Door Marked Danger with Lorie Kolak
Lorie Kolak is a wife and a stay-at-home mom from Illinois. She was diagnosed at 41 with Stage II breast cancer, and also carries the pK71 genetic mutation.
Lorie has worked in university libraries, book sales and distribution, copywriting, and copyediting. When not writing or reading, she enjoys arts and crafts.
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Door Marked Danger
A year after her mastectomy, she walked into the Loyola Center of Aesthetics — an innocuous name for the plastic surgery department — to get 3D nipple tattoos. It was a step toward reclaiming a semblance of normalcy, but little did she know it would also be a step into a story of transformation.
Finding Meaning in Fairy Tales
After checking in, she got lost trying to find the procedure room. A nurse named Karina, her tattoo artist for the day, found her in the hallway. With a wink, Karina said she was looking for the door marked Danger. Intrigued, she followed Karina to a door emblazoned with a bright red sign warning of danger. The symbolism was not lost on her.
Since her cancer diagnosis, she had been hungry for fairy tales. She needed fresh, dark language to articulate the twisty emotions of her journey. She often described feeling lost in a dark wood, invoking imagery from stories of old. Cancer had made her feel monstrous at times, particularly to her young children. To shield them, she used a cold cap during chemotherapy, explaining it as a way to look less like the monster under the bed — even though it was also a bid for privacy and vanity.
Ancestral Connections
Her maternal grandmother had undergone a radical mastectomy in the 1950s. Her grandmother became a figure of myth in her mind — the godmother of her cancer ordeal. She prayed to her, invoking her strength as she navigated her own path. Standing before the door marked Danger, she thought of Bluebeard’s wife, who defied her husband’s orders to open a forbidden door, only to uncover horrifying truths. Unlike her, she found no corpses behind the door — just an exam table, a 3D tattooing wand, and paint pots resembling a paint-by-number set. Yet, danger lingered in the form of medical advertisements on the walls, promising to “Make life more beautiful” and “Earn the right not to show your age.”
The Tattooing Process
Even amid the absurdity, she laughed. She had faced a life-threatening diagnosis, yet here she was, embarking on a mission of superficial enhancement. It was not about cultivating youth but about embracing mortality as part of her identity. She had joked that cancer had aged her from mother to grandmother in an instant, a transformation underscored by her high risk of recurrence. Like Hansel dropping white stones along his path, she was leaving markers to find her way back to some version of herself each night.
The process began with Karina tracing circles on her reconstructed breasts to determine placement for the tattoos. “Don’t use the scars as guides,” Karina advised. “They’re not centered.” They chose a modest size and a pinkish hue for the areolae. As Karina worked, she felt a sharp buzz — like a dentist’s tool — radiating down her sternum. The pain was manageable, and when it was over, she stood before the mirror, marveling at the illusion before her. The tattoos were so realistic she had to touch them to confirm the skin was flat. The enchantment had begun to work: she no longer saw scars but a semblance of wholeness.
A New Perspective on Loss
A year ago, she had viewed her mastectomy as a disfigurement. Today, she saw it as a transformation. Loss had reshaped her, not just physically but emotionally and symbolically. Her body had changed out of necessity, but it had also become something new — a testament to survival and adaptation. The tattoos were more than ink; they were a symbolic space for interpretation, lifting her from the blunt reality of loss to a place of acceptance and resilience.
Leaving through the door marked Danger, she carried with her a sense of healing. The symbols and stories she had clung to during her cancer journey — fairy tales, zones of regulation, metaphors for monsters — helped her make sense of an experience that defied simple explanation. As a mother to young children, she had found ways to communicate her changing reality, using language they could understand and creating bridges to their world. Now, as she moved further from the rawness of her diagnosis, she found herself ready to share her story with others — not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to the power of transformation and resilience.
Cancer had marked her, but it had also rewritten her. And as with any good fairy tale, the ending was not a resolution but a beginning — a stepping into a new chapter of life, forever changed, yet still moving forward.
Writing Prompt Inspired by Today’s Episode
Set your timer for eight minutes, write without stopping or editing yourself. There is magic in leaning into that time. The prompt is:
Finishing touches…
What does that bring up for you? It could be cancer-y, or it might be something else.
If you find that you write best with a good prompt, check out our free prompts and learn about our writing workshops.
Happy writing! Until next time, take good care.
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