Suzanne Schnittman has been an educator for forty years, twenty of which have been spent teaching women's history at the college level. She has worked with a number of women's advocacy groups including Feminists Choosing Life of New York, New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and The Judicial Process Commission of Rochester. She is Catholic but has raised two Jewish sons and has always belonged to a synagogue as well as a church. Her writing has appeared in The North Atlantic Review, Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, The Finger Lakes Times, Adirondack Express, Justicia, The Adirondack Review, and in two books about 19th-century American social history.

The Bra for Battle (July 20, 2011. Issue 29.)

"I'll take Mom's prosthesis and bras to Gilda's Club in Rochester," I offered.

We were cleaning our mother's drawers the afternoon of her funeral. When my sisters, Betsy and Barb, and my sister-in-law, Pat, found the gelatinous ball that Mom had worn as armor for half of her life, we passed it to one another.

"I never even saw, much less held, this thing," Barb said.

"Neither have I," echoed Betsy. "I feel like I don't know a thing about Mom's breast cancer."

"Well, I know a bit more," I admitted, being the eldest of five siblings.

Betsy sounded more wistful than resentful. "She sheltered us from its devastating effects at the beginning, minimized them as the years wore on, and only recently spoke of them when cancer reappeared in a new site. I wish I knew how it really impacted her."

I took the prosthesis from Betsy's hands and arranged it carefully in the Styrofoam mold that had held it in shape for decades. It slipped in like a knife in a sheaf. Mom had tucked this size 34C weighty prosthesis into her bra every day for forty years. The morning she eliminated it as part of her uniform, about a month before she died, signaled a major retreat. She could no longer muster the forces to continue her battle. Within a week, Mom placed herself on permanent furlough—in bed. By then, she didn't care that one side of her chest sagged.

Mom's life had been a miracle. A breast cancer survivor who had outweighed most odds, it was not that, but cancer of the thymus gland, that claimed her life.

I felt fortunate, not only because I had shared close proximity to Mom when she first faced the crisis, but for our more recent conversations during which I pressed her for the details I'd missed. After the disease that strikes one out of nine women became a reality for many of my friends, I asked Mom to share her experience with me more openly than she had previously. How had she managed? How had she survived?

I was finishing my freshman year of college in the late spring of 1966. The dorm receptionist called me down to the lounge to receive a call on one of two pay phones. It was Mom, masking her concern, telling me about the lump.

"It's probably a milk duct," her ill-informed ob-gyn had promised when Mom first saw him. Breast cancer was remote, often secret, to our small world.

The doctor administered a hormone shot that would prove his theory by inducing false menstruation. She should follow the progress of the lump faithfully.

"I lost all sense of proportion, of size, as I felt the lump every day," she later recalled. "I had no idea if it was growing or shrinking, if it was hardening or softening. All I knew was that after a month, it had not gone away."

Mom waited a few more weeks and then, in desperation, turned to Dr. John Nichols, a specialist whom she'd heard speak recently. Learning that she had a two-month-old lump, he saw her after regular hours, late in the evening.

"If you were my wife, I would operate in the morning."

"I'll be there," she said.

He smiled and said, "We're going to get along fine."

Mom donned a face of courage for family and friends, signed a waiver in the event they had to "take her breast," and prepared for surgery.

On August twenty-sixth, Dad waited alone at St. Francis Hospital in Buffalo all day long. When Dr. Nichols knew the worst, he paused in the four-and-a-half-hour procedure, came out to meet Dad, and guided him into the chapel. It was indeed cancer. They would have to take Mom's breast, lymph nodes, and much of the muscle under her arm. Skin from her thigh would be grafted onto her chest. A hysterectomy one week later would ensure that all hormone activity ceased. Follow-up would be a month of daily radiation. (Chemotherapy was unheard of in those days.)

The silent nuns sat vigil with my grieving father the remainder of the day.

When Dad knew everything, he called me at the lab where I was employed for the summer, right down the street from St. Francis. "Suzie, Mom is out of surgery and doing fine," he reported. "But they had to remove her breast. It's called a radical mastectomy."

I went to take care of my father for the first time in my life. When you're nineteen, you measure everything by the way it affects you. My diary that summer, filled with social activities and punctuated with boyfriend trouble, gradually reflected my new role.

"Daddy is a mess," I wrote the night of the surgery. The following day he was "very upset and wanders around aimlessly." How could I fix my broken parents and family?

The next night I saw Mom at the hospital. I was startled that she looked so normal. In my diary, I recorded, "She really looks pretty good" even though she "is in a lot of pain and needs morphine."

