Ep.20: After life

Its Easter Sunday and I’m sitting on the deck of our new house with a cup of tea and a hot-crossed bun watching the milky sunshine play on the loch.  There’s just enough breeze to raise wrinkles on the surface of the water and it briefly reminds me of the wrinkles on my shrunken mis-shaped new breast.  It sits under my baggy t-shirt, hard and ugly like an unwanted gargoyle.  Unwanted?  Is that fair?  I made a definite choice to have this reconstruction and I knew that whatever I chose meant compromise but, but.

4.5 weeks ago, as I was waiting to go into the operating theatre, if I’d stood and cast ahead to what life might look and feel like a month down the line, what might I have seen I wonder?  All I wanted at that point was to be alive and free of cancer, to want more would have seemed excessive, so now, sitting here, I don’t have any sense that this is not what I did or didn’t expect, just that life remains a challenge and that cutting out cancer doesn’t draw a neat, crisp-edged line under the subject.  Lob a cancerous pebble in your pond and the ripples continue long after the noise has gone.  So here I sit, bobbing up and down on those ripples, at once both utterly, heartbreakingly grateful for all the care and concern I’ve received while at the same time feeling rage and grief and shock at what turn life has taken.  

My phone alarm goes off. I have it set to nag me 4 times a day to do physio.  I turn it off then start casting around for things to do other than the exercises, eyeing up the boxes which need flattening and put away, the washing that needs put on.   I thought I’d be good at this bit.  I had intended to embrace the physical part of this challenge, see it as something to be conquered and beaten but if truth be told every time I have to pull and stretch my twisted and gnarly muscles it makes me wince with misery for what I’ve lost.  The physio is my regular reminder of what’s happened to me and I buckle and cry every time I have to do it, not so much because of the discomfort but because of what the doing of it represents. 

I had intended to stop writing once I left hospital, figured this story had reached its natural and neat end, but increasingly I’ve realised each day throws up new struggled and frustrations and maybe I need to write in order to file all these mismatched and complicated feelings away somewhere.  So here I am again, filing.

I start with the easy ones, lifting my shoulders to my ears repeatedly then move on to rotate them backwards.  They crunch and complain.  I move to running my fingers lightly up the wall in front of me until my left up is up above my head, then do the same move side on.  I leave the ones I really hate until last, lying on my back, elbows wide, hands behind my ears then pushing both arms up above my head along the floor.  With each repetition the area to the left of my sternum feels like its being ripped and torn from my body.  Finally, I sit on a chair and lean forward, sinking my head down to my knees to place my hands on the floor while my lower back stretches in an almost pleasing ache.

My body feels wrong.  I’d expected to it to feel tight and it does, like after the operation I was been put back in the wrong skin, one 2 sizes too small. But beyond tight I feel twisted and out of place, like a kid’s jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces have been forced into spaces which look like they should fit but don’t.    Zig-zagging its way from near my spine round to my left side is an 15cm scar.  Puckered and still sticky in places it creates waves across the left side of my body.  I stare at it over my shoulder in the mirror.  I still can’t feel all of it, the nerves damaged and dis-functional following surgery.  I get David to check it from time to time and its weird not to be able to feel his touch. 

At the front, where my breast used to be, is now something other.   In the first week after surgery, when my reconstructed breast was still new, it was swollen and smooth.  Even under its dressing you could see it sat plump and impressively ‘real’, missing nipple not withstanding, it was ok.  It felt acceptable.  Then, as the distance from the operation increased and the fluid keeping it plump drained relentlessly into my lower back where it’s had to be regularly syringed off, the new breast changed into something hard and angry looking.  I’d asked that I didn’t have too much of the skin removed during the operation because I didn’t want to end up having a breast reduction on my ‘good’ side but as a result the excess skin is now wrinkled and dimpled and ugly.  I have a breast which looks like it was in a fight and lost. 

‘I feel like my left breast should be wearing an eye patch’ I message to Kenris, ‘it looks like it belongs in a razor gang it’s so scarred’. 

‘love it, not just bad boob but badass boob’ she messages back, making me laugh through my tears.

Increasingly I keep it covered, even from David.  I’d decided before the operation that I would be open and as relaxed as possible about my body after surgery, that I would try to embrace my new self, not be ashamed of my scars, see them as evidence of a battle won, not lost.   But if I’m utterly honest if I look at myself now I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made the wrong choice by having this reconstruction.    Not only do I feel like I’m moving through life wearing a straight jacket, constantly ratchet-tight and tired, but I feel desperately ugly.   I don’t feel this is a victory scar to be worn with pride, I feel in place of my left breast I now have a scarred, muscly mess and hard as I try to remind myself that ridding my body of cancer was always going to mean compromise, that they are difficult choices that you have to make, I haven’t found peace with this yet, instead each day I search the wardrobe for baggier clothes, each day I feel less feminine, more like hiding.

I struggle to express how I feel to David, if I so much as try to form the words they swell and cause me to gag then get choked down again.  So I resort to messaging him on WhatsApp late at night while he’s still up and I’ve headed to bed.  I tell him how terrified I am that he’ll never find me attractive again, that he won’t want to sleep with me anymore, that he’ll find me as ugly as I do.   The next morning we talk, as ever he’s resolute that it makes no difference to how he feels, that it doesn’t matter what’s under my clothes. So each day I’m trying to look at myself in the mirror and not flinch.  But I do flinch.  My body’s a mess and I’m grieving for what used to be.