Published: May 10, 2008 05:32 pm            

Stephanie Salter: The Best Generation Mom’s Credo: Suck it up

TERRE HAUTE — Earlier this month, I went to the new Hux Cancer Center with my mother so she could be measured and marked for a series of radiation treatments on two basal cell carcinomas just south of her scalp line.

Basal cell is the least-threatening of skin cancers, but it is nothing to mess with. When one develops on your face, it seems worse because the whole world can see it. Treatment is even more visible. With all the advances in dermatology, no one has yet figured out a way to get rid of skin cancer without some sort of scorched-earth approach that takes weeks to heal. This is especially daunting if you are a woman.

As a guy pal once reminded me when basal cell surgery made my face look like I’d gone 10 rounds in a boxing ring, “Face wounds are one of the last things people are still totally sexist about.”

A man with a bruised and bandaged face could walk into a bar and half the place would offer to buy him a drink, my friend said. “A woman walks in with the same wounds, and everybody moves to the other side of the room.”

I thought about this as I watched the doc and radiation techs at Hux lay Mom out on their table, measure and mark her head and create a Star Wars-kind of net mask to guide them through the next few weeks of zapping.

I saw the look on my mother’s still-lovely face when the doctor told her she would lose a tiny patch of hair at the primary site of the treatment, and it would never grow back.

Typical of her suck-it-up generation, Mom winced, then started talking about how fortunate she was to have insurance and to be able to get radiation right here in Terre Haute instead of having to drive to Indianapolis.

Later, when we discussed it, she almost apologized for caring at all about another scar on her face or a patch of hair that would be gone forever. Compared to what most people in Hux are up against — what Mom herself already has confronted and survived — a couple of basal cells are nothing. Besides, she reasoned, she is 78, and shouldn’t mind about her face.

Once again, admiration for my mother and so many women like her washed over me and left me humbled. Of course she should, and does, mind. Any woman whose face is changed by cancer minds. But you won’t catch many in my mom’s age group “dwelling” on it.

They are warriors, these women of the Depression and World War II, astonishingly tough and resilient. Among their unwritten rules of conduct is the cap on time allowed to feel sorry for yourself: Maybe 60 seconds, and even that is looked upon as an indulgence.

We, their adult children, have grown old and experienced enough to finally recognize the stuff of which they are made. We know, now, how much harder life was for them than for us, how accustomed they became to the short end of the stick, the smallest portion of the pie.

        

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