(Note: This memory contains graphic descriptions of the reality of cancer.)
The phone calls always seemed to come when I was up to my, well you know the expression, in details for some elaborate event sponsored by the hospital. As PR director at Bayshore, medical photography was one of my assignments. I always dreaded those calls from Dixie. Those photos were different.
“Dorothy, we have another one.” Dixie would say. “Can you come over to the office?”
“Right now?” I panicked knowing I was about to lose a couple of hours from an already packed day.
“Yes, now. I just finished examining her. It’s worse than the last one, been out of the skin for two years. I need to document her case.”
I’d grabbed my trusty Canon, check for slide film, flash attachments and headed over to her office. These were the photos that would make the biggest difference in Dixie’s education presentations. I’d been handling the medical photography for years and was never squeamish about it, no matter what type of case.
I remember being called to the Operating Room when they wanted to chronicle extracting a 15-pound tumor from a woman’s abdomen. Bracketing and F-stops were the priority. I was most concerned about whether I had enough contrast among all the red of the open flesh. Much later, after specimen shots and measurements, I allowed the realization to settle in, “Hey, that was a living, breathing person under those sterile drapes.”
I never saw anything other than a “person” when I responded to the calls from Dixie. No matter how much she’d try to warn me, nothing ever prepared me for seeing advanced breast cancer. The women would be waiting for me, sitting alone in the exam room, covered by a gown. As I’d start to position them against a backdrop, we’d remove the covering and I would steel my face.
The sight was never the same. The smell of rotting flesh was the common factor. You knew when you entered the room what you were about to see wasn’t going to be good.
Sometimes it looked like a hunk of raw, oozing hamburger meat, attached to the outside of a woman’s breast. A closer look revealed the “hunk” was coming from the inside, stretching the skin in a grotesque shape.
The worse case was a young 28-year-old, whose cancer was so bad that it looked like it had exploded right out of her breast. Resembling a yellow cauliflower-bordered cavern, the gaping hole, about the size of a fist, sat in the very middle of her right breast and the muscles covering her ribcage could be seen. She was the single mother with two kids and no money. She had to keep working for as long as possible. Two weeks after I took the photo, she was dead.
One of the saddest cases was an elderly lady whose children had brought her in because “Granny couldn’t breathe” and “Granny had a bad smell about her.” She couldn't breathe because the cancer causing the ugly sores on her chest had also eaten into her lungs. No one had ever seen Granny undressed, so no one knew how long those sores had been there.
The woman I was to photograph this day had hid her tumor by covering it with diapers tucked inside her bra. She had discovered the lump in her breast a long time ago, but her husband had lost his job and with it, their medical insurance. Since she didn’t want it to be a “pre-existing disease” when he did find work and they could get insurance again, she never told anyone about it.
When this lady’s tumor erupted through the skin, she still didn’t understand the significance. She thought that no matter how big it got, it could be removed by surgery. She’d seen the newspaper stories about Dixie and made her appointment, hoping to find someone who could help.
The photo shoot went quickly. Afterwards, Dixie and I sat in her office. We didn’t talk. We sat, our minds racing but our voices stilled by the scene. We sat for the longest time.
“Unbelievable,” I said, finally breaking the silence, “how on earth did she hide that for so long from her husband?”
Dixie sighed, “I asked her that. She said she always kept her clothes on, even at night she wore a bra under her gown. I doubt she and husband were intimate anymore. They were so worried about money and no work and losing their home.”
“What now?” I asked.
Dixie replied, “Nothing … there’s nothing that can be done. All I can do is hold her hand while she dies.”
This memory is one of 25 short stories written by Dorothy Gibbons, the Co-founder and CEO of The Rose, a nonprofit breast cancer organization. She and Dr. Dixie Melillo received the 501C3 documents for The Rose in 1986. A memory will be shared daily, culminating with number 25 on the day The Rose celebrates its 25th anniversary November 10.
© 2011 Dorothy Gibbons. All rights reserved.
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