How to Live Forever

For as long as you're alive.

There are very few things in life that would cause me to spare a centipede’s life moments before I commit murder with a paper towel, but a phone call from my doctor telling me that my ultrasound showed I had a 'likely benign' breast tumor (a.k.a fibroadenoma) turns out to be one of them.

Before hanging up, the doctor tells me 10%-15% of women have fibroadenomas, which is considered common, but that she thinks I’m too young to bother with a biopsy. I set the phone down, lowered the paper towel, and allowed the centipede to run across the horizon of my night table, sailing into the sunset, never to be found again—until it crawls into my mouth one night. I sat atop my bed, just one duvet fold away from perfect, and stared at my pillow like a suspect testifying in court, having a flashback that implicates the local serial killer lurking among them.

In your 20s, you’ll eat an entire bag of Reese’s and drink gin martinis until you pass out, but now we’re worried about wiping the counters with Lysol.

I thought about that bag of tortilla chips I inhaled in bed last night, like a big, dumb Kirby (my favorite lovable Nintendo character, of course). The shock hit me like a mild inconvenience—disbelief first, then panic. If I couldn’t find someone to blame, then surely it wasn’t true. The physical manifestation of my suffering was currently a soft whisper in my chest, and I needed the screams to fill the void. The chest palpitations felt weak—it wasn’t like I left the house and realized I’d forgotten deodorant… No, I was walking around with a lump in my boob.

So, naturally, to make matters worse, I grabbed my phone, my hands trembling, and googled “Tortilla Chips Cancer.” It turns out the concentration of acrylamide in potato and corn chips ranges from 329 to 7310 μg/kg. Acrylamide intake poses a significant carcinogenic risk but no neurotoxic risk. Not surprised. I knew that. Duh.

I got up from my bed to launch this smear campaign on the big screen (my iMac). I glanced back at the linen duvet, noticing a dime-sized grease stain on the edge of the zipper. I sat down at my desk and typed “Best Non-Toxic Laundry Detergent” into Google, trying not to think about the half-eaten chocolate bar next to the screen.

Over the course of the next two hours, I became a self-proclaimed researcher. I called everyone I knew to deliver the news, beginning with, “I’ve been doing research—peer-reviewed medical journals, of course…” I fell down a rabbit hole that led me from breast cancer to breast cancer risks, and straight down to hormonal contraceptives. I was set to get my IUD replaced next week. I called Planned Parenthood and said, "Call off the troops; I don’t want a new one." At the removal procedure, my rejection of her offer to place a new one inside me raised the clinician's brows. "Are you looking to start family planning?" she asked.

“Yes,” I told her, “five of them. This one will be my first, and I love my husband very much. So, can we get this show on the road?”

“You need to pull out,” I told Steven.
“You need to ask for a biopsy,” he replied.

I had gone in for an ultrasound the week prior. The only way to say it’s a fibroadenoma and not “likely fibroadenoma” for sure, is through a biopsy. Seems simple, right?

A biopsy sounded responsible, reasonable, and like a healthy dose of closure—until I talked to my mother, who once told me she’d eat papaya seeds and swallow them whole. “They’re full of antioxidants,” she’d say, choking down a mouthful of gooey seeds. Although my mom subscribes to a lot of the pseudoscience she sees on Facebook from people like her old retired neighbor Liz—who smokes weed in her garage every day while listening to the Joe Rogan podcast and puts three tablespoons of sugar in her coffee—my mother has become less afraid of death since she turned 60 last year. She drew the line on medications that made her bedridden, choosing to forgo certain treatments that would limit her ability to enjoy life.

“Maybe getting off statins will give me a heart attack,” she’d say, “but staying on them makes me unable to get out of bed in the morning, pee every 20 minutes like clockwork, and vomit randomly, including once in the car. What kind of life is that?” My mom asked, “Do you really want to go sticking needles in things? Who knows what triggers.”

“Mom, please. Tell me more because I’m not fully convinced.”

I called Steven back. “My mom said what if a biopsy could give me cancer. We just don’t know.” Silence. I looked at my phone to see that he’d confidently hung up. I filled a mason jar with a liter of water and chugged. The crowd chanted in my head as I slammed it down, wiped my mouth, and exhaled, satisfied. Enough kooky shit. I’m calling my doctor.

“Hey, so I wanted to discuss the results the receptionist sent me. Why does it say ‘likely benign’? Is it, or is it not? Don’t I need a biopsy?” I could almost hear the sound of a ball being tossed in midair and slapping back into the doctor’s hand on the other line. I imagined him like Aidan from Sex and the City, leaning back in his black Eames leather chair inside his hard loft, dressed in a black crew-neck tee and bootcut jeans.

“Ahh, wow, you’re really anxious about this. Nah, you don’t need a biopsy; don’t go prodding and poking things unnecessarily. Besides, if we sent everyone for biopsies over things that have a 0.1% chance of being serious, then we’d never get to the people who really do have cancer.”

Seeing as that was the worst possible response to quell my anxiety, I couldn’t help but point out the flaw in his argument. “But if it’s that 0.1% chance, wouldn’t you have really messed up?”

