Cancer Schmancer (7 page)

Ultimately, though, I decided that my worries about growing old, being abandoned and alone, really had nothing to do with John. I’d worried about this stuff all my life. In therapy, I connected these worries to empty threats my mother made to me as a child. Here we go again.

“I’m going to send you away to the home for bad children,”

she’d scream whenever my sister or I would get too out of control.

And I don’t know about my older sister, but I for one believed her!

She never realized how frightened I was by what she was saying.

Maybe on another child it wouldn’t have had the same impact.

But the mental images I created of this home for bad children became the core for all my fears of being alone, being unloved, being abandoned, and being dead. Once again, after I made those connections, I was able to let go of many of my lifelong fears. For the most part, I stopped worrying about getting old, about being alone, about dying. I stopped worrying about the age difference between John and me. I was just going to lighten up and get a sense of humor about it all, like when I first met John’s buddy Nat. Shaking my hand, he said, “I’m John’s oldest friend.”

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“And I’m John’s oldest girlfriend,” I responded happily.

I was able to color my hair in front of him and cover my gray without worrying about all that other crap. We’d joke about my

“blond” growing out, but it was only a joke; we both knew it was gray. John would often tease me, “I’m going to send you away to the home for bad girlfriends if you aren’t good.” It was nice to finally be able to joke about it all.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one who needed to work on her problems. I’d begun to realize that John didn’t like to travel and had a real fear of flying. Every time we made plans to go away, he’d become so stressed his immune system would weaken and he’d get sick. It was impossible to discuss plans with him because the very idea of it made him so nervous. The last thing I wanted was to make comparisons between John and Peter, but in this situation, it was difficult not to. I was running up against the same thing. Here was another man who didn’t share my wanderlust.

“I know once I get there, I’ll have a good time, but it’s the getting there that’s the problem,” he’d say. For me, it was like being in a parallel universe, because those had been Peter’s exact words, too. Verbatim! This was one area where I refused to indulge any man.

“If you give into this fear it will grow into a phobia,” I’d always say. My desire was to always work through a fear rather than give in to it. I wished I could be with someone who actually looked forward to taking a great trip, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Then there were times when John would scold me for saying something he didn’t think sounded good. Like when I said, “I’m going to the bathroom to take a dump.” He suddenly became very parental and said, “Don’t say ‘dump.’ It’s a turnoff when you talk like a truck driver.” I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Now, I’d already gone through this sort of thing with Peter. There was no way, after everything I’d struggled through to get where I was, 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 53

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I was going to end up with another man telling me what to do. Peter was a Scorpio, John was a Scorpio, and my father, the man who’d started it all, was a Scorpio, too. Are there no other signs of the Zodiac that I’m attracted to?

Oh my God, what’s happening? I thought. Had I gone nowhere? Had I been standing still all this time? I really began to wonder. Was this part of John’s Italian/Lebanese culture? I mean, where did he come off telling me what to do? On the upside, I liked the way I was responding in contrast to how I’d been with Peter. I didn’t feel like I’d been bad, didn’t worry John hated me or might leave. I never felt like I’d be sent away to the home for bad women who sounded like truck drivers. I simply felt he was more uptight than necessary, and that, for things to work out, it had to stop.

Of course, I needed to stop doing certain things, too. My inability to apologize has always been a problem. It was a problem when I was a kid, and in my marriage with Peter, as well as with coworkers and friends. During an argument I was also prone to name-calling, which John would take offense to. If I called him a baby, silly, or immature—to me, no big deal—he’d get really irritated. “Talk to me, communicate, don’t call me names,” he’d insist. He also made me aware of how many times I had, out of frustration, punched him in the arm. I guess I’d been doing that to boys since my girlhood and never thought much of it, but he didn’t appreciate it at all. He was right. Name-calling and arm punching are immature and childish.

