Labels and Limits
By Jessica L. Israel, MD
Aberdeen, NJ

When I look in the mirror now I can see who I really am. Not who I thought I was, or even who I want to be- but who I am. Myself emerging. My eyes always move to the scars. They look so drastic and deliberate, even though they are fading. I have even been told that they are beautiful, because of what they mean.

I have always identified with my mother. In fact, I have even told others that I am exactly like her, unaware that this may be a strange thing to say. I look like her. I move my hands like her. My shoulders slope like hers did. Our ankles twist easily. I have her eyes. Spilled over blue, my grandfather called them. Spilled over because there is blue in the white.

Sometimes I catch my mother’s friends or her sister whispering to each other in the next room at a family party, tears in their eyes- and I know why. People who knew her and now see me sometimes stare, looking for her, looking at her. Her closest friends tell me continuations of stories they think I know the beginnings to, because they once told her.

I have always considered it the highest compliment, “You are just like her”. And it has always been everything that I wanted to be, everything that I thought I was. When I became a mother I felt the most like her, because this is what she was to me. I remember looking into Benjamin’s baby spilled over blues and thinking that I was finally there. Full circle. I was going to be the kind of mother she was. Everything I had known about how to be a mom came from her. Now I could honor her memory. Love unconditionally. Stand alongside. Support. Dream.

I have always believed that I would follow in her footsteps. I have always believed that I would someday have breast cancer. Someday, I would have to fight that fight. I would never be 42 years old. This was my destiny.

I married a man I knew would always travel at my side. I married someone I knew would remember me, or could remember me- in the right ways and at the right time if he ever needed to. I began journals for my children when each of them was born. Writing about how much I loved them, how I would always believe in them. I scrap-booked their pictures. I planned vacations. I built memories. I extended my family into my sister’s, assuring that someone from my original home would always be in my family’s new one. It never dawned on me the acceptance I allowed myself. The limits I set.

When my sister and I went for genetic counseling, I knew even before we sat across the table from the counselor that I would carry this gene. I was the strong one. I was the one like mom. “You were right”, she said. “One of you has tested positive. Jessi, you have the BRCA-2 mutation.” It was the first time in my life that I wasn’t so happy to be told I was like her. Hearing it out loud was hard, and I couldn’t catch my breath. It was finally real. Out in the open. Labels and limits. I am exactly like her.

Or maybe I was. Was exactly like her. I have made changes she could never have imagined. I have played with destiny. I have given myself a freedom I never thought imaginable. A freedom to live in a way I never thought possible.

Three days after my bilateral mastectomy (with planned reconstruction), Dr. Seltzer called me at home. “Your pathology was all negative. I wanted to make you happy tonight.” I remember looking at my face in the bathroom mirror when he called. My chest was wrapped in a cotton and velcro dressing. It was flat. I couldn’t lift my arms. I had surgical drains pinned to my pajamas. Black and blue marks on my hands, with the grayish sticky residue of surgical tape in my arms.

I slept that night for the first time in the seventeen years since my mother had died, with hope. I went to bed believing that I would live longer than 41 years. And I didn’t know it at the time, but I started to break away from who I thought I had to be. When I looked in the mirror that night, on the phone, I saw me. Spilled over blue, and wounded, and scared, and loved. Lucky and brave, without labels or limits.


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