Onions

There’s a lot they don’t tell you about chemotherapy. It’s common knowledge that many people who have cancer lose their hair— for those who didn’t know, it’s because the treatment will target rapidly growing cells (the cause of cancer) and damage hair follicles during the process, thus causing it to fall out.

It’s also common knowledge that it’s expensive. How expensive? In 2016, a study deduced that the average cost for a six-month course of chemotherapy alone (not including radiation!) was $27,000. For perspective, in Florida, the average yearly salary for a person is about $56,000. Now, throw in other factors that we need to pay for in order to survive. To feed a family of four, expect to spend around $15,550. To insure everyone in the family? That’s approximately $24,000. Don’t forget to add the phone bill up, too-- especially with this all happening during Covid.

I was in the eighth grade when my mom was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer. I was on the bus when I got the news. A year or two prior, she had mentioned feeling a lump in her chest, but decided not to get it checked out— probably because she knew we couldn’t afford it at the time. Isn’t it crazy how that’s the concern over your own life? It isn’t.

Knowing my mom, she wanted the best life for her kids— and how are you supposed to provide that without money?

Anyways, that bus ride traumatized me. Sometimes I’ll sit and think about it. I wonder why I decided to ask how the mammogram went before I made it home. I wonder if she regrets pausing for a moment, taking a deep breath to fill the silence, and letting the words fall out so calmly: “So, it is cancer.”

You know when you get a buzzing in your throat where you know you’re about to cry and behind your eyeballs starts to feel hot and the snot liquidizes in your nostrils and behind your kneecaps starts to sweat?

I do.

“Oh. You’re gonna be okay, though, right?”

I’m not sure what she said after, but if it was a yes, I’m very pleased to be able to speak on it now, knowing that it wasn't a lie of reassurance. After I hung up the phone, I started to sob. The ironically un-tough I-hate-my-family-so-much-I-can’t-wait-to-just-leave facade had broken, and I’m glad that reality check came sooner rather than later.

When you’re hit with news like that, you want to think positively. You really do. But, it is so hard to back out of the spiral and the impending question of “what if she doesn’t make it?” I didn’t like to imagine my dad, alone, without his highschool sweetheart. I didn’t like to imagine my brother, alone, without the one person he loved to annoy. I didn’t like to imagine myself, alone, without, arguably, my biggest supporter in life. I don’t like to imagine any of that now, either.

After I got home from that bus ride, nothing more was said. I don’t think I could have said anything. You always hear the cliché of having a lump in your throat, but once you experience it, there’s no other way to describe it without going into grotesque detail. I went to bed feeling like I had to vomit, I woke up feeling like I had to vomit. I couldn’t go to school the next morning or take the same bus home or replay the same phone call or have the same silence. When my dad woke me up— because I had slept through my alarm— he wasn’t upset. In fact, he seemed glad that I had gotten a good night’s rest. “Can you come down so we can talk? I think it’s best if we do.”

I had never previously been good at opening up. I kept everything secret and to myself out of fear of getting in trouble or just ruining my self-image. But, he peeled me back with those two lines, and I let every last tear burn my cheeks and every last word crawl from my stomach and out through my teeth. I don’t remember much of the conversation, but I do remember five things my dad said.

One: “I wish she didn’t tell you, but I’m glad you know, so we can have this

conversation.”

Two: “Your brother doesn’t know, so please don’t say anything around him.”

Three: “Mom is strong, you of anybody should know that.”

Four: “Please talk to me if you need to. Bottling it up is just going to hurt you more than

it should.”

Five: “If I’m not worried, you shouldn’t be either. She’s going to be okay.”

Before my mom even started chemo, she went to my grandma’s barbershop to cut her hair. Months prior, I had made a big chop of my own hair— what was once down to my butt was cut to my shoulders was then cut into a side-parted pixie. I donated the inches to a charity that made wigs for kids who experienced hair loss for medical reasons, but wished I had more to give to my mom. Knowing her, though, she wouldn’t have accepted it; she’d rather it go to a little girl who would’ve felt like a princess with my brunette waves.