Mom had launched her battle plan, the strategy that would make us feel okay.

Dad was her first enlistee, persuaded by her line of attack. He perked up that evening. Father and daughter in a family of seven, we left the hospital to go on our first Saturday night date. He chose Dogs and Suds, probably the forerunner to Carvel's or maybe McDonald's. It was the magical night that I became my father's confidante. Sorrow and camaraderie felt like "you and me against the world" for just a few hours, a feeling we would sustain for the year.

It was time for my siblings to join our ranks. Barb, aged seventeen, visited first. Then Dick, fourteen, and Betsy, eleven, came two days later. Not John yet—he was only three. Mom presented her top form, emitting high spirits to convince us that victory was ours. When her September fifth hysterectomy knocked out her spunk and set Dad back a few notches, we continued to claim a win even though our legions were shaky. I wrote in my diary, "She was in bad shape, but it was only temporary."

Six days out, when I arrived at St. Francis Hospital for my daily stop, I found Mom braced to confront the world. "Sue, if I had the nurse wash my hair, do you think you could set it before you return to college?" This request triggered my naïve optimism.

Mom and I shared a number of personality quirks and charms, but we were bonded like mortar by our common curse: short, frizzy, unstylish hair. In an era of sleek flips, we cringed in unison when the compliment invariably came: You're so lucky to have naturally curly hair. Wrong.

I arrived at the hospital the next day, armed with the necessary apparatus and the unique skill to set Mom's hair. We had learned a few tricks to camouflage the real fuzz on our heads. The first was, "Soak wet hair in waving lotion, then wrap strands around large rollers and start it cooking immediately. Never let it dry naturally." The tactics would prepare her to face the next line of defense: the public. I riveted my attention away from her oozing bandages and strained face to stretch her kinks over huge curlers. I expertly anchored any escaped frizzes to her cheeks with Scotch tape, then disciplined stray curls with more taming lotion and metal clips.

Never were we more grateful for our portable hair dryer, equipped with the most important component: a hood enormous enough to contain rollers that straightened rather than curled our unruly hair. A long plastic hose attached the inflated bonnet to the motor, resembling headgear for an astronaut. It sounded like a small car. Proper straightening required that her hair bake for a noisy hour. I believe that we had special permission from the fascinated nurses/nuns for the entire procedure.

"I feel alive!" was all the thanks I needed when we brushed out her soft waves. It was the next step in Mom's campaign to convince herself and us that she would win this war.

Dad drove me to college a few days later, the first trip we ever took together and a stark reminder that Mom was sicker than we'd admitted. I plunged into campus activities and sorority life. Letters I wrote home are embarrassingly filled with my life and devoid of concern for the home front.

Not until much later, after I had lost a dear friend to breast cancer, did I finally broach the subject of Mom's survival during those awful days. "Did you ever worry about dying?"

"People weren't dying of breast cancer much then, at least not that we heard about. I certainly had dark thoughts, though. I probably confined those to a diary, a habit we share," Mom confided. "But I destroyed it only a few years ago because I didn't want anyone to read it. Prayer was my total salvation. I was never without a rosary in my pocket."

"When did you have low points?"

"I remember one Saturday morning, early in the fall, when I sobbed to myself, 'I can't do this,'" Mom admitted. "I had fallen and broke open my chest incision. I was bleeding extensively."

This had happened about two weeks after both major surgeries, the radical mastectomy and the hysterectomy. My siblings had been in and out that day but unaware of Mom's needs. Dad had gone hunting, no doubt at her insistence.

"I was so worried about scaring the kids," she remembered. "You had returned to college. Barbie had gone off with friends, although she had asked me if I wanted her to stay home. Dick probably took the brunt of it because he was so solemn. He just hovered outside my bedroom door, which I never closed in case I couldn't hear who needed me. Betsy was too young to comprehend, so I feined courage, something she begrudges to this day. John was a toddler. Dad had moved his crib downstairs to the dining room so I could care for him."

As she and we expected, Mom pulled herself together and tried to create normality for us while she endured the lowest point of her forty-four years.

"All I knew was that I had to get you kids taken care of. Without my friends, this could never have happened."

I recalled tales about her support brigade. Every day during the first month after her surgery, a different friend arrived in the morning, drove my brother John to a neighbor and my mother to radiation, then returned to do whatever chores needed attention. Isabel Small, Bess Small, Eve Stanton, Audrey McKnight, Ruth Buell. The list amazed me. They washed and ironed, cleaned a bit, fixed dinner, then returned to their own homes to do the same. They were the troops that flanked Mom throughout her battle. Friends for the front—a lesson we never forgot.

