coming out anytime soon.  For five months I pretended that the lump wasn't there.  Like having a mosquito bite or poison ivy, I imagined that if I didn't touch it it wouldn't get any worse.  Even when I had my yearly Well Woman Check-up I neglected to mention anything to my doctor.  "I can't tell her because if I do she might find it."   And as she wrote me a prescription for my yearly mammogram I thought to myself, "I can't have one because I don't have health insurance yet."  You see, I'd let mine lapse because I was moving from New Jersey to New York and I knew I could get a better plan there.  I'd actually talked myself into thinking that not being covered by health insurance insured me against having cancer.  

And how did I finally overcome the can't?  Well, a good friend posted a video on Facebook of a remake of the 1990 Divinyl's song, "I Touch Myself."  When the original came out the song's meaning was, to say the least, sexually provocative, but the message of this new video was completely different.  It was now an anthem for breast cancer awareness.  Stark in its presentation, the video showed beautiful, strong women singing directly to the camera -- to me -- about overcoming denial, about touching your own body to help yourself.  Suddenly my "can't" became  "should," "can," and finally, "will."   The very next day I called to make an appointment for my mammogram and started the ball rolling toward dealing with the problem.

So what's the moral of my can't-cer story?  Well, nothing too lofty or complicated.  Simply that no matter how fearful you are of the outcome, denying the truth doesn't get you any closer to solving the problem.  There are times when changing a negative to a positive means putting your big girl pants on and finding a little courage.  Actually, most anyone can ... not can't.  

For more information on the I Touch Myself Project, please visit http://itouchmyself.org/