Ep.14: Define good

I’ve come to a fork in the road.  Both paths that now lie ahead are gnarly, gruelling, painful and psychologically demanding, both are hard on the body but from where I stand one path seems infinitely shorter than the other, infinitely more appealing.  They both end up at the same place, with me alive and living and loving long into the future. If I don’t step forward then I die, sooner rather than later.  So I have no choice but to put one foot in front of the other and plough on. But which path?

I’m twitchy and anxious.  I can feel the sweat making my fingers clammy and irritable even though the day is cold and sharp.  We leave for the hospital and David wants to take a detour to investigate getting a Celtic top framed.  I’m scratchy and annoyed about it, why would he be thinking about that now, at this moment, but then he needs the distraction too.  Neither of us wants to make this journey to get the results of my lymph node biopsy.  I’d suggested he might want to stay away and I’d do this on my own but we both knew that wouldn’t happen.  I can’t bear the idea of being witness to how he will feel if they’ve found cancer in my armpit.  I don’t want to have to cope with both my own response and the response of those around me.  I desperately want this pain to be private.    As we walk through the hospital grounds I feel the pressure squeezing at me and I shrink to fit a smaller space.  I curl my hands into fists and press my nails deep into the pads of my palms.

I’m increasingly intrigued by how the word ‘good’ has become malleable and free-form.  Before all this I had a much more black and white definition of the word, now “good” is utterly relative.  "Good" is a shape shifter.  So when you first find a lump in your breast a “good” outcome would be that it is just a cyst, finding out that the lump is cancer is definitely not “good”.  Since then “good” has been on the move.  So once I had accepted the arrival of cancer in my body “good” took the shape of a lumpectomy and radiotherapy, I found myself saying things like ‘what we’re really hoping for is minimal surgery then 3 weeks of radio and I’ll be done’.   I then got the bad news that the MRI had found more and "good" gently re-formed itself into the shape of a life-saving mastectomy with reconstruction and 6-8 weeks of recovery.   But now, right at this clammy handed moment, “good” has sharpened again, “good” has only one look and feel.  A good outcome of this meeting is no evidence of cancer in my lymph nodes, a bad outcome is that the cancer has spread.

I feel sick.  I flick through Ideal Homes magazine with David and feel pleased that the Surgeon is running late so we can put off the inevitable.  ‘Sorry, I’ve fucked up my appointments, do you want to go for a coffee and come back in half an hour?’, he sticks his head round the door and I search his face for a clue, ‘I haven’t got any shitty news for you’ he says and then vanishes.   We walk round to the Maggies Centre light footed and excited.  David’s sure this must mean I’m in the clear. 

Back in the beige office we get the detail, four lymph nodes removed, all of them clear, no sign of cancer which mean’s chemotherapy is unlikely.  Unlikely?  I’m not keen on that word so press pause and push further on this.  It’ll depend on what they find when they operate, if the original tumour is the size we think it is and that the MRI indicated, 2cm, then the percentage advantage that chemo gives me of living for a further 10 years is so small as to be unnecessary.  We play with the possibilities, put different sizes of tumour into the algorithm to see what kind of percentages are spat back.  The tumour would have to be 3 times the expected size before the figures even begin to nudge us towards chemo.  We won’t find out for sure until my follow up meeting two weeks after surgery but still the relief is overwhelming.  

So “good” for the moment remains settled with the shape of a left side mastectomy and latissimus dorsi reconstruction.  The fork in the road has vanished and we're guided through the contours of the path ahead.  “Good” will involve removing my left breast, creating a tunnel through my body in which to pull a portion of my back muscle and skin to form a new breast; “good” will involve up to 8 hours in surgery then drains, a catheter and discomfort; “good” involves the small possibility of things going wrong, of my skin dying off, of my body not healing, of bad scarring; “good” involves discussions over what I want to happen if things go wrong mid-surgery and they can’t perform the reconstruction; “good” will then involve a concentrated effort on my part to push through my pain, to do physio and exercise and re-gain what I can of me; “good” will involve follow up operations where fat is removed from my stomach to fill out the left breast and stop it looking like “a snooker ball in a sock”.  “Yup, all good”, I say and I sign on the dotted line to permit all of the above in 5 days time.

Then we skip and dance our way away from the hospital to enjoy the spring sunshine and wash ourselves in the tsunami of relief which bursts from our friends and family as we pass on the good news.  We are giddy with it, skittish, and celebrate by heading to a garden centre to look at pond liners and dream up possibilities for our new garden.   And I revel in the fact that something so mundane and boring as pond liners and plants feels so damn good!