PRINTBooby Prize: Although it was curtains for her breasts . . .
Heather Carver's sense of humor remains center stage
Adam Wisneski
During a dress rehearsal on January 10, Heather Carver practices her one-woman show, Booby Prize: A Comedy About Breast Cancer, which opens tonight at the Corner Playhouse.
January 25, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Heather Carver had hoped to keep her hair through the holidays, but it started coming out in clumps just before Christmas 2005, shortly after the chemotherapy began. She’d wake up in the morning to find her pillow covered in a tangle of brown strands.
She knew this day was coming. Still, the reality of seeing it happen was like being kicked in the gut. That morning, she wept.
Heather Carver practices juggling colored scarves at a dress rehearsal for her one-woman play ...
Her thoughts soon turned to her daughters, Tricia and Ellie, then 5 and 2. Worried the patchiness would scare them, she decided it was time to shave her head.
Her husband, mother and two friends, one with electric clippers, gathered in her bathroom. For most people, this would have been a somber occasion. But Carver isn’t like most people. One friend started by shaving a strip down the middle. Seeing her reflection in the mirror — the top of her head bald, tufts of hair jutting out from both sides — Carver made a decision.
“Get me my clown nose,” she told her husband. A round of pictures followed. And laughter.
A theater professor at MU, Carver had been clowning since she was 15. The cancer had already taken both of her breasts. Now it was taking her hair, too. That day she resolved that no matter what, she would never let it take her sense of humor.
This is who I am, she thought. I am a funny person. Humor has gotten me through a lot already, so why drop it now? This could be a way I heal.
Heal she did.
Now, more than a year after being diagnosed, Carver feels healthy, strong and has an excellent prognosis. Her hair has come back, her cheeks are rosy, and her face is a bundle of energy. When she talks, her eyebrows dart upward to match the inflection of her voice, which has the assurance and strength of a trained performer. But getting to this stage meant navigating a turbulent and sometimes bitterly cold sea of medical tests and treatments. To get through, she relied on the support of her family and friends, and most of all, a large dose of laughter.
For most of her career, Carver’s specialty has been in autobiographic performance, especially related to women’s health. She co-edited the book Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography, published in 2003. She’s also the artistic director and co-founder of the Troubling Violence Performance Project, bringing to the stage personal narratives from survivors of domestic violence. She has spent a good portion of her life studying how women tell their stories. Now, she’s telling her own.
Carver has written a one-person play about her battle with breast cancer, but don’t expect a sob fest. She titled it Booby Prize: A Comedy About Breast Cancer. The play opens at MU’s Corner Playhouse tonight.
Although the words comedy and breast cancer might seem to go together about as well as refreshing and paint thinner, the pairing is only natural considering the source. Carver laughs. A lot. A deep, throaty laugh that sounds like she’s about to spit out a lung when she really gets going. She knows all too well there’s nothing funny about breast cancer, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still funny.
Finding humor was no easy task, even for Carver. The diagnosis itself was like a bad punch line. The worst punch line ever.
She first noticed something was wrong in February 2005 when she began experiencing pain in her left breast while exercising. After an ultrasound, she was diagnosed with a fibroid, relatively common and noncancerous. Her doctor told her that usually when a lump is large and painful, it’s not breast cancer. Moreover, she had no family history of the disease, was only 36 and showed no other symptoms. All the indications were that there was nothing to worry about.
The lump grew and was still painful, though, and that summer she decided even if it wasn’t cancer, she still didn’t want it. She went to see her obstetrician-gynecologist in August. He recommended she see a breast surgeon. The surgeon scheduled her for a mammogram, which raised concerns but still didn’t give a definitive answer. Finally, she underwent a biopsy in October.
She was in her office about to attend a doctoral candidate’s prospectus defense when the call came that would turn her life upside down. The surgeon said she was very sorry, but it was invasive breast cancer.
“Am I going to die?” Carver asked her.
“Well, I certainly hope not,” the surgeon said.
Carver hung up the phone in a daze but refused to go home. Somehow, she got through the defense. Then she went to see her husband, Bill Horner, an MU political science professor. She walked into his office and shut the door. Horner knew before she had uttered a word.
A week later she was in surgery. The left breast had to be removed. Because she was young, the likelihood of recurrence was higher, and certain powerful drugs used in chemotherapy can only be used once. If the cancer did recur, she would be disadvantaged, so she made the difficult decision to have her right breast removed as a preventive measure. So much of what was happening to her was out of her control. If being able to regain at least some of that meant giving up her other breast, so be it.
Five months of chemotherapy followed, then six weeks of radiation. Fortunately, the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes.
“Had I waited around for somebody else to tell me to take care of myself, I don’t know if that would have been early enough to get it before the lymph nodes,” she says.
Except for a brief period following her surgery, Carver continued to teach, even through chemo and radiation. Taking it easy had never been part of her repertoire; she wasn’t about to change now.
The chemotherapy was especially draining. She felt as if she were moving in slow motion. Teaching helped her feel more normal. Walking into class was an infusion of energy. But she also had to learn to limit herself and pay attention to her body. Even small changes made a difference. She used to skip lunch. Now, she made it a point to eat. She began to sit down while teaching and bring a drink with her to class, a green tea with organic milk.
She also had to learn to accept help. Concerned students, colleagues and friends rallied around her. They began bringing meals to the family’s home. Carver wasn’t used to letting people do things for her. She was juggling a career, family and now cancer, but she didn’t want people to think she couldn’t handle it all. She came to realize, though, what a tremendous gift she had been given. Looking back on it now, Carver says it freed her to spend as much time with her family as possible.
