Debra Jarvis

Before surgery and chemo, Wes and I had a great sex life and I missed it. But I was still, as Wes put it, “intensely desirous of cuddling.” That was true. I needed to be comforted about the fact that I wasn’t interested in sex. For one thing, my vagina had shrunk down to the size of a drinking straw.

I consulted my naturopath. “The only thing I can think of,” she said, “is a dildo to stretch out the tissues.” She started to write it down on my chart and then paused. “I don’t even know how to spell it.” 

My primary care physician nodded sympathetically when I told her the problem. “Okay, what you might try is some kind of—dilator.”

“Uh, yeah. You may have to start small and work your way up.” She gave me the name of a sex-toy shop on Capitol Hill in Seattle: Toys in Babeland. 

I wore sunglasses on the way over and fully intended to keep them on while I was inside. But in my mind, there is no other way to do this kind of thing except directly.

“May I help you?” She was a sweet 20-something girl with pierced eyebrows.

“Yes. I was on chemo and we didn’t have sex for a while and I have no estrogen and my vagina has shrunk to the size of a drinking straw and I need something to get it back in shape.” 

“Yes, of course,” said Pierced Girl. 

Of course? Did she hear this all the time? 

I looked at the vast assortment of penises. They were like puppies at the pound. All of them seemed to say, “Pick me! Pick me!” 

She took me over to three shelves of dildos. “These are silicone, these are latex, and these are blown glass,” she said, pointing to the different shelves. I know she said something after that, but I didn’t get it because my mind was screaming, “Glass?! Isn’t that dangerous? Why don’t you just use plutonium?”

“You can’t use silicone lubricant with silicone. You can only use water-based or glycerin, although we don’t recommend lubricants with glycerin because they can cause yeast infections. Now with latex toys you can use silicone lubricant.”

I should be taking notes! Yeast infections? That’s all I need. 

“How do I know which size to get?” I asked coolly. Never mind the fact that this whole venture had brought on a marathon hot flash.

“It depends on how many fingers you can get in your vagina.”

“Oh, yes.” I looked down at my hands and pondered this question. Did she include the little finger? Because that’s a lot smaller than the other three. That could throw off the entire calculation.

You would have thought I was buying gloves at Macy’s. I quickly ruled out the glass and latex varieties. But the dildo buffet was still overwhelming, so I ruled out anything that looked real because I had the real thing at home. 

Then I remembered what my doctor said about starting small. There were three that were exactly alike, except they were small, medium, and large. Perfect. I picked up the small one: $30! $40 for the medium, and $45 for the large. I wasn’t about to spend $115 on dildos! Once I graduated to the large, what would I do with the small and medium ones? Donate them to the church rummage sale? 

I would just have to start big. I grabbed the Papa Bear off the shelf and waved at Pierced Girl. “I’ll take this one.” 

“Alright. I’ll be right back.” She returned with two sealed bags. “Purple or black?” she asked.

“Well, black does go with everything,” I said, “but how can I resist the purple?” I immediately named him Prince. 

Now I had to get some fancy lubricant. Clearly our common drugstore stuff wasn’t cutting it. There were testers for every brand. On every shelf was a box of tissues so you could wipe off your fingers. So thoughtful. 

So I tried Maximus, O’My, Sliquid Silk, Babelube, Infinity, and Pink. Pink was in a handblown Italian glass bottle so you could leave it out on your nightstand and no one would walk in and scream, “Oh, my God! Lubricant!”

Instead they’d probably say, “Oh, what a beautiful bottle.” Then they’d pick it up, and because it’s slippery, drop it on your floor. Then you’d have lubricant everywhere and a lot of explaining to do. But what are they doing sniffing around your bedroom?

Anyway, I ended up buying a bottle of Gun Oil because I liked the way it felt, and I knew Wes would die laughing at the name. Unlike Pink, I wouldn’t keep it on the nightstand but perhaps in the garage. 

I was feeling pretty wild now and decided to buy some erotic literature. I chose a book whose cover looked very cultured and sophisticated. It was a collection of stories. I’ll tell you right now that the stories where they hop in the sack after knowing one another only 10 minutes just didn’t turn me on. I got anxious and started talking out loud, saying things like, “You need to pay attention to your relationship first!” or “What did you learn from your last relationship?” I was doing pre-marital counseling with erotic literature. 

The stories that worked for me are where they secretly love one another for ages, are afraid to admit it, finally confess, and then hop in the sack. So I read a story and then Prince and I would get to work, paving the way for the Real Thing. It really was work at first because there was a fair amount of discomfort. I looked upon it like dental hygiene, although I’ve never once had an orgasm while flossing—yet.

So like my taste buds, slowly and gradually things came back. Lights were flickering in the house. 

At night, while Wes read his journal in bed, I read my erotic lit. After a story or two I would fling the book on the floor and say, “Honey, step away from that journal!”  

So our sex life is better thanks to Prince and the Gun Oil, although I did have one very bad experience. We were coming back from a vacation and I unconsciously, thoughtlessly, stupidly threw the Gun Oil into my carry-on luggage. 

“Ma’am we need to check your bag,” said the woman at the X-ray machine.

“Oh, yeah, sure. Is it my inhaler?” Sometimes my inhaler is mistaken for a small pistol. She dug through my bag and pulled out the bottle. 

Everyone stopped talking and turned around. I mean, everyone. Of course, this triggered a hot flash. Little beads of sweat were forming on my forehead. Why didn’t I just turn myself in as a terrorist? 

A big, burly TSA guy came over and said, “Dump out your bag.” 

The woman was still examining the bottle. I leaned over and whispered, “It’s lubricant.” Our eyes met and there was a flicker of recognition, of empathy. 

