Writing

Featured Non-Fiction: A Sad Summer

by Lauren Bulfin

Saturday October 4, 2008

By Lauren Bulfin

People often get uneasy when they find out I work in a breast cancer center during my summer vacations. A few brave ones ask: “isn’t that depressing?” I am here to tell you that it’s not. Really. At least not at an outpatient center. 70% of our patients are in remission and the other 30% are well enough that they don’t need to be hospitalized. I work in the radiology department. People come to us to check whether their cancer has returned or if it has spread. Chemotherapy is on the other floor. We see the patients every month at most, often sixth months or a year. We don’t get attached and we don’t deal with children. That would be depressing. During my first few days there, I did feel uneasy. On my third day there, while coding documents, I came upon a death certificate. I froze for a few moments, and then thought: she would still be dead even if I didn’t have her certificate. All of these patients would be sick even if I didn’t work here. As clichéd as it sounds, death is a part of life. I also had other things to worry about besides death: my co-workers. In the department where I worked, many of the people were of color and almost all were working-class. Coming from Queens, I am not a stranger to that culture, but, as a White, upper-middle class woman, I am also not from it. The class issue was most prominent. In order to work well with my co-workers, I had to drop many of my middle-class behaviors. This is harder than you might think since I only realized, through painful trial and error, what is “middle-class behavior.”
As a temporary worker, hired to pick up the slack for people on vacation, I was also the lowest-ranked. Therefore, I did the work no one else wanted to do. I was on my feet as much as a waitress, but instead of food, I delivered cancer patients. I took orders from a lot of people. If an employee was in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on me, I couldn’t really do much about it. I confronted people occasionally, but was always careful to let them have the last word. Most of the conflicts I had with people happened when I was close to leaving for the summer. I chalked it up to jealousy, but it did sour what otherwise would have been a pleasant work experience.
The infighting took a toll on how I treated the patients. It saddens me now to think of it. Someone’s mother would change into their hospital gown and wander off into the wrong room. Instead of leading her back to the waiting area herself, as she requested, I merely pointed the way. This was going on in my head: Why I am doing this job by myself when we’re overstaffed? If so and so in the back says anything to me, I’ll be prepared for her.
The patients always asked the same questions, the most frequent being: “When I am going to get my results?” The only answer I could give was “you’re just going to have to wait.” The typical wait was an hour and a half. Most cancer centers take 4 to 5 days to give Mammogram results, some even take up to 2-3 weeks. From the way the patients complained about the wait time, it seemed like many were unaware of this fact. My ex-boyfriends mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer in El Salvador nine months ago. There are very few treatment centers in that country and from the way he described how her breast cancer was being managed, I knew she was going to die, it was just a matter of when. I began to resent our patients for the care they were getting. I worked at one of the top cancer treatment centers in the world while my ex’s mother barely received chemotherapy treatment. Our patients struggled with insurance payments, but at least they had insurance. They didn’t have to wait for their children to wire them $100 before every medical procedure, which is half a months salary for many people in El Salvador.
On my last day at the breast center, the staff was unduly nice to me. They bought me a cake, which we ate together. I rode the train home with one of my co-workers. While walking from the subway to my house, I received a text message from my ex: “My mother is dead.” I thought it oddly coincidental that she died of breast cancer on the last day of my job at a breast care center. But I don’t believe in coincidences.