Shormistha Mukherjee’s No-Holds-Barred Account of Fighting Cancer | EXCERPT

In Cancer, You Picked the Wrong Girl, Shormistha Mukherjee offers a no-holds-barred account of her journey navigating a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Through getting a Brazilian wax and deliberating the pros and cons of breast reconstruction to finding a ‘setting’ in the chemo ward, it’s laughter that helped keep her fears in check.

It’s 8.45 and we’re waiting. There are three metal chairs, joined together, in a long corridor. We’re sitting there. The same chairs are spaced out all along the corridor. It’s empty and silent. There are no windows, no natural light, just the white antiseptic glare of the tube lights above. I can see the light bounce off the tiled floor and walls. It looks like something is about to happen. Maybe a flood of blood is going to come cascading down the corridors. This is a great setting for a horror movie.

Just then, I smell a gust of aftershave. And look up to see a well-dressed, dapper man walk into one of the rooms. That’s the room I’m supposed to walk into. That’s the man who is going to make me a new boob.

I, by the way, have now stalked Dr Mandar and Dr Quazi on every platform I can find. My logic is simple. If you’re going to be making yourself so familiar with my boobs, then I better make myself familiar with you.

I like the fact that they have both worked at Tata Memorial. It’s like having Jai and Veeru take care of me. Plus, it’s good to know both your surgeons know each other and have probably done this together many times. It’s like your tailor, the guy who’s measuring you and noting it down on that little bill book, and the guy who’s going to decipher those scrawled measurements and actually stitch the garment—it’s best if they have worked together and know each other’s coded drawings.

We get called into Dr Quazi’s room. It’s bare, but he’s smiling at me. I immediately like him. I show him my file and tell him that Dr Mandar asked me to see him. He asks me when the operation is scheduled for. I stare at him and tell him I have no idea. I guess they are going to decide that based on what he says. He laughs, tells me to go to the examining table, and calls for a nurse.

Now I’ve become smart. I carry my backpack to the examination table and slip my bra in. Pro move! He comes, feels the breast, makes me stand. And then checks my stomach, sides and back. He smiles and says, ‘I see you are very fit, but that’s a problem for us. I have no fat that I can take from your stomach.’

I want to hug him and do a dance.

And I also want to sigh and curse my blasted luck. Here I am, in the best shape I ever was, not an ounce of extra fat, flat stomach, and guess what … I have cancer. Damn.

‘So we’ll take the tissue from here.’ And he taps at my left shoulder blade. And we’ll take a graft of skin from here as well.’

My eyes widen. He says he’ll explain everything. But his worry is the tattoo on my left shoulder. It’s a beautiful tattoo of vines and leaves and it says ‘pick the present’ in French. Not because I know French, but because the tattoo artist was French. And I just wanted it in a different language. He frowns and looks at my back and finally he’s satisfied. ‘We can save the tattoo. If it had been a little lower it would have been a problem, but this is manageable.’

How sweet. I realize then that plastic surgeons are really nice. They accept all your vanities and don’t judge at all. In fact, their job is to make you look even nicer. Imagine, a surgeon worrying about sacrificing my tattoo.

I take the chance to put across an alternate solution. Maybe, he could take some tissue off my hips, or my bum. How about that? I go in for a mastectomy and come out looking all svelte and slim-hipped.

Is slim-hipped even a word? It should be. I mean, I dream of being slim-hipped all the time. It’s the unattainable body of the women in Gap ads who have really long legs and very narrow hips, and look stunningly athletic and yet girly in their jeans.

Jeans have been my nemesis for years. I love them, but shopping for them exposes the wonderfully complicated relationship between my hip and waist. If they fit around the waist, they’ll never go up my hips. And if they fit around the hips, then the waist is so loose that I have to wear a belt and look like Pooja Bhatt from the 80s. Plus, the length. No, I don’t have long legs, and you can make a whole other garment from the amount you have left after resizing my denims.

So, I slyly slip in the offer to take my hip or bum fat. But I’m guessing the doctor has heard that one before, because he grins and shakes his head.

Fine.

I dress and go back to the chair. He’s writing something out. I realize it’s my surgery plan, and as part of it he’s made the standard boob drawing.

Except there is nothing standard about it. That’s when I realize every doctor has his or her signature style of drawing boobs. They are no way representational of the actual stuff on your chest. Some do a stick figure kind of drawing, and that is the most basic version. Like my gyneac. She just made some long and tired-looking boobs.

The first oncologist drew them in a hurried textbook fashion. And then there are those who make them with the practised flourish of an artist leaving his signature style across the prescription pad. I like those doctors. Like my onco surgeon drew them brilliantly. Perfect shape, size, everything. And the plastic surgeon, same. Modestly Blaise kind of sharp boobs.

There’s a lovely Urdu word for it. For signature style, not the drawing of boobs! It’s called takeeya kalam.

I looked at Dr Quazi’s takeeya kalam boob drawing, and I knew he was the right person for me.

Of course, the doctor had no idea that I was impressed with his artistic skills. He was outlining what was going to happen to me. He was going to take tissue from my back. There would be a scar there. And some skin would be grafted from my back to create a patch where my nipple was. The body, as usual being all awesome and amazing, would grow back that skin on the back.

They would create a channel from my back to the left breast and fill it with tissue, and then stitch it back up like a cushion cover. Since it was my own tissue, there was no worry about the body rejecting it. Also, if I put on weight, the boob would grow like the other one, and if I lost weight both would shrink.

Damn, I already have small boobs, how much more will they shrink?

In fact, my crazy cousins in the family WhatsApp group are urging me to get the doctor to give me bigger boobs. We all have the same body type. Small till the waist. And then a big Mukherjee bum!