A breast cancer diagnosis sends your entire life into a sort of free fall of decision making. Almost daily at doctors'
appointments you have to decide things you could never
imagine deciding. I remember the appointment when the surgeon told us that there was no
way to keep my breast, no possibility of lumpectomy, and did I want to
do reconstruction? In the days leading up to my mastectomy I remember
feeling a visceral terror of the surgery and of the idea of losing my
breast. I just could not imagine a world in which my breast would be cut
off. I would go to sleep one morning and when I woke it would be gone.
I
remember everyone I asked recommending getting an implant because I am
so young to go the rest of my life without "something" to replace the
breast I was about to lose. I remember the doctors promising me that I
had found my lump so "early" I wouldn't even need chemo or radiation,
that the pathology of the biopsy guaranteed this.
Many women who
go through reconstruction after mastectomy do it because they want to be
able to look normal in a swimsuit, and to be able to forget, even for a
while, that breast cancer ripped a chunk out of their femininity. One
day in the beginning of summer after 2 surgeries and I had lost my hair I
was talking with a man I had just met at a church function. After
finding out the reason I had no hair was because of breast cancer
treatment, he remarked that he hoped I wasn't so afraid of losing my
breasts that I wouldn't have a mastectomy because clearly that
was the best option for all breast cancer patients and don't you know
that you can just get new breasts. I was so shocked that knowing
nothing about me or my cancer he would remark on something so personal,
and to me, implants, however nice, are not real "breasts".
It's
real, that fear of losing a vital part of your femininity. No one who
hasn't faced losing a breast could possibly imagine the reality of it.
It doesn't matter if your breasts are beautiful, they are yours.
I think having a mastectomy is like losing an arm or a leg, just as
central to our idea of ourselves, our picture of what it means to be me.
Starting the process of reconstruction (it's a two step process for
breast cancer patients) meant that in part I didn't have to face as much
a slap in the face of looking down and not having that "something" on
my chest on the left side. I could pretend that it wasn't real. But
that's just what it was, pretending. The temporary implant hurt, I
still had a huge scar across my chest, I still was numb from the
mastectomy and the second surgery to remove more lymph nodes, numb from
two inches in on my back to the center of my chest, down my arm, below
my collar bone. It's real. I really have breast cancer. I lost my
breast. I lost a part of my life that I used to define who I am as a
woman. I lost more than just the ability to breast feed my baby, I lost
time spent snuggled up on the couch with Kate and nursing her, cuddling
in bed in the mornings and sweet sleepy smiles.
Having to have
radiation and needing to stop the reconstruction process has meant that I
need to face these things more clearly than I had and I am actually
grateful for some of it. I have now lost the ease in dressing in the
morning that comes from looking like a normal woman. But I
started gaining a level of acceptance of my "new" body. I am now
completely flat on one side. Flatter than a man actually, because even
men have some tissue sitting on top of their chest muscles and I have
nothing under the skin but scar tissue. I had started to really want
the temporary implant out and now it is.
I had the surgery a week
ago today. I still hurt a lot, still tire easily. But maybe I took a
step towards accepting what this diagnosis means in my life. Most people
don't understand that with breast cancer you can't just cut the cancer
out an be done. If that was true, why would you need chemo after
mastectomy? The reason breast cancer kills so many women is that breast
cancer likes to hang out in the blood. So flat chest or not, I will be
thinking of breast cancer the rest of my life, hopefully until
something else kills me, like old age :). It's funny to think that I
may have gone through 3 surgeries and 4 1/2 months of chemo and still
been in denial that my diagnosis was real. Well, I have a million
stitches across my 8" incision to drive home that reality (that's not
including my port incision). I can look straight down at it. Crazy
huh? What a ride.
On a related tangent, we got chicks a couple
of weeks ago. I had decided that getting chickens for fresh eggs was on
my bucket list and I wasn't waiting around for "someday" to happen. I
went with the 3 older kids to pick them out. I plan on doing more of
that. Not getting more chickens, but dreaming about what I want to do
with my life, how I want to spend it and then doing it.
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