The burly man was just about to take the bottle from her when she snatched it away and said, “We have everything under control here.” 

I still had to dump my bag and let them paw through nasal decongestant, a half-eaten protein bar, a hairbrush that looked like a Shih Tzu, and a package of facial oil-blotting papers. Humiliating? 

This is a test of the Universal Humiliation System. If this were an actual humiliation you would feel worse. This is only embarrassing. 

So like my taste buds, slowly and gradually things came back. Lights were flickering in the house. I am convinced there is no way to rush this. The best thing to do is to pretend you are a teenage virgin and will only allow kissing. You might try saying, “I’m not one of those slutty cheerleader types!” and gently smack your partner. Then think about your parents coming home any minute. Then imagine all the girls at school finding out. Then all the boys. Then … well, it worked for us. 

Debra Jarvis is a chaplain at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. 

It’s Not About the Hair: And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer

 by Debra Jarvis [Sasquatch Books, 2007].

Articles

Sex toys and lubricant and erotic books, oh my! 

Prince & the Gun Oil

It’s Not About the Hair / And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer

I’m not a big drinker. What I really missed about not being able to drink wine was the ritual. I missed the way Wes would ask, “Shall we open some wine?” as we were rooting through the refrigerator getting dinner together.

I would laugh when he opened the bottle with that silly, rabbit-shaped opener because every time he would say proudly, “So easy!” I loved the sound and smell of the wine being poured, the clink of the glasses, the kiss. We tried to keep the ritual with Crystal Light, but it wasn’t the same.

It reminded me of youth pastors who, in trying to be hip, used Coke and M&Ms for communion. Please. I suppose if you were trapped in a snack shack at the county fair and that’s all there was, and you wanted to receive communion because it was clear you were going to die before someone rescued you, well, then I think it’s OK.

Anyway, at first when wine started tasting bad to me Wes would say, “Let’s open a different bottle! Maybe this one is too dry.” But when we had so many open bottles that it looked like a wine tasting, he realized it was useless. After a while he stopped drinking wine, too. 

I think everyone with cancer struggles to keep domestic rituals. Nancy finished six months of chemotherapy and had a mastectomy. Her 3-year-old son, Riley, was used to snuggling up to her every night before bed. 

“So we told him Mommy has a ‘soft’ side and a ‘tender’ side, and he could snuggle only on the soft side.”

“Was he able to remember that?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she answered. “I started to shake hands with my doctor and Riley piped up, ‘That’s her tender side!’ ”

You just do what you can to keep life normal. The hardest ritual for me to keep was eating dinner with Wes. About halfway through my chemo was when ev-erything changed. It was as if my tastebuds, who all  these years had been wearing khakis and polo shirts, suddenly started wearing leather vests and jackboots. 

To me, eating was more than simply putting food in your mouth, chewing and then swallowing. I could do that. But what I couldn’t do was enjoy the same foods he did. All I wanted to eat was pineapple, pickles, nopalitos, sour olives and salad with Italian dressing. 

So gone were the moments when we would take a bite of something, look at each other and say, “M-m-m-m.” Eating was no longer a shared experience.

The only exception to this was steak. I was anemic, and my oncologist was pushing red meat like a waiter with last night’s special. I was thrilled we could eat steak together, and I was thrilled we could afford it. But Wes comes from a family of heart disease, so we really didn’t do it too often. 

I said, “If you have a heart attack and die because we’ve been eating steak because I had cancer ...” Well, I couldn’t even finish that sentence. It was too ridiculous.

I wish I could tell you I did this delicately. But the truth is, somewhere between Best Animated Short Film and Achievement in Costume Design, I took a cleaver and whacked off his head.

“OK, I’ll take care of it.” I took one last look into Santa’s chocolate brown eyes and carefully placed his face into my mouth. He was delicious — just like I remembered chocolate. That was my defining moment; that’s how I knew I was getting something resembling my old life back. 

As a chaplain at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Debra Jarvis had counseled hundreds of cancer patients before learning she had breast cancer — a week after her mother was diagnosed with the same disease. In dealing with her treatment, Jarvis worked on being her Best Real Self, emphasizing the importance of being authentic. Below, an excerpt from her book ?

 explores how she and her husband, Wes, dealt with life as treatment ended. 

So I was looking forward to being able to eat again. I somehow thought I would wake up one morning and, ta-da, the taste buds would be back! But that’s not how it happened. It was gradual like an incoming tide. About two weeks after my last chemo, I found myself eating a piece of cheddar cheese that had formerly tasted like Play-Doh. A few days after I sipped some wine  —  not exactly drinkable, but getting there. 

At Christmas a friend arrived at my door carrying an elaborate 2-foot-tall chocolate Santa Claus. His eyebrows and beard were in white chocolate. His belt buckle and boot were in dark chocolate. I was stunned at his size. 

“All I can tell you,” she said, “is it didn’t look this big in the catalog.” Everyone who came over took a picture with the giant chocolate Santa. 

I didn’t want to cut into the Santa until I was sure chocolate tasted good to me again. This was no drugstore chocolate Santa; it was Dilettante chocolate. I wanted the day to be something special. And it was — the Academy Awards. 

I wish I could tell you I did this delicately, like some kind of skilled surgeon. But the truth is, somewhere between Best Animated Short Film and Achievement in Costume Design, I took a cleaver and whacked off his head. His head broke into several pieces, the largest of which was his face. I dumped it into a little bowl.

“Eeww,” said Wes. “I don’t think I can eat him with his face looking up at me.” 

One woman's gastronomic trek to recover a part of her old life.

Debra Jarvis

Prince & the Gun Oil

Days of Wine and Chocolate

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