John and I fought a lot and cried a lot. At first we were always defensive about our own positions, but eventually we traced it back to pain in our childhoods, and that was when the tears came. Through our relationship we began to clean out the cob-webs of our past, put the pain aside, and see ourselves more clearly. I don’t know how we were able to get through this time, 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 54

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but something kept us together. Whenever we figured out what was really behind a fight, it brought us so much closer. And with each discovery about ourselves, another brick was set in our foundation as we began to feel no one else knew us as well as we knew each other.

Meanwhile, nothing had changed symptomatically. My mood swings were still erratic, and Doctor #1’s being so adamant that I was perimenopausal didn’t help. The progesterone pills she told me to take two weeks out of every month might have helped a little, but not much. I was still staining, still cramping, still everything. When I called Doctor #1 and told her the progesterone didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, she said, “Double the dose and see if that works.” So I did.

It was right around this time that I was being honored in Amsterdam with the Silver Tulip Award. This is the Dutch version of the Emmy Awards, and The Nanny is a well-loved television series there. So John and I decided to make a vacation out of it for my birthday. We met my cousin Reid and his wife, Claudine, in Paris first, as well as my old friend Howie. He and I always daydreamed about the time when we would walk through the art museums of Paris together. And good neighbor Jill, who was working in Prague at the time, planned to fly in for the weekend. After about a week in Paris, our plan was to take a train up to Amsterdam, where we’d do the awards show and enjoy the city before returning to the States.

Unfortunately, I was having a horrible reaction to the double dose of progesterone—something I didn’t realize until it was almost too late. If I’d had mood swings before, now I was completely jumping out of my skin. I really felt insane, had no coping mechanisms. My face broke out worse than ever. I felt like I was capable of murdering someone or killing myself.

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Everything upset me on that trip. There were brief episodes when I felt free-spirited, but probably only after a few glasses of wine. The rest of the time I was pulling my hair out of my head.

Nothing was going right for good neighbor Jill, either. She hated her hotel, the cabbie took her to the wrong place, her shoes were killing her, and I was intolerant of her problems. John and I fought, and Howie, having worked with me for so long on The Nanny, knew to keep his distance until the coast was clear. Claudine and Reid had each other and, thankfully, were very independent. I remember John yelling at me, “You’re acting crazy. I can’t be with someone who acts so crazy!” My behavior was cost-ing me my relationship with him, as well as some friendships I very much valued.

The train ride to Amsterdam was interminable. I thought I’d lose my mind. What people must have thought of me, I don’t know. One morning John and I woke up feeling intensely unhappy. During room service in our beautiful suite overlooking a quiet, leafy, tree-lined canal in Amsterdam, I realized something that hadn’t occurred to either of us before. “It must be the pills!” I remember saying. “There’s something wrong with me, I’m not acting normal. This is not me and I think it’s these stupid pills I’m on.” I guess this rang true for John, too. Suddenly a whole new light was cast on the situation and his tone changed from angry to calm.

“Well, what are you going to do? You have to take the pills,”

he said.

“No I don’t!” I responded with conviction. “Not if they’re ruining my life I don’t. This can’t be what I need. It just can’t be. . . .” Upon my return from Europe I called Doctor #1 and described my extreme reaction to the pills.

Without skipping a beat she said, “Well, why don’t you try 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 56

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taking half the dosage and see how you feel?” I’d started by taking one pill in the first place, before doubling it to two in the second place! Jeez, what was she thinking? Right then and there I decided that was it for Doctor #1. Au revoir. I never, ever wanted to see her again.

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The Pill

M a y 2 0 0 0

ishould have known 2000 was gonna suck when on New Year’s Eve, in front of my house, a driver smashed into poor Howie’s parked car and totaled it. Fire trucks, policemen, and neighbors were congregated out there trying to sort through the damage and mess. For security’s sake, I sat inside watching the action on my monitor as my party guests milled around outside taking photos and trying to calm down Howie. He eventually went home in a taxi around ten-thirty P.M. with a doggie bag of food and about ten milligrams of Valium. Happy New Year! From that point on the rest of the year only got worse.

