Lavender Hair: Devotions For Women With Breast CancerSample

 Red Flag: Uh Oh 

Coughing in my car on the way home from Zanies, I thought about Jim McCawley, the talent scout for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson who “discovered” me at the Variety Arts Center in 1983 where I was doing stand-up. He gave me my big break. He pre-inter­viewed me twenty times before my twenty appearances on the show. In 1992, while having me guest star on the short-lived Vicki! show with Vicki Lawrence, he showed me a big scar down his chest and, with a quizzical smile and wide eyes, told me he had just had a grapefruit-sized tumor removed from his lungs. Cancer. He wasn’t a smoker but had spent years of long nights in smoky comedy clubs discovering talent for Johnny Carson. Jim McCawley died of lung cancer at age fifty-four. I had spent many nights in those same comedy clubs working on my set and breathing secondhand smoke. Uh oh. 

Physical and emotional pain are knit together. The constant coughing was giving way to fear. The next day at the gym, I was still coughing and the other people on the elliptical machines kept moving away from me. Sigh. Better do something. I never went to the doctor for checkups. I don’t have a primary doctor. I don’t trust them—they make too many mistakes. They are “practicing” medicine. But, three days earlier, I had felt a little numb spot near my left underarm area. That was weird. I even mentioned it to Husband.  I guess the strange numb spot added to the cough compelled me to the nearest walk-in clinic. I was sweaty from the gym, which I know is rude, but I thought I would chicken out if I didn’t go see a doctor right then. It was midday in a work week. I figured everyone would be at work, so hardly anyone to notice my sweaty self. 

Five years before, around menopause, my breasts had suddenly started growing, and the left one had developed a weird dent in it. I figured it was just misshapen fat or a slipped implant. I got busy and forgot about it. It couldn’t be cancer. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that cancer didn’t run in our family and there was no lump, just a dent. But now was different. I think there was a small inner voice tell­ing me something serious was wrong inside my body. I didn’t know what. I just knew now was the time to do something. And I knew God would be with me no matter the outcome.

Tip: Get regular doctor checkups. Bonus points for taking a shower before you go. And, don’t go to the gym if you’re coughing on everybody. My bad. My bad. My bad.