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Crème, a hot pink satin pillowcase, a small tin of peppermint pastilles, a set of three small, inexpensive rhinestone bracelets, a pink-striped “journal and sketch book,” and—somewhat jarringly—a box of crayons. Marla Willner, one of thefounders of the Libby Ross Foundation, told me that the crayons “go with the journal—for people to express different moods, different thoughts,” though she admitted she has never tried to write with crayons herself. Possibly the idea was that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind for enduring the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood—a state of arrested development. Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.

    But I, no less than the bear huggers, needed whatever help I could get and found myself searching obsessively for practical tips on hair loss, how to select a chemotherapy regimen, what to wear after surgery and eat when the scent of food sucks. There was, I soon discovered, far more than I could usefully absorb, for thousands of the afflicted have posted their stories, beginning with the lump or bad mammogram, proceeding through the agony of the treatments, pausing to mention the sustaining forces of family, humor, and religion, and ending, in almost all cases, with an upbeat message for the terrified neophyte. Some of these are no more than a paragraph long—brief waves from sister sufferers. Others offer almost hour-by-hour logs of breast-deprived, chemotherapized lives:

    Tuesday, August 15, 2000: Well, I survived my 4th chemo. Very, very dizzy today. Very nauseated, but no barfing! It’s a first. . . . I break out in a cold sweat and my heart pounds if I stay up longer than 5 minutes.

    Friday, August 18, 2000: . . . By dinnertime, I was full out nauseated. I took some meds and ate a rice and vegetable bowl from Trader Joe’s. It smelled and tastedawful to me, but I ate it anyway. . . . Rick brought home some Kern’s nectars and I’m drinking that. Seems to have settled my stomach a little bit.

    I couldn’t seem to get enough of these tales, reading on with panicky fascination about everything that can go wrong—septicemia, ruptured implants, startling recurrences a few years after the completion of treatments, “mets” (metastases) to vital organs, and—what scared me most in the short term—“chemo brain,” or the cognitive deterioration that sometimes accompanies chemotherapy. I compared myself with everyone, selfishly impatient with those whose conditions were less menacing, shivering over those who had reached Stage IV (“There is no Stage V,” as the main character in the play Wit , who has ovarian cancer, explains), constantly assessing my chances.

    But, despite all the helpful information, the more fellow victims I discovered and read, the greater my sense of isolation grew. No one among the bloggers and book writers seemed to share my sense of outrage over the disease and the available treatments. What causes it and why is it so common, especially in industrialized societies? * Why don’t we have treatments that distinguish between different forms of breast cancer or between cancer cellsand normal dividing cells? In the mainstream of breast cancer culture, there is very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, and few comments about the fact that, in all but the more advanced, metastasized cases, it is the “treatments,” not the disease, that cause the immediate illness and pain. In fact, the overall tone is almost universally upbeat. The Breast Friends Web site, for example, featured a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you,” “I can’t stop the birds of sorrow from circling my head, but I can stop them from building a nest in my hair,” “When life hands out