"How was Dad through this?"

"Sue, he was so quiet. But never underestimate his role in my recovery."

"Once you began to heal, how did you find out where to get a bra and prosthesis? They're really expensive, aren't they?"

"Remember what I always told you girls?" Mom reminded me. "No matter how poor you are, you should never skimp on two things: good makeup and good bras. I had to take my own advice seriously when I purchased the first prosthesis."

She paused and sighed. "I couldn't be fitted for a permanent prosthesis for a while. The worst thing was going to your Sorority Parents Weekend so soon...without it."

I suddenly remembered the letter I wrote not one month after her ordeal, the wish I expressed; no, the expectation. I had asked Mom to bring her butchered body to my Sorority Parents Fall Weekend. And today, nearly forty years later, I would need my diary and her memory to help me recall the event.

I was stunned. "I totally forgot that weekend."

"Yes, remember we stayed at the Cortland Hotel?"

"Oh, God, it might have cost $10 a night. What a dive!"

"I don't think it cost that much."

"Was that your coming out event?"

"Yes, I was devastated, and so self-conscious."

I had braced myself against crying up until this point. The floodgate now broke.

"You never told me that. You acted like it was no big deal. Mom, do you know what I wrote in my diary that weekend? That you were so pretty, that you looked so good, and that you were thin!"

We laughed simultaneously. The women in my family have always made weight the centerpiece of our communication. To be thin was the ultimate compliment.

"I'm sorry I made you come to the weekend."

"It helped me move forward. I purchased the prosthesis a few weeks later."

I thought about how she and Dad had never let her cancer knock our safe world off its idyllic base.

Each year that passed after Mom's surgery, we felt smugger. The five-year mark completed our sense of confidence. We heard so little about breast cancer that the world helped us forget. When the disease gained more attention in the early 1970s, we bragged about our mother, who had had a radical mastectomy but was fine now.

In 2003, Mom received her second cancer diagnosis. We sighed with relief that it originated from her thymus gland and was not aggressive breast cancer metastasizing. She lived three and a half more years in relative ease, then succumbed to the inevitable.

Barb, Betsy, Pat, and I had finished as much cleaning as we could do today. I packed the bras and prosthesis in my car. I was sure Mom would want someone to have them.

It was easy to distribute the bras. I could not, however, relinquish the prosthesis, safe in its own clandestine container. I carried it around in my trunk for two months and then added it to my basement array of "stuff to donate." Two more weeks passed. I promoted it to my bedroom. I removed it from the box, handled it with increasing familiarity.

The prosthesis was like jelly, self-contained and perpetually warm. I buried my nose in its fullness. The sharp scent of Elizabeth Taylor's "Passion" startled me, Mom's fragrance lingering. So much healing, so much spirit, so much courage.

Could it hold the same for me? As I tucked it into my drawer of bras, I saw Mom wink.
    
During the five years that have passed since Mom died, my sisters and I have attended to our breast self-examinations and mammograms regularly, always with a bit of trepidation. Who would be next?

Dick's wife Pat called me a month ago to say that it was she, not us, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

I called Dick while he waited at the hospital during Pat's surgery, accompanied by his own college-aged daughter.

"She's having a lumpect—what's it called?" he told me soberly, not yet having incorporated "lumpectomy" into his vocabulary. "It's much less invasive than Mom's was forty years ago, right? And Pat is ten years older."

"Yes, Dick. It hits women of every age. But medicine has advanced enormously. The radiation seeds they will plant in the balloon in Pat's breast will prevent the burning from which Mom never recovered."

"Betsy is here with me. She went to all the surgeons' meetings with us. This is one cancer incident she does not want to miss."
 
"Dick, do you remember the night Dad and I waited after Mom's surgery?"

"No, Sue, I don't. Mom made sure we all had somewhere fun to be, far from her pain."

"That was her strategy. Do you resent it?"

"No, not at all. We were little kids, except for you. What was hardest about Pat was telling Dad. I hate to see him suffer this disease again, even from a distance."

"Dick, I think Mom made it easy for Dad too. She relied on his quiet strength, but from there depended on her own private armor. It's called a prosthesis. I'm pretty sure it's a word you'll never need to learn. But if you do, her legacy will give you the courage to be there for Pat."

I paused while I heard him sigh.

"I'll let you get to Pat now. Give her my love. Like Mom, I'm sure she has that rosary in her pocket. Tell her I have something else from Mom—it smells delicious and will tuck comfortably in her drawer for as long as she needs it. As Mom told us, everyone needs a secret weapon."