I continued to suffer from all the usual symptoms, and just to add to the list, I now began to experience a nagging leg pain. It was mostly in my left leg, and occurred mostly at night. It had gotten so bad I hated going to bed. Every night the same thing. I couldn’t sleep without taking some kind of painkiller or sleeping pill. I tried lying with pillows under my legs, wearing socks, rubbing BenGay, using a heating pad, even filling hot-water bottles.

Sexy, huh? But nothing, and I mean nothing, worked. I felt like I was falling apart and wondered if all this stuff was the nagging aches and pains of impending old age. Did I just need to learn to live 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 58

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with it? I was at my wit’s end, in desperate need of help. So I made an appointment with a vascular specialist, Doctor #6. I mean, the leg thing was the worst symptom of all. I was like a trapped wild animal. If I didn’t get help soon, I was gonna chew my leg off!

I remember Elaine had spent a year complaining about leg pain before being diagnosed with a blocked artery by a vascular doctor. Up until that point she’d been told she needed back surgery for a compressed disc. Her fear of surgery kept her searching for another diagnosis, though, and she eventually found her way to Mind Over Back Pain by Dr. John E. Sarno. This doctor’s approach sounded nonsurgical to Elaine, so she pursued it.

An associate of Sarno’s listened to her symptoms and asked her what no other medical doctor had thought to ask: “Have you had a Doppler flow test?” Wouldn’t you know it? That one little test, easily and painlessly performed in a doctor’s office, told the whole story of her leg pain. The cause was a blocked artery in her leg, which required bypass surgery. At least she was getting operated on for the right thing, and it did fix her. The lesson here is that if you’re experiencing pain, numbness, weakness, or weird sensa-tions in any of your limbs, or if you seem sluggish in your head, a bit out of it, just not as sharp as normal, you may have a blocked artery. I don’t know why doctors don’t offer this test regularly.

So there I was, describing all my symptoms again to the vascular specialist, Doctor #6, wanting this Doppler flow test, too.

He used a wand that looked like an ultrasound and scanned my arterial system for any blockages. But once again the test showed nothing. “You probably have night cramps,” he blurted out.

“What are those?” I questioned.

“No one knows why we get them, but they’re very common.

I’ve been told tonic water helps,” he said, while cleaning up his tools.

“Tonic water?” I asked, incredulous.

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“Yup. Do you like gin and tonics?” he inquired.

“I never had one,” I answered.

“Well, try having one before you go to bed, lemme know if it helps,” he said, exiting. Now, I gotta admit, a gin and tonic is a tasty thing at around 11 P.M. with the fireplace goin’ and the TV on . . . it didn’t do much for the leg pain, though.

It was all so crazy. One doctor told me I had the tits of an eighteen-year-old, one doctor said I was eating too much spinach, and this guy thought I should drink gin and tonics at bedtime. So there I was with perky breasts, in need of roughage, going to bed sloshed, all in some futile attempt to cure myself.

That’s when I called the neurologist, Doctor #7, thinking maybe it was neurological. He requested an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the hip and leg area. An MRI is not an X ray, but a machine that uses magnets to create its images. This was my first one and I was a bit nervous. Would I get claustrophobic?

I’d heard from many people that the cylinder you’re slid into is very small. I was told they have open models and closed models. The open models aren’t as thorough as the closed models, and the closed models, while more thorough, are very confined. Well, it was all true and of course, my luck, for some reason unknown to me, I had to use the closed model.

I went with John. The MRI, by the way, isn’t a quick test. It’s a very exact science and in my case ended up taking close to an hour. They gave me earplugs “because the device is a bit noisy.”

Well, that’s the understatement of the century, since it’s a ca-cophony of machine-gun-sounding bells, buzzers, and bangs.