An
essay from Jessica Burgess. Jess is an award-winning director and producer who has
created for clients such as MoMA, Jay-Z’s Life+Times, Vice, Gravity Media, and
the art blog, Future Tongue. With a background in Art History, her work
often focuses on the visual arts and contemporary artists.
In this piece, Jess reflects on receiving a cancer diagnosis and treatment,
just as the coronavirus pandemic hit New York.
May 4, 2020
What I Learned from Coal: An Unexpected Diagnosis in a
Pandemic by Jess
Burgess
The first time someone says the word cancer in relation to
you, it feels surreal and impersonal; not in the I-must-be-dreaming sense, but
semantically. You hear the word “cancer,” usually with some qualifiers with it,
like what stage, or which body part, or what the prognosis is, but your brain doesn’t
really get past the cancer part. And the doctor won’t just come out and say,
“You have cancer;” there’s always some roundabout statement about it.
“We’ve gotten the results back and it’s not lymphoma.” Or, “It
appears to have spread.” Or, “We will need to remove it quickly.”
Perhaps there is some professional reason for doctors to
speak this way, but I’m not sure. No one likes to deliver bad news, even if it
is part of your job description. So, for better or worse, you get to be the one
to say the undeniably true thing, the thing that they don’t feel comfortable
saying. At some point you will have to be the first person to speak
those words. Someone will ask what happened at the doctors, or they will ask
you what’s wrong. But more likely, the first time anyone says it out loud, you
will be alone, and like naming a newly discovered species or realizing for the
first time that you’re in love, you will stop and say to yourself, “I have
cancer.”
At least that is what happened to me. It was March 16th and
I was sitting in a cavernous Vietnamese restaurant in Union Square. A
restaurant where I used to have lunch in between college classes, but was now
empty save for me, my partner, the owner, and her pet chihuahua. We were all
watching Mayor DeBlasio talk about the possibility of a city-wide shutdown.
Every time he spoke the chihuahua would start yapping at the television, as if
it were upset on behalf of its owner about the loss of business. After the
waiter placed a steaming bowl of soup in front of me, the last meal I would
have in a restaurant for the foreseeable future, I looked down at my lunch and
said it. “I have cancer.” Happy fucking pandemic.
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I have always been an avid researcher; information helps me
to give shape to the things I can’t control. While I was waiting for test
results, which is like sitting in Satan’s living room, my writing group had
assigned an exercise in semiotics and deconstruction. We were to research a
randomly assigned object, and directed to find meaning within its properties.
Others were assigned things like lipstick or swing sets, things I had actually
seen before in my lifetime, and I got coal. I’m not immune to the universe’s
jokes, especially when I was getting the proverbial coal in my stocking in more
ways than one. I knew almost nothing about coal, so I began with the basics.
The first thing I realized, and the thing that still shocks
me is this: life is required to electrify the laptop that you are using to read
this. That life was most likely coal, since electricity generation is the
reason for 93% of coal extraction in the United States. Like all fossil fuels,
the utility of coal comes from its carbon structure, but it’s the residue of
life that creates its combustibility, and hence its importance to us. Diamonds
and the graphite in your pencil are carbon, but their crystalline, undiluted
structure make them impervious to heat; they are, and always were, mineral
compounds. Coal was formed when the Mesozoic plants – ferns, pines, redwoods,
and all the first flowering flora – succumbed to the swamps around them.
Hundreds of millions of years of heat and pressure forced the oxygen from their
dead mass, leaving behind carbon but also mercury, nitrogen, and most
importantly sulfur, the reason coal burns so consistently. The rotten egg smell
wafting from northern New Jersey is the remnants of prehistoric ferns, exacting
their revenge on motorists on the Turnpike.
Despite clean energy advances, the U.S. still relies heavily
on coal and we still extract a lot of it – 755,000,000 tons of coal in
2018 according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration to be exact. We do
this primarily through strip mining. The technique, which is actually a group
of methods including the controversial and aptly named “mountaintop removal”
process, was created as a safer practice, billed as both more efficient and
much cheaper than traditional pit mining. Strip mining only works when the coal
is close to the surface of the earth. Employing some of the heaviest machinery
on the planet, the earth is peeled back layer by layer to expose the black
mineral, which is blasted from the ground with explosives and collected in dump
trucks. The “over burden,” or topsoil previously exfoliated from the earth, is
laid back atop the broken ground and companies are supposed to plant vegetation
in the wake of their Frankenstein machines.
