DISAMBIGUATION | Jenny Burkholder
I started my 16th year of teaching high school English in pain. Decked out in my new black-and-tan wrap dress and cute wedge high heels, I stood in the auditorium foyer, welcoming my students with handshakes, high fives and fist bumps, all with a dull ache in my sternum. I tried to move slowly, avoiding hugs and more discomfort. I turned to a long-time colleague and good friend and said, “You know you’re getting old when you begin the school year slathered in muscle relief cream.” Both close to 50, we knowingly laughed. He responded, “You got this, champ!”
I started teaching English because my passion was reading literature with students and helping them to find meaning in a text’s complex weave of plot, character, theme and language. I loved marking up the text and asking my students to do the same. My book’s margins were filled with notes like SYMBOLISM. REPETITION. THEME. These notes alerted me to the textual evidence I needed to pay attention to. After I had finished the book, I could return to these notes, underlines and squiggles to develop a beautiful idea, one that I could share with my peers and students. I credit this passion to when I was 16 and in Mr. K.'s American literature class. My heart fluttered and my palms started to sweat when he said my interpretation of a Walt Whitman poem was “astute” and “grounded in textual evidence.” From then on, I reveled in my powerful close-reading skills.
It was around the start of the same school year that a mysterious man’s name appeared next to mine on the mailing address label from a reputable journal I subscribed to. Each month, the journal came addressed to James McGrath and My Name Here. I thought it was funny. Who was James McGrath? Why was he suddenly sharing the address line of my life? And how did he get there?
My tweens thought James McGrath’s arrival was hilarious. “Oooooooooooooo, Mommy has a new boyfriend,” one giggled as she paraded around the just-arrived journal with his name on it. The other playfully scolded, “Does Daddy know? I bet he wouldn’t be too happy to know you have another man,” and would shove the journal in my face as if I was guilty of hiding another life from them.
I was not hiding another man from them, but I was hiding my pain. And, like James McGrath, the pain seemingly popped up out of nowhere. The last time something “popped up out of nowhere” was eight years earlier. After my first and only mammogram at 40, the tech said, “I’m sure it’s nothing. We just get a little concerned when things like this pop up out of nowhere.” Then, she hugged me. Though at the time she could not tell me, she knew she was looking at invasive ductal carcinoma. I had breast cancer.
In my mind, my current pain was a slow-to-heal, yoga-related injury. As an avid yoga practitioner, I was sure I over-efforted in a practice or two and pushed myself too far. So, in October, when I lowered into chaturanga dandasana and a new scorching sensation ripped across my sternum, I quickly charted it up to “overdoing it” and stupidly muscled my way into a headstand. Though I was stunned by the pain’s heat, I continued to convince myself that it was nothing and would eventually go away.
Just to be sure I was right in my “slow-to-heal” yoga injury theory, I visited my general practitioner, who ordered a chest X-ray. According to my medical records, I complained of “pain at the sternoclavicular junction and some shortness of breath with deep breath.” The results were normal: “Osseous structures: Within normal limits.”
After these results, there was no need to ask more questions. I felt better, and I was right! But what was concerning was that the pain had now spread to my lower back. I taught my English classes wrapped in a bright orange wooly shawl. My students laughed at me, one commenting that I looked like “a fuzzy orange Starburst.” I had no explanation for why my body craved more and more heat. After every school day, I rushed home, filled the bathtub with scalding hot water, and lowered myself into it. Breathtaking relief would wash over me as I slipped my ears beneath the water, and I listened to the rhythmic thump of my heart. At night, tossing and turning, I cried when my kids and husband were asleep.
I could no longer practice yoga, so in my morning shower, I squatted 20 times and slowly folded forward, trying to keep up my strength and flexibility. I struggled to get dressed, opting to step into my shirts and sweaters, rather than lift my arms over my head. I was taking 800 milligrams of ibuprofen a day. In my English classes, I found it increasingly difficult to care about the repetition of the word “savage” in “Lord of the Flies,” the A’s symbolism in “The Scarlet Letter,” or the dialogue between form and content in any given poem.
As one distraction from the pain, I searched the internet for possibilities as to who James McGrath was. There were plenty. Was this the James McGrath known as “The Beast,” from Season 2 of “American Ninja Warrior?” Or the James McGrath whose voice was Wizzie in “Boss Baby?” Perhaps he was the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University? Or the deceased Philadelphia police officer who dressed up as an undercover grandmother.? Maybe he was the California man who stole nearly $1 million in nine separate bank heists in 1994? At first, his appearance on my mailing label was funny, but as his name kept showing up, I began to worry. Was he acting as my doting husband and signing my names to blank checks? Were the details of my identity now being sold to the highest bidder? Instead of helping to divert my attention, James McGrath fueled my worry.
Trying to gain a semblance of control over my life, I called the journal to alert them to James McGrath’s sudden appearance on my mailing label. Alone in the anemically lit faculty room, I left a message on a voicemail. I patiently offered them grace–“I am not sure how James McGrath showed up on my mailing label”–and explained how, “I used to work in nonprofits, so I know how difficult database management is,” and finally let them know that “James McGrath is not my husband, not my partner, not my friend, not my boyfriend, not even my side jawn.” I felt better. Now James McGrath was their problem, not mine.
