The Bif Naked truth

Bif Naked thought she’d done everything right.

As a vegan, the diminutive Canadian rock star ate healthy foods, didn't drink or smoke and spent more than her fair share of time at the gym.

Then in December 2007 her doctor told her she had breast cancer.

It was a humiliating experience for the then 36-year-old, born Beth Tobert in New Dehli, India in 1971 and subsequently adopted by American missionaries who eventually wound up in Winnipeg.

“Cancer is embarrassing,” she told a crowd of about 150, who gathered Monday at Confederation College to hear her tale of survival. “Don’t kid yourself. Our culture is so interested in health, beauty and youth. It’s our culture. It’s just how we are.

“People want to blame you. ‘What did you do? It might be in your family.’ I don’t know,” she would reply. “I’m adopted, maybe it’s a virus.”
 
Humour has been a constant in Bif Naked’s life as long as she can remember. It and her emerging self-awareness helped her eke out a living for years on the road as she and her band mates struggled for recognition.

The diagnosis came months after she married Vancouver sportswriter Ian Walker, before the couple really even began to embark on the journey of marriage.

“What a pisser,” she said. “Not that I thought the doctor was lying, but it was really hard to believe … I was only 35. What are you talking about? I couldn’t believe it.”

The chemotherapy was the worst, she said.

While everyone knows about it, only a select few understand the torture it puts a patient through. Yet still Bif Naked can look back and laugh a little at her situation.

“Boy, I needed the break and cancer was just in the nick of time for me,” she said, drawing laughter from the mostly twenty-something crowd. “I was tired. And being bald is not that bad. You do not have to shave your legs.”

There is a downside, however, and that’s when the hair in your nose falls out and nosebleeds become a regular occurrence.

“People just think you do cocaine,” she said. “I’d say, ‘Actually I don’t do cocaine, I’m in chemotherapy.”

Before her diagnosis, Bif Naked – best known for her 2001 smash hit I Love Myself Today – said she never questioned her mortality.

After the news broke, the questions didn’t stop.

“Are you going to die?” people would ask. 

And then came the advice.

“It was a weird existence. It was two years of my life dealing with treatment.”

Even at her lowest, she never stopped working, whether it was her music, her role as host of the mixed martial arts program Bobdog Fight or the documentary Bif Naked Bride, the story of her wedding to Walker.

“I worked the whole time I was in chemo, like most women,” said the artist, who one day would like to work with the ministry of health and to this day still works with fellow survivors, helping them forge their own path to a cancer-free life.

Though not officially free of the disease herself, Bif Naked, who had her ovaries taken out to help reduce the risk of its return, said afterward that she tells herself that she is, joking that when she visited her oncologist last week she was told to get out, ‘I’ve got sick people to see.’

Convinced to write a book about her ordeal, despite her misgivings that every Tom, Dick and Harry have already written one, she plans to meet the ever impending deadline and then return to her first love, music.

“I just thought, it’s so cheesy, I just can’t get behind this at all. So I’m dawdling, taking my time,” she said, promising a new album is on its way soon, though no release date has been set for a disc that’s been sitting on the shelf for more than a year.

In between writing and singing, she’s decided to take her story on the road, to share it with students and remove the taboo that surrounds the discussion of cancer.

“Hopefully if we create enough dialogue in the rest of society, hopefully it won’t be an issue anymore.”