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Book Excerpt: Speech to Breast Cancer Survivors Group

Austin, Texas
November 5, 1999

Many of my friends like me are in the "parts department." An ear here, a bosom there, and so forth. Recently, I shared the stage in Houston with Phyllis Diller at a benefit for the Battered Women's Center. She and I are the same age, but with all her tucks and lifts, she looks 50. I told her so: "You look fabulous, Phyllis." She responded with a confession: "Liz, there are no two parts of me that are the same age!"

As we speak, I am down to one of everything.

My second book, Getting Better All the Time, was rolling off the presses, and I was planning a talk show schedule and assembling a wardrobe to go forth and sell my book coast to coast to anyone with vital signs and $18. Suddenly, that nagging little pinch that had been occurring in my right breast now and then became a lump. After a trip to the doctor and a mammogram - actually two or three of them at my insistence because I thought the first mammogram had lied - I faced the unwanted fact that I had a malignancy that had to be removed.

All of this enveloped me like a dark cloud and no power on heaven or earth was going to change the necessity for an operation. Still, I would not give up trying to change the verdict. I had called every contact I had developed through years of working as a reporter and in the White House, trying to find someone to give me another answer. I called the Mayo Brothers in Rochester, M. D. Anderson in Houston, a recommended place in Cleveland, and even a Christian Science friend who leans heavily on Mary Baker Eddy. Yes, for seven days I named myself chairman of the arrangements committee to avoid the operation.

It was sheer hell fighting the inevitable wondering why this cursed thing had to happen to me and interrupt my rollicking lifestyle. My new doctor, a surgeon, was startled as I battered him with questions: "Who is the anesthetist - is he a Democrat? After all the ugly things I've said about Republicans, I certainly don't want to go under ether with anyone else." He was disgusted. "We haven't used ether in 20 years and, yes, I'll get you a Democrat."

The date was set - January 20 - and the doctor, wise to my politics, even promised to make it at 11:00 A.M. when Bill Clements was being sworn in as governor of Texas, so I could pretend it hadn't happened. As my son, Scott, later said "Mom, you only lost your breast. Mark White lost his ass."

Actually, it was a Republican friend who calmed me down. The night before the operation, while I lay there in my misery, my son said "Betty Ford is on the line."

Someone in Washington had run into her daughter, Susan, and told her about my dilemma. Betty and I had worked together on several lost battles before. We both had lobbied State Legislatures to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. We had old ties from an old battle and I have found that these survival ties bind forever.

Lying there in my torment, I heard Betty's voice on the telephone saying to me "Liz, I guess you are getting lots of advice now." And I was - big slice or little slice? To be or not to be - reconstructed?

"Follow your own instincts. Have faith in your doctor. Accept this as a challenge. You've had challenges before, and this isn't all that much. It's another day in your life. Use your sense of humor. And, Liz, call on the strength of women like me who have gone before. I will be calling the hospital to check on you."

What a marvelous woman! I think she makes a practice of calling people to give them strength. Meanwhile, on to the operating room. The next morning, off it came, even as Bill Clements was sworn in as governor. In the four days in the hospital that followed, I learned the big lesson that we all learn from despair: a new appreciation and respect for simple acts of friendship and love. Those of you who have known this experience know how much those expressions of friends and family mean.

I am still in awe of how creative people can be with kindness. After the operation, on Valentine's Day, a woman in Austin, whom I had always admired for her pretty face showed she had great perception, too. She brought me a beautifully wrapped Valentine's gift. It was a breast. She had the same operation 30 years earlier and so she had a surplus number of them lying around. I never had been given a breast before, but she knew that I might want to try one out before I went shopping for my own. I will never forget it. Another friend who is a gourmet cook prepared a meal. It would have been better if it hadn't been breast of chicken, but you can't win them all. But the one that tops them all is the letter I received from Elvira Crocker, a funny friend in Washington:

Dear Liz,

I was sorry to hear about your surgery but from what I hear the operation did not affect your walking and hasn't stopped you from talking. All in all you've still got a lot of body going for you. Now it is true that men will not be able to say "You have great knockers or boobs," but what the hell? It's not much of an achievement. I do have an important question to ask, something that had nagged at me. All my life, I have heard people say "a tit for a tat," but I've never known what that meant. End this mystery for me now. What the hell is a tat, and did you get one?