Kevin A. Roberts
From the distance of our monthly book club, I watched Dr. Tammy Ostapowicz, a retired obstetrician/gynecologist, recover from breast cancer. She seemed to grow lighter, softer, more fun; she added a bottle of good Champagne to her grocery cart every week; at restaurants, she ordered seafood and salads and ignored dessert. How much of this, I wondered, had come of her brush with mortality?
“None of it,” she says, blowing my story premise. “I never did eat much sugar. I was one of eight kids! I liked Tootsie Rolls; that was about it.” She brightens, tells me how her grandson just had his first Tootsie Roll.
I’m still waiting for a transformation story. Trying to help, she describes the cancer itself. It was the tricky kind, “triple-negative”: “When I left active practice, I’d never even heard of it. Triple-negative is defined by the characteristics it doesn’t have.” The tumor is checked for three kinds of receptors—estrogen, progesterone, and a hormonal growth factor. If one shows up, the hormone in question may have played a role in the cancer, and that can guide treatment.
Ostapowicz’s tumor tested negative for all three, and she didn’t have the BRCA gene mutation, either.
Researchers probably figured out triple-negative breast cancer by looking into the reason some people weren’t doing well, she adds: “Most breast cancers have a 98 percent success rate. This one has a 75 percent success rate. So you’re finding out that you’re not in that 98 percent, and you’re going to be blasted with chemo…”
She’d just had a nice clean mammogram four months earlier, so the news fell like a hammer. But she decided to treat cancer like a job—something to research, manage, solve—and not let it become her identity. “I’m practical almost to a fault,” she says, remembering her thoughts about how far she’d go in experimental treatment if the cancer came back. “Wouldn’t I just as soon take that money and take our kids on a cruise versus putting myself through hell?”
She found a few good wigs, learned to draw on eyebrows, put the people taking care of her at ease. “Oh good Lord, don’t worry about it,” she told one young man. Often she never even mentioned her medical background, figuring it wasn’t relevant. She was putting herself in their hands.
“If anything changed me, it’s this,” she adds, hoisting a fat folder of insurance paperwork to show me what a nightmare it is, even when you know the system.
I nod absently, unconvinced. She’s so damned stoic. I’ll have to press her family.
“She’s always been constant,” says her daughter, Michelle Thore. “She’s always been a fighter. She was quiet yet steadfast in her recovery. Hell, no one would have known she had cancer if it weren’t for the baldness and the port!” As for the Champagne, it was already on her mom’s bucket list, Thore says. “But if anything, the diagnosis made sure that the bucket list would happen.”
Next, I call Ostapowicz’s husband, Dr. Steve Pisoni, who forced red roses on his unsentimental wife every week of her recovery. “It isn’t like it suddenly dawned on her that you only have one life,” he says. “You’re a doctor all those years; you get your nose rubbed in it. But she’s gotten more relaxed about what you might call small stuff. She pays even more attention to what’s important”—like their grandson. “I think she emphasizes love more than anything else.”
I repeat this to Ostapowicz. “Oh,” she says softly. The words remind her of David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon College commencement speech, and she finds it on her phone, reads me the ending, in which he emphasized “simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.”
And with that, her voice cracks, and her eyes fill with unexpected tears.
