los tumores

At 12 years old I thought God was punishing me. A small lump had formed on my right breast and I was certain that it came from the way my string of boyfriends grabbed at my tits while their tongues sloppily squirmed around in my mouth. God thought I was disgusting and it was a medical fact that bad things happened if boys touched you. That’s the impression I got from my mom, an incest survivor who desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to protect her children from molestation. However, being Catolica and raised in the 40’s she was unable to articulate what it was we should not let people do to us, why it was wrong or what would happen to us.

So God hated me. And I began to hate myself. I started keeping a journal full of images, because I knew my mom would find the journal and read it. It had to be in code- clumsily drawn flowers, tears, knives, skeletons, each symbolizing how much I wanted to die that day. For an entire year I was convinced that the growing lump on my breast was my fault. That if I told my mother she would know everything I wanted to keep secret from her. She would find out how far I let those boys go with me, she would know about 2^nd grade when Lindsey Jones and I shared the same boyfriend, she would discover the relationship Lindsey and I had in 1^st grade where I pretended to be the mechanic husband coming home from a long day at work so pissed that dinner wasn’t ready that I raped my wife (Lindsey), and my mother would have to face herself for letting the older neighbor girl play with me alone in the backyard, forcing me up against the side of the house while she touched me non-consensually.

I watched that lump grow from the size of a raisin to the size of a really big grape, maybe even a fresa. I started Catholic all-girls high school con verguenza and the grape. I started thinking that this thing inside me was gonna kill me and I showed my mom one Sunday night. She flipped out, asked me how long it had been there and dragged me to the doctor the next day. Benign, but I was still so ashamed that I couldn’t tell anyone at school why I had been gone and why I couldn’t do PE.

The doctors didn’t know why I had the tumor, they just told me that some people get them and that it’s pretty uncommon for someone my age to get that type of tumor. I was convinced that God was punishing me. It wasn’t until a few more years when my abuelitas cancer went into remission that my family told me why I had the tumor. My grandmother and her sisters all had cancer that eventually killed them- the kind of cancer that’s caused by being poor and Mexican. My abuelita was a migrant farm worker in Southern and Central California in the early 1900’s. The pesticides passed down through the generations, with the grandchildren all having numerous tumors.

My abuelita died from the pesticide cancer in 1997, on the day I graduated from high school. Two years later I found 2 more tumors, this time in my left breast. Still suicidal I waited until I had a big paper due to go to the doctor- I figured that surgery would be able to get me an extension. It did but it also started the conscious spiral of gender dysphoria that lasted for the next few years. It also made me start cutting again and almost got me fifty-one-fifty’d.

Last year I found another lump. With that lump the flood of memories came back around: shame, bulimia, cutting, suicide, abuse, rape and my abuelita. Her memory pulled me away from the bad memories and forced me into the gynecologist who examined the lump on my hairy breast. All she said was that it’s still small, it would be best to watch it and remove it only if it gets bigger. Testosterone softens breast tissue and people who have lumps usually discover them because the rest of the tissue is breaking down. That lump was removed during my chest surgery. Right now I’m waiting for the results from the pathology analysis. It’s funny that the physical ties to my Mexican heritage may kill me, that the insides of me are where the Chicano in me is visible. And that my dad’s side of the family was farmers who hired farm workers and, I’m guessing, sprayed them with pesticides.

My mother’s only supportive statement about my chest surgery was her relief that at least now I can’t get breast cancer. I don’t even have the scars anymore from my old surgeries- 2 inches around each areola. Now I have 10 inches of scars on each side, located a few inches beneath nipples shaved down and sewn back on. Waiting to find out if the lump is benign or malignant I’m amazed that the faith, which created the whole mess in the first place, gives me hope. But I don’t pray to God now, I pray to the Virgin de Guadalupe. I pray to my abuelita. I clean my altar, light my candles, put fresh flowers out and remember my history.