News - Local - Greensboro
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
She's got cancer with attitude
By: Jeri Rowe
GREENSBORO - Lauren Brower keeps her hair in a drawer.
Depending on her mood, she'll become a strawberry blonde or a brunette. Then, she'll pick up her cell phone — studded with pink and white crystals — and become what her friends in Charlotte love to yell:
"Diva!"
And that she is. She'll often say, "The diva doesn't like this," or, "The diva wants this." Of course, she has to be surrounded by people she knows by first name.
Sometimes, with her ever-changing hairstyle — she has 10 wigs — people she knows don't recognize her. Once, when the stares persisted, she had to say: "Hi! It's me! It's me!"
But sometimes, when she runs into what she calls "waiting room stares," she'll approach people she doesn't know, introduce herself, and, like the diva she is, talk to them about her own monster: cancer.
"What do you do for a living?" she's heard people ask.
"I survived."
Brower is an actress, entertainer, model and singer. She made a name for herself in Charlotte, sounding so R&B that people told her, "You don't sound like a little white girl."
But the 40-year-old Greensboro native is giving her biggest performance off stage.
It first came six years ago, when her husband found a lump on her left breast. She dreaded the worst.
With her parents at her Charlotte home — they traveled from Greensboro to offer support — she got the call from her doctor.
"It's cancer, like we thought," the doctor told her.
She broke down. So did her parents. Their only child had breast cancer, the same monster that attacked her mother and took her paternal grandmother and her aunt.
"We'll do everything we can, and maybe we can beat this," her father said.
Brower tackled it with humor. She wrote a book, "Don't Let The Cat Get Your Wig." It was very Erma Bombeck, with subtitles such as "Have A Party … Shave Your Head" and "Lose Seven Pounds A Day, The Chemo Way!"
She sang, modeled, wrote poetry, wrote a column for an online magazine and created T-shirts, coffee mugs and buttons with her bald, buxom image in silver hot pants and the phrase "Survivors Are Sexy Too."
But after two years of being cancer free, her monster came back. This time, after feeling a stabbing pain in her chest, she was told the cancer had attacked her sternum. She had three spots as big as quarters.
It was 2003. She felt she had failed.
"Where is my sense of humor?" she asked her husband, Scott, on their ride home from the doctor.
"There is nothing funny about this," he responded.
Brower returned to Greensboro two months ago, just before Christmas. After eight years of marriage, she and Scott have split. The tension of battling cancer and sinking in debt had taken its toll.
She's come back to continue her work. She wants cancer survivors to embrace their sexuality and individuality.
So, she's working on creating a one-stop online shop where they can buy wigs, a motivational DVD and even their own makeup. She'll call it Facing Forward by Lauren. Its symbol: a butterfly.
But she's also come back to be closer to her parents, Eleanor and Lawrence Lambert. She needs their support because her cancer is back. This time, it's a spot on her lung.
"People get so busy getting caught up with 'what if,'" she said. "'What if I go into debt? What if I can't work?' Well, all those 'what ifs' have happened to me, and when you take it down to the very nub, you have to ask yourself, 'What if I'm not here tomorrow?' and, 'What if I die?'
"The only thing you can do is face it head-on or pretend it's not there," she said. "Well, I'm facing it head-on. That's my choice. Part of me says, if I'm not here tomorrow, I'll deal with that."
Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jrowe@news-record.com
200 East Market Street, Greensboro, NC 27401
(336) 373-7000 or (800) 553-6880
