Pandora's DNA: Tracing the Breast Cancer Genes Through History, Science, and One Family Tree by Lizzie Stark

Author:Lizzie Stark [Stark, Lizzie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

8 | The Black Cloud

In some ways, my grandpa’s funeral revived me. It gave me permission to cry, mostly for him, but for myself too. And it contextualized my genetic results—this wasn’t a death sentence, but simply a statistic of cancer risk. An up to 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer in my lifetime. A 40 to 60 percent chance of ovarian. After the funeral ended, my aunt put the box of ashes in my arms to carry home for my grandmother. It felt heavy for a man who shrank to almost nothing in his final days, and when my curiosity forced me to open the polished wooden lid, all I could see was a smaller plastic box. It fit perfectly inside.

I drove from Tennessee back to DC with my parents, and my mother drove me further, back up to New Jersey, where she would stay with George and me for a few days.

Since my mother doesn’t sit still, we don’t when she visits. We visited the Ikea vortex to look at furniture, different grocery stores for all the cooking we would do, the needlepoint shop in Princeton for a project I wanted to start, and the park, where we walked around and around before dinner.

Our conversation circled too. We shuttled between talking about cancer and carefully not-talking about it. I was still in a state of shock, uncertainty, and terror. I couldn’t climb out of the thick of these emotions the way I would have liked to, because what I imagined on my mother’s face was potentially guilt, as well as dread that our family’s curse might be seeking its next victim. I wished I was in shape to comfort her. She told me about her surgeries and how much she loved me and how glad she felt, after cancer, to have the luxury of dull mediocre days stretching in front of her. She assembled delightful salads with Asian pears and toasted pumpkin seeds. We ate ice cream together, and she taught me how to needlepoint; but eventually she had to drive home.

After she left, George and I tried to return to normal. But the truth was that after the genetic test, the old normal no longer existed, and the new one haunted us.

The gene consumed me, at first slowly, but as the shock wore off it devoured every waking moment not forcibly occupied with other activity. I was OK three mornings a week, from 5:00 to 10:00 AM, when I was summarizing news articles. And I was OK when I worked on my first book, which would find a publisher in only a few months. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed and thought about the inevitability of this mutation, my risk written into the DNA in every cell of my body. I knew it upset my husband when I cried, so I tried not to sob unless it was really bad. Whenever he realized I was weeping, he rolled over to hold me, but surely, by this time, he was tired of the grating endurance of this pain.

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