“It was a way of making life a little bit more normal for my girls,” she says. “It’s hard enough having Mommy be bald and tired, but I didn’t have to get worn out making dinner, and my husband didn’t have to get worn out making dinner. We just had dinner. It just arrived.”
Her husband was another constant source of support. They began dating their sophomore year at Northwestern and have been together ever since. Horner says the two hit it off right away. Although they were in different fields academically, both had similar interests and senses of humor.
“We’ve always amused each other,” he says.
Cancer touched both their lives early. In graduate school with Carver at the University of Texas, Horner was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He was 29. It hap pened about a month before he was supposed to take comprehensive exams for his doctoral program.
Carver helped him through the surgery and went with him every day to radiation. He passed his exams on schedule and has been cancer-free ever since.
“It was a scary but short period of time,” he says. “And in comparison to what Heather’s had to go through, it was nothing.”
Together, though, they’ve managed to keep amusing each other, even in the most difficult of situations, such as that day in the bathroom or during her chemotherapy treatments.
A favorite routine was that whenever they would go in for an appointment, the doctor would ask questions to evaluate Carver’s level of pain. Her standard answer was that Horner was her biggest pain.
“It’s the same tired joke, but we laugh every time,” she says. Even now she can’t help dissolving into laughter as she tells the story. The two were made for each other.
There have been times, though, when laughter was the furthest thing from their minds. Her experiences with the medical system have not always been positive.
After her initial treatment, tests revealed a spot on Carver’s back that looked like it could be cancerous. She asked what would happen if it were in her back, and her oncologist told her she would be put on palliative care.
She remembers calling the oncologist’s office late one afternoon for test results from the MRI exam, which she thought would be the final word on whether the spot was cancerous. A nurse told her the results were back, and she could give them over the phone.
The nurse then proceeded to tell her about tests she already knew about. When Carver asked about the MRI, there was an awkward pause.
“Uh, you know, I think you should talk to the doctor,” the nurse finally said.
Of course, it was too late in the day to talk to the doctor, so Carver spent the night expecting the worst. If it had been a good result, surely the nurse would have said so, she thought. It was one of the scariest moments of her life.
She remembers going home and rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, almost hyperventilating. Horner was the voice of reason. He kept telling her they didn’t really know anything at that point. Maybe she had read the nurse wrong. Later that night, she wrote the words: I do not have cancer in my back. I do not have cancer in my back, over and over in her journal. Writing was a tool of survival.
When she finally did speak with the doctor, she was told the results were “iffy.” The MRI, as it turned out, was not the final test. A biopsy followed. More waiting. More worrying. When the results came in a couple of days later, the doctor called to tell her it was not cancer after all. Relief washed over her, but it seemed as if no one had stopped to consider the anguish she was being put through. She felt like a car being worked on in a shop.
After that, Carver found a new doctor.
“People have a hard enough time having to face death when they’re really facing death,” she says. “There’s no reason to put people through that if they’re not.”
She now sees Dr. Clay Anderson at Ellis Fischel, who she says has been wonderful. Anderson was one of about 100 people to see the first performance of Booby Prize when Carver performed it October 7 at the annual Ellis Fischel Oncology Conference.
Kathy Sevedge, the clinical support coordinator at Ellis, was responsible for bringing Carver to the event. Sevedge, a nurse, has worked in oncology for almost 30 years. For the past several years, she says, she has tried to bring something to the conference to show not just the clinical side but the emotional side of cancer.
“When you’re going to a conference to learn about things, especially a conference where health care practitioners are learning to take care of their patients, we’re not always comfortable about approaching the emotional aspects of what cancer does to a person in their whole life,” she says.
Enter Heather Carver.
She begins the performance in full clown makeup, wig and costume and distributes balloons and clown noses to every table. Each nose represents a different person in her life and a different story.
After working the crowd for a little while as a clown, she starts trying to drag a large bag to the center of the room. It’s too heavy, so she gets them to applaud. The more they applaud, the easier it is for her to lift. When she gets it to the center of the room, she says that, just like them, she always wanted to succeed, to be at the top of the class, to win. She asks them to guess what could be in the bag. The excitement builds.
When she finally opens the bag, she pulls out a sign. It reads, “Booby Prize.”
“One out of seven women in this country is diagnosed with breast cancer,” she tells them. “I win.”
Now that she’s got their attention, it’s story time. She talks about that day in the bathroom and the frustration of hearing her test results were “iffy.” She talks about boarding an airplane and feeling as if she had cooties because of the stares.
“I don’t know what it was, but what do they think: Bald people never fly?”
“Yes they do!” shouts a man from the audience. She looks up, and, sure enough, he’s as bald as a cantaloupe.
She goes over to him, gives him a big clown hug and plants her big clown lips on his forehead.
“It’s kind of like she’s a carpenter with a real big hammer, a super hammer, a jackhammer,” Anderson says. “The John Henry of cancer survivors in that her hammer of humor is overdeveloped to a point where she’s got a lot extra to share with the rest of us, thank goodness.”
Writing Booby Prize was a connection for her to other authors, such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who have written as a means of healing. But she also wanted to open up a dialogue. Carver hopes her humor and her willingness to share her story will help other people become more comfortable talking about cancer and sharing their own stories.
Just as her life will continue to evolve and change, the play will continue to evolve with her. She looks forward to performing Booby Prize well into the future.
“You know, when I put it up, I’ll be a 15-month survivor,” she says. “I look forward to being a 15-year survivor performing the play.”
*For event information, see It's the breast show in town.
