Ep.15: A wake
I lie back in the bath and search for relief from the constant pain in my armpit. I’ve given in and taken some painkillers – the first since my lymph node biopsy a week ago - the pain has become scratchy and constant and I’m irritable and sad. Yesterday’s giddy high from learning the lymph nodes are clear has been replaced by a fresh sense of exhaustion and dread for next week’s operation. My left breast is swollen and bruised, stained turquoise from the biopsy and I suddenly feel weirdly sorry for it, both for what it’s been through over the past few weeks and what lies ahead. I take time to study it in a way I never have in all the years it’s been a part of me. Pushing aside the bath bubbles I focus in on the scattering of freckles across the left side of my chest, trying to memorise them and wondering if they’ll survive the mastectomy. Should I take a photo of her? Her? I have started to talk about my left breast as if it’s a separate part of me, almost like I’ve started to create a distance before it’s removed.
I’m crying again as I take a sip of wine although I can’t quite articulate what I’m crying for. When a mastectomy started to take root in my mind as being the only possible path to clearing me of cancer I immediately started to grieve for the loss. I’ve never been very keen on my body, rather the opposite in fact. In patches, when life has pressed me into bouts of anxiety and depression I’ve experienced an almost dysmorphic dislike of my body. At the height of these episodes I would duck under mirrors and I remember, long ago, undressing under the duvet to stop from having to catch sight of myself. I talked to a therapist for a patch and we tried to trace it back, wondered if this curious self-revulsion had origins in my relationship with my estranged father. Now though, lying chin deep in the beautiful, claw footed free-standing bath which David fitted for me, I feel a sense of injustice on behalf of my poor much maligned and unloved body. I look down and see full and muscular legs, legs which have cycled me for miles through some of the most beautiful landscape in the world; the jagged c-section scar isn’t ugly, its evidence of delivery of my amazing daughter; I may not have soft and feminine curves but that’s because my frame is solid, strong and capable. It’s a body which hasn’t wavered or buckled under any challenge over the years. Why have I given it such a hard time? Why haven’t I loved this hard-working, supremely effective and useful body more? Waves of anger at why I’ve wasted time in self-loathing lap at me. If I’m allowed to be so bold as to draw up a wish list of the positive things I hope cancer leaves me with – and yes there are positives from cancer, many of them – then high up that list I want it to leave me with self-love in place of self-loathe.
But I’m not sure how to resolve my new found self-love with the insistent move towards Tuesday’s operation. I feel like I’m in a slow motion car crash and I can’t unbuckle my belt to step out. Everyone I know, all the people I love, with the best of intentions, are bunched together pushing the car at the wall, egging it on and although I’m leaning back, straining in my seat, pumping the break with my foot as hard as I can, nothing will stop the inevitable carnage. On Tuesday my surgeon will cut away my breast, push, persuade, twist and rearrange what’s left of my body into a shadow if it’s former shape then stitch me tight inside this new shell. I feel horrified. Undone. Sick.
I reach for the imaginary gear stick and slam the car into reverse. I want to unravel this life, rewind back to the unknown moment in my past when the cells in my left breast decided to divide, change and run off on their own unchecked course. I want to pause at that precise moment and scream “STOP!”, plead with them not to do this, set out my stall, make my case for why cancer should not pick on me to set up home. I want to call all the witnesses who’ve commented over the past few weeks that I’m too healthy, look so well, am too fit, too positive, too capable, too what? Too good for this path in life? Or just too fucking scared? But I can’t find reverse. I’ve even considered running, driving north to Assynt, hiding in the folds and creases of that landscape I love so much until Tuesday is past. Trouble is I know Assynt too well, I’ve hidden there before and I’m well aware that the lochans act like mirrors to my soul, so far from hiding from my cancer I’d only end up incarcerated with it, unable to escape its persistent whine.
No. I have no choice but to step towards the knife and while my family and my friends smile gently, nodding encouragement, telling me this will soon by fixed and consigned to the past, inside I silently buck and kick, a toddler who’s arching against the tightening strap of their safety seat, furious that I am being left with no choice.