Cancer Schmancer (3 page)

Doctor #1 eventually breezed in and snapped on her gloves. I slid down to the table’s edge, placing my heels in the stirrups.

There was no mention of the perfume. I wondered if she was more a Shalimar gal.

I brought her up to date on my symptoms. “I keep experiencing this cramping in the middle of the month and after sex, like I’m about to get my period.”

“Do you take anything to help relieve the pain?” she asked, while performing a relatively painless Pap smear. I knew there was a reason I preferred a female gynecologist. Small hands!

“I usually take an Advil and the cramps subside,” I responded.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about anything a single Advil can take care of.” She didn’t seem very concerned, which was a relief, but I thought she did seem a bit hyper. She talked a mile a minute as her head periodically popped up from behind the paper sheet that draped across my thighs.

She brought up the Chinese herbs I knew she was selling on the side to Judi and a few of my other girlfriends to help them lose 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 11

In the Beginning

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weight. Oy. I never liked the idea that my gyno was into that, too. I should have known then. “I’ve been taking them for two years now,” she said, while pressing on my abdomen. “I’d like to stop, but I’m afraid I’ll gain weight.”

“What do you make of my midmonth staining?” I asked, while noticing on the wall a set of triplets dressed like bunnies.

“You’re probably perimenopausal. It’s the precursor to menopause and a common symptom in middle-aged women.” Middle-what? “In France they consider it normal,” she added.

My mind wandered as I began to obsess on Catherine Deneuve. Catherine Deneuve is French and she looks great. Does Catherine Deneuve stain between periods? Does Catherine Deneuve still get her period? Did Catherine Deneuve get a face-lift?

“Fran, what about having children?” Doctor #1 said, pulling me back into the moment. “Do you plan to? Because time is running out!” By this point she was annoying me. My life was so up in the air I had no idea what I was having for breakfast, let alone what I was doing about having kids. But the photo of that very fat, bald baby in his tiny baseball uniform sitting in a catcher’s mitt sure looked cute.

In that moment I made a mental note to stop seeing a gynecologist who was also an obstetrician. I mean, I needed this pressure like a hole in the head. So I pulled up my pants and left with a sample bag of Chinese weight-loss herbs and a clean bill of health. I had cancer at the time.

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Dating

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well, by the time the fifth season of The Nannyended and our hiatus began, Peter and I, and the whole cast and crew, breathed a sigh of relief. We could escape from each other and all the pressure. Peter packed up and went to New York, while I stayed in L.A. We took separate coasts for that hiatus and spent the next months free from it all. It was during this period that I allowed myself to really feel single.

There I was, a forty-year-old woman, and I’d never really dated. I began to make new friends and branch out from the married couples Peter and I had known for years. This helped me discover who I was outside of the marriage. Somehow I fell in with a group of Europeans who were very social. They were always throwing parties, and I was always game to go.

For the first time, I felt like I could be whoever I wanted to be.

Free to decide everything for myself, without feeling encumbered by my nagging inner voice always trying to do what was best for those around me. I was someone with no experience being on my own. Zilch! I never went away to college, never even went away to camp! At the age of nineteen I moved out of my bedroom in my 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 14

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parents’ apartment in Queens and in with Peter. But now it was time to have some fun.

It’s not that I was wild—God knows, nobody would ever describe me as that—but I was “open.” I wanted to meet new circles of friends and I appreciated whenever I was included. I used to tell everyone, “I’m hard up, invite me!” I remember my English friend Kat, a well-known interior decorator whom I’d been friends with for years, was entertaining some Italians who were visiting L.A.

We all decided to take a hike in the mountains together.

Well, one of the three men, Vincenzo, was so gorgeous. I mean, like right out of La Dolce Vita. Black wavy hair, dark sunglasses, and dazzling white teeth. He was olive-complected and dressed casually in whites and tans. He had an adorable Italian accent and spoke limited English. Perfecto!

There we were on the hike when Vincenzo and I started to hit it off. “I see Nanny in Italia,” he said. “It call La Tata.”

