New Year, New Boobs
How can you not be at least somewhat stopped in your tracks by the anniversary of the day your body was all cut up and rearranged? I’m in a better place than I was last year, having quit my job and taken the entire summer off. Still, PTSD is a wily motherfucker and like clockwork I had serious struggles with sleep and anxiety. Looking back at my journals from this time last year, the exact same thing happened. I suppose that’s reassuring— it’s not a new problem! It went away and I forgot about it!— but I’d rather it not happen at all. Leaving my job was the healthiest choice I’ve made in a long time and it’s given me room to work on processing everything my body has been through in the past five years (although we really could do my whole life). That being said, it is really hard work and oftentimes I can feel angry or frustrated. Since 2016 I’ve had:
an axillary lipoma removed on Election Day. 3/10, only because we all needed access to heavy pain pills after that;
My thyroid removed. 2/10 because I got stuck with a hospitalist who didn’t want to let me go home and left a JP drain in my neck for waaaay longer than necessary;
double mastectomy and DIEP reconstruction, aka the reigning champion of my surgeries. 10/10 for great surgeons but 0/10 for length of time, recovery, and general badness. Unfortunately for this surgery, that means it averages a 0/10.
Two revision surgeries, including fat grafting in May. I was going to write an entire post on this but there’s really not much to say beyond liposuction really fucking hurts. 4/10 for ‘quick’ recovery, but I docked points for having to be wrapped up like a sausage for almost two months.
This list is not exhaustive (but is exhausting 😒)— I didn’t include biopsies, which would add another 5-10 instances of being cut open depending on how we score it. This also doesn’t include the hysterectomy I will need to have in the next year or so. With it all written down I sometimes am in awe of how I am still in one piece and manage to be a functioning human being.
Today I feel fuzzy, maybe kind of numb, definitely a little angry. My mind likes to fall into the same well-worn ruts, periodically checking the clock and thinking “at this time two years ago I was ___ hours into an 11 hour surgery.” I still struggle with the idea that I’m supposed to do something today, turn my experience into something quantifiable. It can also be difficult to balance the magnitude of this day in my head with the fact that it’s really just another normal day for others— the whole shitshow of holding two feelings at once. Cancer is hard (shocking, I know) and one of the biggest challenges is figuring out where it fits in your day to day. There can be a lot of pressure online to turn cancer into your identity— I’m a survivor, I’m a cancer influencer (yuck), my cancer made me powerful! At the same time we talk a lot in therapy about how it is necessary to turn down the volume on cancer. I am not my cancer, even though sometimes I feel subsumed by it. I can’t escape the memories of it, its there every time I undress and look at my body. Its there when I can’t feel a sunburn, scratch, or caress because the nerves were severed. It is definitely there when I put on my compression garments to help with lymphedema.
And yet.
I am still here. I am learning that my anger and my panic are protective, and learning to ask them what they need rather than trying to strangle them (which only makes them bigger). I am learning to listen to the part of me that knows what she needs, although she is still a whisper that threatens to be drowned out by my louder, raging self. So again, happy birthday to my boobs. You are hard won, you are very different from what we started with, but you are a badge of honor. You are mine, and we have to learn to live together.