It felt like my fate had been signed, sealed, and delivered. Benign for now, sure, but give it time—who knew what this could turn into? The doctors seemed to be taking the classic “wait and see” approach, which is just code for “wait and see if you die.” Clearly, it was up to me to save myself. And so, like anyone in the throes of existential dread, I took the only logical step: I went to Whole Foods. If I just ate more pistachios and sockeye salmon, ran a half-marathon now and then, eliminated plastic, and dedicated myself to eating the “rainbow,” I’d build an immune system so strong that even death itself would find it inhospitable.

Soon enough, I was back home, cracking open pistachios and binging self-help videos from some LA health guru named Daphne Javitch, who looked like she hadn’t had a carb since the Clinton administration. From the corner of a Zoom screen, she preached the miraculous powers of natural detoxing. “You can sweat it out,” she said, “poop it out, and sleep it out.” Well, what a relief. Here I’d been worried sick, and apparently all I needed was an Instagram-approved cleanse and a good night’s sleep to fix my health and chase off mortality.

“Vasectomies are safe, effective, and highly reversible. A vasectomy is a quick outpatient procedure with local anesthetic that takes place at a doctor’s office and doesn’t require a hospital stay,” The author of Ejaculate Responsibly speaks through my AirPods while I wait for my flight to New York. I text Steven, “It’s insane to me that men don’t just get fucking vasectomies!! Not talking about you, obv.” Just before I lose service in take-off, his reply comes through, “We can wear condoms, but I can’t feel my dick in them.” Now I was certain I was screaming into a void.

I sit there, blinking at my screen, realizing that I’ve entered the health care debate equivalent of a feedback loop. Why was I even texting him about this?

By the time the plane takes off, I’m questioning every life choice that’s led me here. Meanwhile, the author of Ejaculate Responsibly is still talking in my ears, reassuring me that a vasectomy could be quick, painless, and easily reversible. I consider leaning over and sharing this information with the guy in 18C, just to see if anyone would take the hint.

I landed on Saturday, and Steven picked me up from the airport. I was in New York to spend a few days at a cabin, but I felt like absolute shit. The stress of my situation was so tangible, I could practically feel it in the clumps of hair that fell from my head in the shower. I pretended it was just my body mentally preparing for whatever was coming, though deep down, I knew fear was already sinking its teeth into me. I would wrap the clumps into little bows and flush them down Steven’s toilet in Brooklyn, like some weird, morbid little ritual.

Earlier this year, I ran my first half-marathon in Toronto. For runners, the New York City Marathon is the finish line. It’s the coq au vin of races. The La Mer of runs. If you’re lucky, you’re one of the 50,000 who get to run down the streets of New York without cars, while the crowds cheer you on for 26.2 miles. In other words, you get to experience what it must be like for Harry Styles to go for a jog on a casual Sunday afternoon.

On our way to cheer for the runners, just 20 minutes before the first elite wave reaches Greenpoint, we pass Peter Pan Donut Shop. Whatever ailment I had, I didn’t care. Sugar might’ve been the enemy thirty seconds ago, but now it was my lifeline.

With white powder all over my face from a blueberry donut in hand, I hear the cheers echoing for blocks, like a flock of birds flying south for the winter. The women’s elite runners charge toward us in synchronized harmony, like something out of a very graceful action movie. I woo’d and yeah’d more than I would if Prince could still perform live. This was the first year I gave a shit about any kind of athletics. I’m not looking to lose weight or get “snatched” when I run—running has become a kind of church for me, a way to exhaust my racing thoughts and focus on getting one foot forward at a time. Running has taught me to keep going when all I want to do is stop. The only thing that will get you to the finish line, I’ve learned, is how you choose to view the situation and push through the pain. It’s an extremely visceral way to learn this lesson, which, frankly, would’ve been better learned with a nice sit-down conversation over tea, but I guess that’s not how this one works.

All kinds of people run marathons. As I’m scoffing down a donut, feeling profoundly proud of strangers, I get a rare moment of perspective—outside myself for the first time in weeks. We get in the car and head upstate, where I eat popcorn with hot sauce and try to get close to deer. I wonder what colors I’d need to mix to capture the reflection of the trees in the pond. I make snow angels in the dirt road. I become obsessed with a furry hat I found on the shelf. I lay on the floor, pull the wings off the bug on my shoe to confirm it’s not a tick, and watch Spiderman on mute, set to jazz. Like that wooden plaque my mom bought at Marshalls says, “Life goes on.”

After decades of bodega sandwiches for dinner, Steven’s on a health kick after being 20 points over normal on a cholesterol reading. It’s his birthday, so I bought him an entire banana cream pie, and he’s committed to finishing it within three days. We are not people of moderation. I’m pretty sure this “likely benign” tumor is a direct result of eating entire chocolate bars and bricks of salami in one sitting. As we sit across from each other, once the chocolate I ate earlier wears off and the walls become solid again, eating our slices of pie, I don’t think about the consequences and, honestly, I don’t care. Reading my mind, Steven lets out an appreciative mmm and says, “Yeah, it’s worth the heart attack.”

I’ll likely tumble into another hole over that weird heart pain I sometimes get, but we’ll save that for another day—preferably a day when I’m not eating my weight in banana cream pie. For now, I’ll just keep living for as long as I’m alive. So, be nice to me while you still can—you never know, you might end up with something nice when I’m gone. I mean, I have to pass these new glasses down to someone, right?