I was so unattached to my own hair, but when I watched my mom’s fall to the ground in botched clumps from the scissors and chunks from the razor, I wanted to cry. She did. For about a year, she had been lightening her hair in highlights with the end desire of it being platinum, so you couldn’t differentiate between dye and the actual grey growing in from her roots. Despite the tears, though, it was what she had wanted. If she was going to lose her hair, it was going to be her own choice and doing. Not the cancer’s.

When we got back home, my dad was sitting at the dining room table by the front door, probably playing on his phone or reading a comic book. “Hey, beautiful lady,” he said to my mom as she walked in. The only comment about her hair that he made was that he wished she had let him do it with the electric razor he shaves his own head with— just because it would have been funny.

With each treatment, my mom felt and looked weaker. Some days, she couldn’t even get out of bed. When she did, it would be to rush to the bathroom to throw up or to sit outside on the patio and watch the cardinals eat the seeds from the fire pit. She was always cold, especially her head. The little bit of hair she had after the buzzcut fell out and she couldn’t believe my dad was able to survive bald during the gusts of winter air. She went online and ordered herself head scarves and beanies from businesses that donated some proceeds back to cancer cure-based charities. None of the scarves were boring, I will add. They were all brightly colored, some with floral designs, others just solid shades like magenta. Did we joke around that she looked like a Babushka? Of course we did— that’s always been the dynamic of my family.

While a lot of the weakness came from the chemicals seeping into her blood through a port on her collarbone, it also stemmed from her lack of appetite. I don’t blame her. The chemo, for some reason, had an effect on what she could and couldn’t eat. She loved peppermints during the treatment and ate them almost religiously, but that’s really all I remember. What she couldn’t eat was a different story; the biggest impact to her was that she couldn’t eat anything (and I mean anything) with onions and garlic. And yes, this did include seasonings. It was almost as if she had gained some super power, where she could taste even the smallest granule of onion powder. The consequence, however, was nausea, so it wasn’t all that super. Sometimes she’d start crying because she missed eating Spanish food (basically every dish had onion or garlic in it, and it wasn’t the same without it); a part of her culture was essentially stripped away from her. Did this stop her from making it for the family, though? Of course not. When my brother was craving Bistec de Palomilla (or as he calls it, Mojo Steak), my mom would either tough it out or throw on a mask, so she couldn’t smell the heightened pungence of the onions. I’m not sure why she did so much for us, and I’m really not sure why it took me so long to appreciate it, but grateful doesn’t begin to describe how I feel for her.

When the medical bills started coming in, I couldn’t fathom how they could charge someone so much for a life-saving procedure. That’s a lie. I could. The medical system now is based on a foundation of greed and dispassion. When my mom came home saying she rang the cancer-free bell, we were all ecstatic. But how many times a day do the nurses watch people do the same thing: clap their hands, then go home, and await their paycheck, unfamiliar with the warmth they should be feeling over the sheer strength it had taken their patient to fight through it? I wouldn’t like to know.

What I do know is that after everything, my mom survived. While she has yearly mammography appointments, they’re normal— just like the scans every woman of her age should get. Her hair is a gorgeous silver and already past shoulder-length. Most importantly, though, she’s healthy. That’s all we ever wanted in the end. We all went through our own struggles of acceptance and grief, but it’s all a part of the process. The layers of it all flaked— we didn’t rush to peel them. There were tears, but that’s only normal. We let the situation simmer, caramelize over, and now everything is sweet.

In creative writing, we were given the prompt of writing about a rock bottom situation that proved only things could go up. While it was geared towards a fictional response, I had the idea of creating a nonfiction piece based on when my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. It's a retelling of the events I can remember and the moments that stuck with me, especially her inability to eat onions when undergoing chemotherapy, an odd side effect. Onions throughout the piece, symbolize that moment in time as well as how, internally, I tried to protect myself, eventually allowing myself to experience grief and then gratitude.

Justina Guido ‘25