Ep.26: Hard to kill
I’m not very good at looking at myself yet so the thought of having others look at me is a challenge. An appointment has come through for me to go back to the hospital to see my surgeon and review where things are at 6 months down the line. 6 months. I can’t decide if that seems like a very long or very short time. It certainly seems like a very short time for so much change to have been wrought on my life but at the same time it feels like I’ve been trapped in this body for an eternity. Part of me thinks 6 months, has it only been 6 months, the other part yells fucking hell surely I should be further down the line by now!
I don’t want to go back to the hospital. I’m embarrassed about the fact that my reconstruction didn’t really work too well. I feel I’ve failed the team at the breast clinic. I think they’re going to be disappointed with me. Truth be told I’m disappointed with me, I feel I should have made a better job of this whole recovery malarkey. I’d like to be a model pupil but I’m not. I’m a bit of a whinge, I give off a whiff of dissatisfaction even though I try not to. But it’s not easy because people will persist in asking me how I am. I’m getting better at deflecting the question, steering the conversation in a different direction, but the more perceptive call me out and push the conversation back round to wanting to know how I am. I’ve been at a loss for how to respond. I always feel that you’re expected to supply a breezy ‘I’m fine, really not bad, much better, thanks!’ but actually quite a lot of the time I feel frustrated, trapped and pissed off. I usually mutter something about it being a long, slow road but I’m going in the right direction which elicits the response ‘well you look great!’. I’m not sure why looking great when you feel like shit feels quite so unsatisfactory but it does.
I’ve banned my mum from asking how I am. She’s allowed to say a casual ‘how are you?’ when she calls but it has to sound general, all encompassing, not too invested. Asking about my back is specifically on the banned list and asking if I’ve been getting enough rest is completely and utterly banned. But telling other people they can’t ask me how I am is less easy. People want to know.
David’s niece came to visit the other week and instead of asking me how I was she told me how she’d passed David as she came up the track. They’d stopped and wound down their respective car windows, ‘how’s Pen?’ she’d asked, ‘hard to kill’ came David’s reply. It was perfect and I snatched at it like a long sought, odd shaped jigsaw piece. If you reply ‘hard to kill’ each time someone asks how you are you provide them with just the right dose of dark humour, light touch and get out of jail free card.
But ‘hard to kill’ doesn’t seem quite the right response when I find myself back in the beigely bland hospital examination room. There’s four of us there, all wearing masks in deference to the Covid world that still haunts us and I weigh up my answer carefully when my surgeon asks the inevitable question. ‘It’s not been what I expected’ was about the best I can muster. I’m feeling guilty. I’m feeling like I’ve failed, like my body has not behaved the way it should. I don’t want to admit to the full horror of what it has felt like, I don’t want to say that I sometimes feel like I’ve been buried alive, like I’m encased in concrete, like I’ve had so much more stolen from me than I’d anticipated. Instead I pull off my t-shirt and bra and let them see for themselves just how badly I’ve failed. My left breast is shrunken and puckered, a gargoyle clinging to my torso. He talks about how they can fill it out, how much they can improve it with lipo but he says he’s no idea when that can happen in the current climate. He couldn’t even hazard a guess. And then he says he’s sorry it’s not the result we were hoping for and I realise that it’s him who thinks he’s failed me, not the other way round. ‘You saved my life’ I say to him, ‘I’m alive and cancer free’.
I remember a conversation I had with acclaimed choreographer Claire Cunningham some years ago when we were working together on a Radio 4 talk. I’m paraphrasing but it went something along the lines of ‘if we’re lucky we’ll all become disabled because we’ll live long enough to get old’. The idea of us all inching our way towards disability, of our living long enough to suffer impaired vision, hearing loss, hips that don’t work so well and gnarled arthritic hands lodged itself in my consciousness. And it’s an idea that I return to dust off now. I’d hoped to live long enough to be less able but maybe, in some strange way, in order to live longer I have to pay in advance with some reduced ability. Maybe that’s just the price of my own longevity. And when I think of it that way round it nudges the whole thing into a more comfortable place. If this is the price of a longer life is it not a price worth paying?
Claire says her disability makes her unique, makes her different. And I wonder if now I’ll live long enough to see what my own new body is capable of. I hope so.