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One night I dreamt that my neck was the earth. A bucket
wheel excavator, one of those machines that’s larger than a cruise ship and
looks like a fever dream from Mad Max, rolled into the space between my collar
bones and excised all the unwholesome flesh beneath.
The definition of cancer is “a disease caused by an
uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body.” It’s in the
definition that you find the problems. Separately, accelerated growth and
mutation of cells are merely dysfunctional, but together these two
characteristics are lethal. Abnormal cells happen everywhere on your body; in
fact, cell mutation is what created our species. The mutation that causes
cancer also caused the cell in the hands of apes to defect and start acting
like a thumb. Cancer cells act on the same line of evolutionary edicts,
fighting to exist in a body with the same tenacity as early humans fought Neanderthals.
Like all evolutionary beasts, the important facet of cancer
lurking behind the definition is time. The phase of cancer given during
diagnosis is largely based on the amount of time it has been allowed to grow
undetected. Thyroid cancer, at least the type I was diagnosed with, is
incredibly slow growing; the tumor could have been there for up to ten years
before it spread and could be felt in the side of my neck. But it didn’t start
out that way.
All tumors begin as a cell that has a mind of its own and
doesn’t want to stop existing. “Adult cells are constantly under strict
control,” Timothy Weill of Cambridge noted, “basically cancer is a loss of
control of those cells.” Cancer cells are wild cards, they break all the rules,
they can’t be stopped. I respect cancer, hell, I might even admire cancer – one
little deviant cell that laid low, biding its time, waiting long enough to
upend my whole life.
My doctor decided to rush surgery, fearing that
non-emergency surgery would be cancelled for over a year because of the
coronavirus; there was too much unknown to let this thing stay inside me for
any longer than it needed to be. At 30 years old, they figured I was young and
healthy enough to operate then get me out before Mount Sinai would become a respiratory
ward, so they scheduled surgery for March 20. With only three days between
diagnosis and surgery to prepare, I did what I could.
My parents, at ages 65 and 68, couldn’t come into the city
that was quickly becoming a hotbed for a disease that preyed on people over 60.
Not that it would matter, no one could come into the hospital with me. During
my surgery they would remove my entire thyroid, as well as the lymph node –
where they expected the cancer had spread to – and all the surrounding lymph nodes
in my neck. I would have a scar that would stretch from the left side of my
neck, across my throat, hook a hard right upwards, and end just below my right
ear. After surgery, I would be watched in the hospital for up to 48 hours with
no visitors.
So that was it. In 72 hours, they would remove a tumor I had
for 10 years that took 2 months of testing to identify. There was no time to
accept, or prepare, or even understand the gravity of my situation.
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Coal did have some personal relevance as it turned out. Like
all the difficult and fascinating things about myself, it has to do with my
southern roots. In Appalachia, “redneck” is a complicated term. Lots of folks
take a sarcastic joy in using the term, calling their floating pontoons
“redneck yacht clubs” and prompting a whole line of jokes. “If you’ve ever been
too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck.” (Thank you, Jeff Foxworthy.) Others
find it a shameful slur, akin to being called ignorant, uncivilized, or even
illiterate. Like most people I know, I grew up thinking the term came from the
sunburn gained from long hours working in the sun, but it turns out that isn’t
true.
My grandfather, growing up in a coal mining family in West Virginia, was
proud of the name and with good reason. One story of how the term “redneck” began, as it turns out,
was probably first coined over one hundred years ago in relation to coal
miners. The peak of coal production in US history was before and during the
First World War. Coal-miner veterans returned home to find that the coal
companies had worked hard and fast to consolidate power, squeezing wages
everywhere in the country. Conditions were so dangerous and pay so meager that
after the war, the United Mine Workers of America began to gain ground as a
legitimate force.
The main focal point of conflict was in West Virginia, where
coal was the predominant industry. In 1920, the long-simmering tensions of “The
Coal Wars” erupted into the single largest worker’s uprising in U.S. History at
the Battle of Blair Mountain. A coalition of 10,000 white, black, and immigrant
miners marched from Charleston to the headquarters of Logan County Coal. Armed
with rifles, they demanded their rights to fair pay, safer working conditions,
and the right to unionize. The miners wore red bandanas around their necks as a
symbol of solidarity and quickly became known as “The Redneck Army.”
The ramshackle army was met by the Logan County sheriff,
employed by the coal industry, and their 2,000 hired mercenaries. Private
planes dropped bombs and mustard gas acquired from the First World War on the
unionizers. After a month-long standoff, President Warren G. Harding called in
the National Guard of West Virginia, which effectively dispersed the leftover uprisers.
