Stephanie Green: _Cancer Is the New Black_

Meet Stephanie Green, a writer whose privileged life was interrupted by stage II breast cancer at 32. She responded by shopping, botoxing, pill-popping and partying her way through a bilateral mastectomy, reconstruction and four months of chemo. Read her story "Benzos and Breast Cancer" [excerpt below] in Sex Drugs & Gefilte Fish, and look out for her memoir, Cancer Is the New Black.

What was your best Sex experience?

On a Birthright Israel trip several summers ago, I decided one of the gun boys—armed guards on our buses—needed to put in some overtime with me. One night my friend and I hopped into the gun boys’ car and, after navigating the insanely rocky beach in my Guccis, we settled in on the shore of the Kinneret, a.k.a. the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus walked pre-Kanye. I ended up having sex with Gun Boy on a bed of (pretty fucking painful) rocks. The sex was neither here nor there, but the setting? Divine.

What was your best Drugs experience?

As a teenager, it was my duty to sample every form of Ecstasy on the black market. (Some of which was pure MDMA; I’m old.) One weekend, my BFF and I drove five-plus hours to a rave in Charleston with a baggie of pills in my Versace parfum-scented console. When I saw cops at the door, I decided we had to eat all the pills before we entered. Within an hour, we were sockless and boys from the Citadel were massaging our feet with Vicks. I was convinced the bar had detached itself from the wall and was headed towards us. “Look out!” I screamed, but my friend was busy chasing down someone she thought was Miss America.

What was your best Gefilte Fish experience?

I’ve been a vegetarian until recently, so I reached the age of 32 without even trying gefilte. Then at Passover last year—with price tags still on the Haggadahs—I tried something that looked like a potato. Seconds later, I spat it out. What the fuck? But since I’d already de-vegetarianized myself, I took another tiny bite. It ended up in the same place as the brisket.

Read an excerpt from "Benzos and Breast Cancer":

The next few weeks were a blur of drugs— benzodiazepines mostly—and doctor’s visits that entailed a posse of Mom, Dana and Mom’s Palm Beach BFF Lynn, a breast cancer survivor diagnosed when she was 31. I dressed for the hospital like I did for a ladies’ lunch: head-to-toe designer gear, full makeup and hair, stilettos, jewelry. I looked and felt amazing. That’s the scariest part of cancer; you can look fabulous and feel even better while the cells in your body are waging a civil war.

I had nice tits, too. Bra-less, they were saggy but in a 34C, they were hot. Men loved them. Women envied them. I liked them in clothes, hated them when naked. In Lynn’s car on our way to my first consult with an oncologist, we videotaped me saying (in a slightly nasal, Jappy-sounding voice): “They’re not going to chop of my boobs. Fuck that.”

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What do you think?