Topshelf One drink.
Worldwide breasts.

Fuck Cancer

By Kristine Gutierrez

October is breast cancer awareness month, an occasion that up until now, I’ve been able to appreciate and intermittently celebrate from afar as a cancer free carrying card member. October for all my life was cozy autumn coffee, golden crunchy leaves…incredibly sad Scandi pop music.

Then last July, I was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer at 35 years of age, on the cusp of turning 36.

Now, I’m plenty aware of breast cancer. Before, I almost tried to be ignorant about breast cancer. If I could refuse breast cancer’s existence in my brain, then perhaps it wouldn’t encroach my body. Unsurprisingly, ignorance only made me less prepared for what would befall me. Not only was I kinda dumb about cancer but, it still got me!

Now I’d find myself incredibly pitiful to live with both cancer and regret. Neither are functional: both are dead-end roads that carve deeper into yourself the more you fucking live with them. So I’ve got chemo to kill both bad and good cells, and I have a choice to make about my mental and emotional fitness. We all know these things about cancer to be true: it is an invasive, painful, uncomfortable, and scary thing that further violates and afflicts its marks with even more suffering and surprise side effects in order to cross into remission. Imagining that pain pre-cancer was a movie in my head that I could stop and store away from focus. Having cancer, the actual having and surreal possession of it, is like having heavier bones and poisonous blood. Strength can feel weak. I have often felt incredibly alive - with a song, a symphonic busy night at the bar, laughter and wine around a table. But to feel your mortality, to understand how final and uncompromising it can be, to know that the edge of all my unsung hope and untouched love…everything unfinished - can simply drop into an unceremoniously dark, infinite hole of absolute nothing, is terrifying. I face this fear with the banality of a daily routine. I grieve the comfort and safety that came with good health; I sit at the ruins of my former self, sometimes devastated and often at loss.

But I chose joy, almost every day. I chose joy, because the alternative is quite frankly, pain and loss. I chose joy to suffocate fear and doubt. And for October, I chose and persist to share joy.

I have much to celebrate in my junior journey through cancer: I am in good medical hands, in an efficient and empathetic system. I am not - shocker - in the US. I am in Norway, my birthplace. Thankfully, this cancer is transient, a lousy tourist in my body, and I will once again be cancer free.

I celebrate because I have you: my friends and family who are rooting for me across different time zones and zip codes. I have many who think of me - you tell me you think of me frequently, in what would otherwise be objectively creepy (yet still sensible because come on) but in this context of cancer, is kind, validating, heart-warming, and absolutely motivating on days I hate that I have this fight.

So this October, fuck your PSLs and cozy knitwear; fuck gourds and squash and weird shaped vegetable balls with high fiber content; most importantly, FUCK CANCER. The month’s theme is breast cancer and the costume is a giant, freaky middle finger against it. October is now a fightin’ month, four and change weeks of a spirited campaign against cancer that I must personally win. And in between my dizzy chemo appointments, I invite and enlist everyone to banish breast cancer from our future.

It’s a wasted wish to try to undue this cancer I have; so if there’s a wish I can be granted in October by the pink ribbon fairygods, it’s to alleviate and hopefully uplift friends and strangers who face this stupid cancer as a footnote or an entire book in their life. Because I am actually, SO lucky.

And this lucky girl is not going to sit on a wish, but ask you, my friends, to share the love you’ve shown me with others whose names we may not know, but whose pain I know is real, destructive, and relentless. I’m asking you to not worry about me, to not feel an ounce of my pain, but to share a giant gallon of my joy with others in your country and afar. I love this industry because it’s my home. Like any, it’s riddled with flaws, held together by sticky, shaky hands - but I have found redemption, friendship, and joy with you and a drink at the end of a shift. I’m asking you to make that drink mean just a little bit more.

In an effort to save worldwide breasts and in honor of my own boobs, that topshelf rack I love and am fighting for, I’m asking you to donate a dollar/euro of a single drink to a local breast cancer charity I’ve picked. For a day, week, or the whole month of October, add a drink to the Topshelf Tab so that others may prevent this disease, receive a bit more support, and get life-saving services. It’s a small step to expire this disease. One drink. Worldwide Breasts. Chose joy.

There’s plenty to be sad about, but you all have made me so happy. Thank you for your love and support. I’m going to be just fine. With you, I’ve always been better.