PORTRAITS OF A SURVIVOR
One morning in October of 2000, my wife felt a lump in her breast. She asked me to feel it, "Does this feel weird?" As I felt the lump beneath my fingers my blood ran cold and I wondered what an ok lump was meant to feel like. Tracy reassured me and I reassured her. Women find lumps in their breasts all the time and it's usually nothing. These photographs are a sort of diary of the main events of the next year of our life.
With that profound inner knowledge they call women's intuition, Tracy went to the doctors. They also reassured her the lump was most likely a benign cyst. She insisted on a biopsy. On October 12 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This photograph is Tracy the morning after her surgery. It tells a lot about her: she's very strong, proud, and beautiful.
Tracy's loyal cat Sydney rarely left her side as she went through the process of recovery.
Chemotherapy. It is very hard to watch someone you love lay in a hospital bed and be given Tamoxifen. It is a drug so dangerous that nurses handle it with thick rubber gloves. After, she would feel wretched for a week: nauseous, tired, weak. Then a week of feeling pretty bad followed by a week of starting to feel better. Then it's time for the next cycle to begin. It is said of chemotherapy that sometimes they practically kill you to make you better.
About two weeks after the first dose of chemo Tracy's hair began to fall out, right on schedule. It was something she had anticipated and worried about a lot. But when the hair started to fall out, she was fascinated that she could pull it out in handfuls, which completely freaked me out. I persuaded her, she who had always had great stylists cut her hair, to let me cut it short.
The results of my haircut. Quite sexy, no?
Dr. and Mrs. Wu, Tracy's acupuncturists. When a patient is going through chemotherapy, oncologists discourage the use of other drugs: painkillers, anti-nausea medication, etc. So Tracy did acupuncture twice a week to help her with the side efffects. During a very difficult time for us, their loving care meant a great deal to both of us.
Tracy with an acupuncture needle in her now completely bald head.
After three months of treatments, Tracy began her last chemotherapy session. This was a wonderful day for us both, even though she felt like hell.
Four weeks after finishing chemotherapy it was time to begin radiation. Some patients do only chemo and some do only radiation. Because of Tracy's relatively young age for a breast cancer diagnosis, her doctors recommended the most aggressive treatment: chemo and radiation combined. She was tattooed with tiny blue dots so they could focus on the area to be treated. At the time she thought she'd have the tattooes removed later, but now you can hardly see them. And she's proud of her scars.
It seemed only right we should get a good portrait of Tracy with her perfect, bald head. Very Star Trek.
Walking back into life. When her treatment was finally over we'd promised ourselves a holiday. Here she is on a trail outside Santa Fe. It's always been a beloved place of ours, and this hike in particular. It was utterly quiet, the only sound our breathing and our foot steps in the snow.
Glamour Magazine asked to publish these pictures after Tracy's recovery for an article in their annual Breast Cancer Awareness issue. They needed a picture of us together, after everything. I asked our dear friend Andrew Brucker if he would photograph us. It was a good excuse for a picture from a great photographer.
When Tracy received her diagnosis, many things became instantly clear to her. She no longer wanted to live in New York. She wanted to be somewhere we would be able to afford a house with a garden. Most of all, she wanted to become a mother. On May 3, 2004, our son William was born. I think he is Tracy's most beautiful statement of her commitment to life, to being a cancer survivor.
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