Smooth move, I thought. Talking about one of my favorite subjects.

“I like sound of you voice,” he said.

Does he realize the show is dubbed in Italy?

“You much more beautiful and younger in person than TV.”

Well, no language barrier here. Honey, come to Mama! By now I’m workin’ my mojo, gettin’ that whole thing goin’, and I’m checkin’ out his legs, his clothes, the way the tendrils of his hair spill over the white collar of his shirt, even his fingernails. And after careful inspection, I’m still interested.

After the hike we all wound up at a beachfront restaurant for margaritas and then at my apartment just to hang out for a while.

Despite the place being so small, they all loved its white, airy look and felt very comfortable. One by one everybody had somewhere else to go. Everybody except Vincenzo, that is.

Now, remember, I was new to dating and not very experi-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 15

Dating

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enced. Oh well, better late than never. I gotta admit, I was feeling a nervous flutter in my stomach when I closed that front door on the last visitor and turned back to the room to see Vincenzo sitting on my couch, arms spread across the back, smiling from ear to ear.

That looked like an invitation if ever I’d seen one, and so I sat down next to him. Within moments we began making out. But where does “making out” end at this age when you’ve got your own pad and can no longer use your parents as an excuse to cut the evening short?

On the other hand, what was I worried about? If I wanted to, I could have sex with him. I could do whatever I wanted. I was a grown woman. But I was really a freak. With little or no sexual experience other than with my husband, I was literally feeling my way through.

I know it sounds weird, but my marriage to Peter had sheltered me from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s. I was like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping right through the sexual revolution. I used to feel like a bore, always being part of an ol’ married couple when the whole “Me Generation” was sleeping around. A therapist once told us we were “too young to be in such an old relationship.” Well, it sounded good at the time, but actually nothing could have been farther from the truth. In reality, we were too old to be in such a young relationship. Both of us were emotionally immature, underdeveloped, and lacking insight.

Well, as beautiful as Vincenzo was, I can’t say he was a very good kisser. I’m sorry, but for me the quality of the kiss means everything. Oy, it was all wrong. The mouth was too open, too much tongue, not enough lip. And then he started biting me! Can you believe that? Was this supposed to be sexy?

“Vincenzo, quit biting me,” I said. “I wear very revealing clothes on The Nanny and I can’t be getting bite marks!” A few things began racing through my mind: His friends left him with-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 16

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out a car. I really didn’t want to be doing this anymore, but what to do with him? Should I just sleep with him and get it over with?

Or reject him, hurt his feelings, and then have to deal with him during that awkward waiting-for-the-taxi-to-arrive period?

Is that crazy? I mean, what a baby, what a dope I was, actually considering sleeping with a man who promised to be a lousy lover just to avoid making him feel bad. There was my problem staring me right in the face: To what lengths would I go, how much was I willing to sacrifice, just to make others happy?

Suddenly sanity took over and my inner voice said, You don’t want to go through with this? Don’t! And I heard myself saying,

“This isn’t going to happen, you have to go.” Wow. I did it. And it took only forty years and a lotta therapy to get there. What was far more important to my growth than sleeping with Vincenzo was being able to tell him I wouldn’t.

As the taxi arrived—thank God, in no time flat—I closed the door on Vincenzo, and felt like I’d turned a page in this chapter of my life.

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The First Pilot for MTV

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the staining and cramping persisted, and it made me feel embarrassed and inadequate. If I truly was perimenopausal, as Doctor #1 suggested, that meant I was getting old. I hated that idea. Besides, didn’t most women start this stuff in their fifties? At what age did it start for my mom? I called her to find out.

“Hello?”

“Ma, tell me something, when did you begin to experience the first signs of menopause?” I asked, while inspecting my hands for liver spots.

“Morty, turn off the teapot, the whistle’s blowing!” she screamed. “He don’t hear anymore, where was I?” she said as Oprah droned in the background.

