Cancer Schmancer Read Online Free Page B

Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 18
    18
    Cancer Schmancer
    “Hot flashes? No way.” Suddenly I felt nauseous. “Let’s change the subject.”
    “Hmm. Did I tell you Grandma Yetta hung up on me when she tried to shut off the TV with the telephone? Is she funny, or what?”
    my mom asked.
    “Hysterical,” I answered. But I wasn’t laughing.
    Fate was playing a dirty trick on me, giving me an early menopause just when I was starting my life over again. I pictured myself getting night sweats and a lowered libido. I felt like damaged goods, imperfect.
    So while I pretended to be the picture of health to the outside world, I secretly decided to see another gynecologist, Doctor #2.
    Leesa, my exercise instructor, had said he was really good, that he was doing all kinds of breakthrough hormone treatments in women’s medicine. A magazine had even reported on his contro-versial, even radical, theories regarding the usage of natural thyroid and growth hormones to keep a woman in a perpetual state of youthfulness. I’ll tell ya, that just don’t sound kosher to me. I know there ain’t no fountain of youth. But meanwhile, I went to see him anyway.
    As I sat in the waiting room a young woman entered the office and asked at the desk for her pills. She seemed to be in her twenties, but she could have easily been in her thirties. Perhaps she recognized me, I don’t know, but while she was waiting, she struck up a conversation.
    “Is this your first time here?”
    I nodded, slightly overwhelmed by her bouncing-off-the-walls energy.
    “Let me tell you, he is a great doctor. A true genius,” she said, talking a mile a minute. “Look at my skin! Look at my hair! I’ve never felt better in my whole life. And I’m not the only one, all my sisters go to him. We all take his hormone replacement regimen 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 19
    The First Pilot for MTV
    19
    and we’ve never felt better or more energized!” Calm down, honey, you’re gonna explode!
    Sounded more like Scientology than gynecology, I thought, as the nurse showed me into the doctor’s office. There, behind a large desk covered with bottles of pills, sat an older man with a foreign accent who wore clogs. He seemed very bullish on his arsenal of medications, but meanwhile he was still getting over the flu. So there you are.
    Between sneezes and coughs, he questioned me about any family history of cancer. “There’s none on my mother’s side, but my dad’s sister died from ovarian cancer,” I said as I handed him a tissue. I remember saying with conviction, “I don’t have cancer.”
    “I do extensive state-of-the-art blood tests,” he said. “I’ll need at least seventeen vials of blood, to be thorough.”
    “Seventeen vials?” I said, recoiling.
    “They’re small vials,” he countered. “And we send them out of state for the best analysis.” Where, Transylvania? Who was this guy?
    In the meantime he talked about putting me on his program, which included the taking of a natural thyroid pill. I explained that I was already taking Synthroid medication for Hashimoto’s disease, a very common thyroid condition. (Thyroiditis is the most common disease among women. It’s hereditary, and all women should be tested for it by an endocrinologist.) It annoyed me that in this first visit he was already pushing pills.
    His exam was pretty typical: stirrups, pelvic, and Pap. He couldn’t do the blood test because it had to be done on a specific day of my cycle. I got dressed and left, but I never returned.
    So I went back to taking my Advil and business as usual. It was right around this time that a sitcom script I’d written was green-lighted to become a pilot for MTV. This was my first real venture on my own apart from Peter and The Nanny, and I execu-9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 20
    20
    Cancer Schmancer
    tive produced and directed it as well. The concept was a Gen-X
    Odd Couple. It was a massive undertaking, a real milestone