it all started with a lump in the armpit right. When the Argentine writer and journalist Patricia Kolesnicov he happened to feel that protuberance for the first time, at first he thought nothing of it. He requested an appointment with his gynecologist and, after a series of exams, they decided to remove him immediately. “That choice saved my life: the bulge it was an aggressive cancer”, writes the author in her book biography of my cancerrepublished by IndieLibros, which can be downloaded for free from the world cancer day.
The thing, as expected, was not easy: “I was 33 years old, I had always had a very strong body and the biopsy said that I expected a few rounds with death. I did not hesitate: I was going to give that fight; i did it with chemotherapy, with psychoanalysis, with an eclectic alternative medicine, with lightning, swimming and the love of others. Ten months after having felt the lump she was bald, skinny, without eyebrows, weak. But the tests were clean.”
From that bump he found in 1998 to the first edition of the book, when cancer I had already been defeated, there were four years in which the limits of traditional medicine led her to try all kinds of alternative therapies. But, without tending towards esotericism, mysticism or the current anti-scientific imposition of “vibrating high”, one of the things that Kolesnicov highlights the most, no longer as a possible solution to the disease, but rather as a palliative, is the love of his relatives and, in particular, his partner: “I am a loved body, not just a sick body”.
Shortly after winning the Nobel Prize for Literaturehis friend, the famous Portuguese writer Jose Saramagoreviewed biography of my cancer on his literary blog. In addition to highlighting the courage with which Kolesnicov faced breast cancer, a courage of which “only a woman is capable”, the author of Essay on blindness Y The duplicate man He highlighted his “blackest” humor: “The story, which in other hands would be serious, disturbing, even frightening, frequently awakens in us a complicit smile, a sudden laugh, an irrepressible laugh”.
I have a lot of hair. I have rollers up to the waist, up to the tail if they are wet and I straighten them with my fingers. I have two million buckles. Big, made of leather, wood, metal, one made with a spoon that Olga bought me in Cologne. I just did a one-man show where I would tie him up in one scene, braid him in another, dunk him onstage, shake him. I use the rollers to make love.
I have too much hair for my height. It was hard, in the early ’70s, to be a babe with curls. They had to be combed, the curlers inflated, they had to be tied: in childhood photos I wear a tight tail. At twelve I had it ironed and for a couple of years I wore it straight: I looked like the brave prince.
The straight fake hair needed care; she was a teenager who spent Friday afternoon at the hairdresser’s. She first touches her, then the curlers, the dryer. One Sunday afternoon, in the club’s changing room, I saw a short, blonde girl put sap into some pretty ringlets and shake her head. I don’t know how long it took me to remove all the rollers, all the headdresses, all the irons on top, but at 17 I did the same.
Once, in something like a group dynamics class, we were asked to define ourselves through our hair. I remember: I said that it was twisted, but that if you knew how to treat it, you could give it the way you wanted. That he looked very strong, very personal, but that with heat and humidity he became docile. I never touched it again.
My finery consisted of tying it this way or that, letting it dry with time and water, in a back braid to give a peasant style or a braid on the side and mandarin collar. I didn’t get highlights or reflections or anything at all. It filled me with ice one morning several degrees below zero, when I washed it in the sierras. I got lice about once a month when I was a kindergarten teacher. He got entangled in my doorknobs and was crushed under the bodies of the people who slept with me. He demanded an hour of dedication to each wash: brush, thick comb, fine comb. My hair is something I did with myself. A peace treaty in the horrors of adolescence. A beauty I found. And now they tell me that If I want to stay alive I have to drop it.
I was never impressed by the needles. I’m not impressed with this one, which goes into my left arm, connected to a little tube connected to an IV bag. I am not impressed by the nurse who regulates the drip with a butterfly in the tube. I’m lying on a bed that goes up and down.
Here the thing begins. It’s early Friday. July 23 is my sister’s birthday, every year except 1999, which It’s the day I start chemotherapy. I’ve been tooth to tooth since dawn and that’s how we arrived at the Institute. Two hours, they said. So I have a shipment of drugs and, in my bag, a police novel.
I hand over the load when I enter and they make me go into a room where there is a bed, a chair, a foot to hang the bag with the medication and a closet with blankets. Opposite there is another room with five, six armchairs and a couple of televisions; There are people there receiving their chemotherapy. But not me. It will be that in my order it said “long application”. It will be mine is much more serious. It will be that I am going to feel much worse, there will be some reason for this deference. I don’t ask—I wouldn’t have the patience to listen to an answer—and I stay sitting on the bed.
The nurse walks in and out. A supervising doctor appears. He is the one who formally begins the treatment, puts the needle in the fat vein of my left arm, explains that there will be several bags of serum, one with an antibiotic, a stomach protector, an antiemetic that works great and makes people with chemo I almost didn’t vomit, the drug itself and something that washes the vein. More or less like this or in any other order.
The doctor makes some jokes and finally leaves, leaving us alone, Olga and me. It falls a drop, a drop, a drop, too slow. I open the little book and go for a while with the detective who is the good one but she is also a Vietnam veteran so you never know. It didn’t last long: I ‘m getting dizzy, the letters have fuzzy outlines, the letters are mixed, the lines wave. I support the novel, still open, on the mattress, I’m cold.
My partner takes a blanket out of the closet, covers me, lies down next to me and hugs me. She gets, with me, on the chemotherapy table. My arm is outstretched, the drug goes down, and she rests her head on my chest. She is there, I am not in the hands of the doctor and the nurse and the needles. I am a loved body, not just a sick body. The nurse enters and disapproves: —You can’t be on the stretcher. “Well,” Olga says, and she doesn’t move. “What will the doctor say if he comes in?” “Well, well,” Olga repeats, without arguing and without letting go of me.
Gaby, who studies Classical Letters, who every week has a different color hair and talks to me about the iliad in the orchard, she is the first to see him. We are having breakfast outside, I don’t even realize that she is looking at me and she approaches me, opens her eyes and says it cautiously, as if the word could conjure up a miracle: “you have tabs”.
I eject into the bathroom: it’s almost true. It is a black shadow, insinuated, as if an eyeliner had barely passed me. Taxol retreats and I return to my face myself. The little pig, the foal, the basil and me: sprout. In the days that follow pilgrim to the mirror. The line becomes a little brush: it has texture, it scratches a bit, the little hairs can move. I measure progress with my fingertips. I am ceasing to be an insect. Behind the eyelashes come the eyebrows: two-day beard, they make me laugh with happiness. Very mild, stings the hair on the head. On the way, the head dotted with dark islands could be pathetic. Back, this shade is glorious. Will they be curlers? Olga is in the Capital. When she tells her, she cries.
♦ Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1965.
♦ She is a writer and journalist.
♦ He collaborated in the magazines Sex-Humor, Vivir, El Porteño and Latido, the newspaper El Cronista and in different cultural supplements. She was the editor of the Culture section in the Clarín newspaper and is currently the editor of the Leamos section of Infobae.
♦ Wrote the books It is not love, biography of my cancer Y I fell in love with a vegetarian.
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