In his famous 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” Modernist poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot coined the phrase “objective correlative.” According to Eliot, an objective correlative is a literary device defined as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” that a writer wants to evoke in a reader. James McGrath became my family’s objective correlative. If I asked my tweens to finish math homework, turn off YouTube videos, or do the dishes, they would whine, “Why? James McGrath wouldn’t make me.” Or when I would ask them what was wrong, they snarkily answered, “James McGrath.” And in moments of weakness, I, too, had secretly begun to slip James McGrath in. He was hiding my car keys, breaking the dishwasher, making my bones ache. My real fear was what my aching body meant, but it translated into a wild assumption that because James McGrath’s name had shown up next to mine, my name was being used to bankroll a drug cartel and buy expensive cars.
Diagnosing what is wrong with a patient is an art and a science. Listening to a patient’s story is one of the most important ways a doctor begins to understand what is wrong. When a doctor friend listened to my story, she said, “When it sounds like a horse, 99% of the time it is a horse. It’s only that rare 1% when it is a zebra.” Toward the end of that year and after many rounds of physical therapy, I felt a little better, but my physical therapist told me there was nothing more she could do for me and referred me to a physiatrist.
I was pleasantly delighted when a young, handsome doctor—his hair pulled back in a neat ponytail—listened to my story, asked me questions, and examined me. He could not offer me a definitive interpretation of my pain, but he was the first doctor who said, “You should really check in with your oncologist.”
Also an art is how to teach teenagers that a “good” textual interpretation needs clear textual evidence to prove a point. My students always pleaded with me that their interpretations were “right,” and “good” solely because it was “their interpretation” not because there was clear textual evidence to prove their point. One of the reasons I fell in love with literature was that my favorite books were intentionally ambiguous, yielding different interpretations with every reading. However, my students needed to learn how to find and understand textual evidence so they could analytically prove a point.
Analyzing literature and diagnosing a patient can be like a puzzle that needs to be solved. I left the physiatrist’s office angry and devastated that not even good-looking doctors with great hair had answers. I begrudgingly called my oncologist.
In a windowless exam room, my oncologist of eight years listened to my story, examined me, and reflected that he too thought I had a “slow-to-heal yoga injury.” But because he was “in the business of cancer,” he added, he ordered a CT scan.
At some point, James McGrath’s name no longer showed up next to mine. Mistakenly, I had assumed that because of his appearance on my mailing label, my social security number was being copied and pasted all over the dark web. But there was no evidence to prove my point. My identity had not been stolen. I would never know how James McGrath had suddenly and mysteriously appeared on my mailing label. My searching and theorizing were fruitless. James McGrath was a clerical error, not a real threat.
Like me, those students who realize they have made an insightful point about a text, one that their classmates may not have thought of before, light up when their peers or teacher proudly nod their heads and smile in satisfaction. Having a smart idea is like no other feeling–one I craved over and over throughout my teaching and learning career. Being wrong, on the other hand, is one of the worst feelings.
When my CT results came back, I felt cheated, duped, bamboozled. My “slow to heal” yoga injury was widespread “destructive osseous metastases” in my T4, T3, and L1, and “lytic lesions of the sternal body likely accounting for reported pain in this area.”
When I told my doctor friend, all I said was, “It’s a zebra.” She understood.
Quite literally, disambiguation means “to remove ambiguity from.” For me, the diagnosis was clear. I had metastatic breast cancer. A most unexpected and horrifying answer to the “what’s wrong with me” question I had been asking for months.
Like my misguided worry about the potential threat of James McGrath’s identity, I had somehow misread my body’s textual evidence. What I could not get out of my head was the question: where had I gone wrong? Looking back, I realized the X-ray was a red herring. In literature, a red herring is a literary device that intentionally misleads or distracts the main character from the main plot. But more seriously I asked myself why didn’t my doctor offer me, a woman with a history of breast cancer, a more comprehensive screening when I showed up in his office with sternal pain? Did those doctors know what they were looking at and did not tell me? Why had my body betrayed me again?
Though I did not know it at the beginning of the year, that was my last year of teaching. In January, my diagnosis forced me to resign. I never told my students that I had been diagnosed with ER/PR +, HER2+ metastatic breast cancer, leaving them with no textual evidence to process why I was leaving at the end of the year. By March, COVID-19 shuttered my school, and we pivoted to online learning. Sadly, I ended my 16-year teaching career by pressing Zoom’s red “End Meeting for All” button.
Any patient who has searched for weeks, months or even years for an answer to their “what’s wrong with me” question knows the gift of a diagnosis. What comes next is a clear and discernable treatment plan. With skill and precision, my oncologist correctly interpreted the textual evidence. His compassion assured me and multiple treatments alleviated my pain.
I have been living with metastatic breast cancer for more than five years. At this point, my textual evidence is clear; my scans are “unremarkable” and “stable” with “no progressive disease.” Living with metastatic breast cancer is always surprising and worrisome, so I know that someday, my oncologist and I will be having a different, more difficult conversation. But for now, we talk about my current treatment plan and books. Now that I am not teaching high school English, I do not have to reread “Lord of the Flies” or “Macbeth” or prepare an insightful and engaging lesson plan; I can just read. During my last appointment, we traded recommendations—his was Madeline Miller’s “Circe” and mine, Athena Dixon’s “The Loneliness Files.”
Jenny Burkholder is a writer, teacher and breast cancer advocate living and working in Pennsylvania. Formerly the Montgomery County Poet Laureate, Burkholder is the author of the poetry chapbook “Repaired” (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in North American Review, So to Speak, 2River View, The Healing Muse and The Maine Review, among others. She is the co-host of the podcast “OVERexpressed & OUT,” which amplifies the voices of Philadelphia-area, modern-day pioneers–women transforming their communities from the inside.