Almost 1,000 men were tried for a litany of charges, including murder,
conspiracy to commit murder, and treason. Membership in the UMW plummeted from
50,000 to under 10,000.
My grandfather grew up outside of Logan County. I don’t know
for sure if my great-grandparents were part of this rebellion, but I like to
think they were rednecks in the original sense of the word. The coal miners
went on to unionize in 1934.
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One hundred men died in the Battle of Blair Mountain. People
killing each other over the right to take the remnants of dead plants from the
ground, or the right to not be killed while doing so. We are fallible, delicate
beings. We don’t have the luxury of seeing the fullest reach of our actions.
The worst moments of my week-long run-in with cancer was the
morning before the surgery. I woke up after a few hours of sleep and for one
brief, lovely moment I thought I’d dreamed up the past 5 days – that I didn’t
have cancer, that the world wasn’t shutting down piece by piece, that I could
make coffee and worry about finishing the accounting for my last job.
Then I
remembered, New York City was shutting down, turning off the lights. Without
the need for as much power, the coal had stopped burning somewhere upstate. And
I did, in fact, have cancer. I was hours away from going into the hospital,
alone. Alone because it was too dangerous for anyone to accompany me. Alone to
wait in a mostly empty hospital, while nurses readied themselves for the hard
weeks ahead
Then the interminable car ride to the hospital, readying
myself to say goodbye to the one person who I would be able to see until the
world started up again, knowing that in thirty minutes, now twenty, now ten, he
would have to leave me. Standing on the precipice of all the wonderful and
terrible facts of who I was, being made to fall into the unknowable blankness
of who I would be. Would I still have a pretty neck? Would they cure me? Would
it hurt?
When they woke me up, I immediately began to have a panic
attack, like my brain was just catching up to the trauma my body had just been
through. But then, this internist named Josh held my hand and looked at me with
his crystal blue eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we have all the best drugs
here.” And I thought, “Wow, he really fills out those scrubs well,” and I
realized I was all right.
In fact, I was more than all right. The reason anyone even
thought to test me was because of a lump you could feel in the right side of my
throat. Further scans discovered another tumor, deep in my thyroid as well as
an enlarged lymph node. During surgery, my surgeon discovered the tumor in my
lymph node was much bigger than it had appeared in the scans, and that it was
putting pressure on my carotid artery. When I asked my doctor what all of this meant,
he said, “Well, you could have had a stroke, really at any time.”
As it turns out, the huge, tangible lump in my throat wasn’t
related to the thyroid cancer at all, even though I also had thyroid cancer. It
was something called a vagal schwannoma, a relatively benign tumor of the nerve
sheath that only causes problems when it grows in vital areas. Without the
schwannoma, they would have never found the malignant tumor, possibly for
another entire decade. Without the cancer, they would not have operated as
quickly, and I could have had a stroke. I haven’t fully had time to understand
the depth of this experience for me, but I do know that I am very lucky.
Not least of all because I have years of puns ahead of me, since, technically,
my life was saved by something called a vagal schwannoma.
Perhaps there’s no bigger significance to everything I
learned about those little black lumps of fuel. Perhaps I just want to find
meaning, but I don’t really know if that matters. I felt better learning about
old, socialist coal miners in West Virginia and how many tons of coal China
produces - which is, by the way, which 3,532,500,000 tons per year.
There was nothing for me to do while I was waiting for test results, or my
surgery date, or for the pain to go away, nothing except learn and think.
Perhaps, there is one concrete lesson I took away from my
brief stint with cancer and researching coal. There is no way of knowing what
the coronavirus will fundamentally shift in our global community, like coal
miner unionists didn’t know what a “redneck” would one day symbolize, or that a
single cell in my neck would revolt and try to end my life, or that the trees
on the edge of a swamp 60 million years ago would be the fuel to build
skyscrapers. There’s no way to know the specifics, but it will be destructive,
and surprising, and, perhaps, a bit magical.
By the way, getting coal in your stocking began as a gift, a
little black lump for a poor family that had no better way to get warmth or
light in the dark winters of Northern Europe.
MEET JESSICA…
Jessica Burgess eats, dreams, and breathes stories. She's an
award winning producer for agencies like Vice, Vaynermedia, and Gravity Media;
co-owner of Little Animals Pictures, a Brooklyn-based production company;
director of fever-dream content; teacher at Tisch School of the Arts; and
podcast creator, essayist, and daily admirer of life's idiosyncrasies. She
doesn't like to brag, but she can also make a mean meatloaf. Check out her
southern-fried brainchildren here.