“Menopause, when did it start for you?” I repeated, wondering if my body was aging at some weirdly accelerated rate.

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The doctor’s thinking maybe that’s why I’m staining.”

“A lot of women go through an early menopause. Do you get hot flashes?”

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“Hot flashes? No way.” Suddenly I felt nauseous. “Let’s change the subject.”

“Hmm. Did I tell you Grandma Yetta hung up on me when she tried to shut off the TV with the telephone? Is she funny, or what?”

my mom asked.

“Hysterical,” I answered. But I wasn’t laughing.

Fate was playing a dirty trick on me, giving me an early menopause just when I was starting my life over again. I pictured myself getting night sweats and a lowered libido. I felt like damaged goods, imperfect.

So while I pretended to be the picture of health to the outside world, I secretly decided to see another gynecologist, Doctor #2.

Leesa, my exercise instructor, had said he was really good, that he was doing all kinds of breakthrough hormone treatments in women’s medicine. A magazine had even reported on his contro-versial, even radical, theories regarding the usage of natural thyroid and growth hormones to keep a woman in a perpetual state of youthfulness. I’ll tell ya, that just don’t sound kosher to me. I know there ain’t no fountain of youth. But meanwhile, I went to see him anyway.

As I sat in the waiting room a young woman entered the office and asked at the desk for her pills. She seemed to be in her twenties, but she could have easily been in her thirties. Perhaps she recognized me, I don’t know, but while she was waiting, she struck up a conversation.

“Is this your first time here?”

I nodded, slightly overwhelmed by her bouncing-off-the-walls energy.

“Let me tell you, he is a great doctor. A true genius,” she said, talking a mile a minute. “Look at my skin! Look at my hair! I’ve never felt better in my whole life. And I’m not the only one, all my sisters go to him. We all take his hormone replacement regimen 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 19

The First Pilot for MTV

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and we’ve never felt better or more energized!” Calm down, honey, you’re gonna explode!

Sounded more like Scientology than gynecology, I thought, as the nurse showed me into the doctor’s office. There, behind a large desk covered with bottles of pills, sat an older man with a foreign accent who wore clogs. He seemed very bullish on his arsenal of medications, but meanwhile he was still getting over the flu. So there you are.

Between sneezes and coughs, he questioned me about any family history of cancer. “There’s none on my mother’s side, but my dad’s sister died from ovarian cancer,” I said as I handed him a tissue. I remember saying with conviction, “I don’t have cancer.”

“I do extensive state-of-the-art blood tests,” he said. “I’ll need at least seventeen vials of blood, to be thorough.”

“Seventeen vials?” I said, recoiling.

“They’re small vials,” he countered. “And we send them out of state for the best analysis.” Where, Transylvania? Who was this guy?

In the meantime he talked about putting me on his program, which included the taking of a natural thyroid pill. I explained that I was already taking Synthroid medication for Hashimoto’s disease, a very common thyroid condition. (Thyroiditis is the most common disease among women. It’s hereditary, and all women should be tested for it by an endocrinologist.) It annoyed me that in this first visit he was already pushing pills.

His exam was pretty typical: stirrups, pelvic, and Pap. He couldn’t do the blood test because it had to be done on a specific day of my cycle. I got dressed and left, but I never returned.

So I went back to taking my Advil and business as usual. It was right around this time that a sitcom script I’d written was green-lighted to become a pilot for MTV. This was my first real venture on my own apart from Peter and The Nanny, and I execu-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 20

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tive produced and directed it as well. The concept was a Gen-X

Odd Couple. It was a massive undertaking, a real milestone for me.

As exhilarating as the experience was, it was also a rude awakening. I, who’d always had Peter by my side to support and console me after a long and hard day’s work, now came back to an empty apartment. Too tired even to go out for dinner, I’d sit on my bed working on my camera shots by the light of my reading lamp, eating food my housekeeper Angelica had left in the fridge. At this point Peter and I were sharing Angelica and her husband, Ramon, depending on them to keep our places tidy.