My friend “R,” from way back in our middle school years, recently visited for several days. She came to help with some of the basic tasks of living I’m not up for doing myself in the aftermath of major surgery. I say we know each other “from our middle school years,” but what I should say is “from the years when we were supposed to be going to middle school.” One of the first things we discovered we had in common those thirty-five years ago, was that neither of us had the slightest interest in attending school.
R and I have been there for each other through all kinds of momentous occasions and significant rites of passage: births, nasty break-ups, surgeries, illnesses, weddings, divorces, and the like. R has shown up a lot more for me than the other way around, because she is naturally a very private person, whereas I tend to let everything hang out for all the world to see. There have been times I’ve had no idea when something big was happening to her until she was nearly through it, because — if it’s possible for a person to be — she is even more fiercely independent than I am. And, dare I say? Even more stubborn. I scold her for this, but it’s useless — she is very much the boss of herself, and keeps a firm grip on the dial of how much she will reveal at a given time.
Though we have known each other for three and a half decades, we’ve rarely ever lived in the same town. There have been brief periods of overlap, but mainly, we’ve maintained our friendship across long distances. It’s fair to say she’s been like a big sister to me, and there have been times when she was the only person in the world I felt I could turn to.
True to form, despite geographical challenges, R showed up in Lafayette the other day to help me after being released from the hospital, following a double mastectomy with DIEP Flap reconstruction. She arrived, ready as always, to jump into the fire of whatever needs I might have, offering whatever comfort she could provide.
I’ve learned to roll out of bed like a log, unable to use my arms, with a huge cut across the middle of my body and armpits too swollen to even put my arms down. I navigate mostly by inching, then lunging, then practically falling off the edge of the mattress. Before my clumsy feet could even find their way under me in the mornings, R was there pushing protein drinks, already having processed loads of laundry, with a fridge full of food prepared for the day.
She drove me to post-operative doctor visits, held my hand, and did not wince as the nurse pulled the final drain from my body. The extraneous apparatus I’m burdened with has now been reduced to just a tight belly binder and two wires. The wires, which are used to monitor blood flow to the donor tissue, will come out in another three weeks, as they are wrapped around the fragile vascular connections made during the implantation process of breast reconstruction. They can’t safely be removed until that important blood source is well established. The binder is to remain until the end of week six, and I’m already sick to death of it.
At my appointments, I’ve gathered a few more facts that help make sense of some of the intense physical pain I’ve been in. For instance, I learned that a small part of my rib near the middle of my chest had to be removed during the transplant to gain access to an important artery.
I also better understand now why the whole front of my torso hurts so damn much, even where there are no visible incisions. This is due to the fact my abdominal muscles had to be separated and stitched back together, in an effort to access and extricate certain vessels. So even in places where there are no external signs of disruption, there are many internal stitches working to mend my body back together on the inside.
Nerves have been reawakening under my arms and in the area around what were once my breasts, now haunted by weird phantom pain: a strange combination of numbness, tender swelling, and bruising. The stitches itch like a bitch.
I found out that the plummeting blood pressure I struggled with in the hospital likely resulted from a large amount of blood loss during surgery. Apparently, all three surgeons noted that there was excessive bleeding and constant “oozing” as they worked on my breasts. Inflamed as they were, all the rushing-in of blood made a big mess of things, affirming just how critical it was to remove the diseased tissue.
Speaking to that, the pathology report revealed there was more atypical hyperplasia in some of the masses than anyone realized, more extensive ductal ectasia than the first surgery had revealed, and in fact, no less than four diseases associated with an increased risk for breast cancer. The duct ectasia alone was enough of a reason to undergo this surgery, making it more than prophylactic, but the other issues confirm just how necessary this was for long-term health.
To heal now means I really just need to sit still and rest, other than taking a few short walks a day — necessary to keep my blood from clotting. R knows me well, and understands how hard it is for me to be stuck in a chair, on the receiving end of care. Each time I asked if she was hungry or thirsty, or checked in to see if she needed anything, she glared at me from over her knitting, gave me The Look, and basically said that was none of my business, that she could help herself.
“I’m here to help you. If I need something, I’m perfectly capable of getting it for myself.”
“Well, it’s hard to just sit here. You’re my guest and I want you to be comfortable.”
“You’ll get over it,” she said, counting stitches, and looking up over her glasses to smile impishly with pursed lips.
At one point, this outrageous woman went so far as to pull up a chair, sit at my feet, clean and paint my toenails. When neither of us could really see well enough to judge whether she’d gone outside the lines, we laughed at how old we’d become.
“It looks great from here,” I said, when she asked me to check her work. We chuckled, in wonder over the passage of time, and how it has come to pass that we find ourselves aged and grey, having survived so much, and suffering such poor, middle-aged vision.
She must have known I needed some part of my body to look nice, and the pedicure was a brilliant stroke of genius. She’d held me while I cried over the disaster that is presently my chest. Giving me these cherry-red toes was a real kindness, and a welcome distraction.
“The front of my body looks like roadkill. I’m hideous. I was not prepared for this,” I whined, breaking down in tears for the tenth time that day as I dropped my shirt, and pointed to the wreckage.
“You’re not hideous! And this isn’t the final result! It’s going to keep changing. But even if it didn’t, and this is how you were to look from now on, what I see is a brave warrior. Someone who has lived through many battles. You’re beautiful and strong and fine just as you are. Besides, it’s really not that bad.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said.
But even though the “it’s really not that bad” part of the speech was clearly a bald-faced lie, I knew the rest was true enough. It is as though, finally, my outside reflects how my inside feels. My body is a roadmap of the complex terrain I’ve traveled through life. Scars, stretch marks, pain, cuts and wounds, rearranged skin (for instance, these crazy-as-hell blue nipples I’ve got, now that my belly tattoo was repurposed to make up for lost flesh).
One dear friend, who many years ago underwent a single mastectomy, said she’d struggled with similar emotions. In her southern drawl, she told me about her husband’s reaction.
“He kissed those big ugly scabs, told me just how much he loved me…and said if I ever got kidnapped, he’d just tell the sheriff to search for a dawg chawed, one-tittied woman.”
I’m not broken, but I’m badly bent. And that’s ok. It’s true: this is not over yet. In six months or so, I will have a revisionary surgery in which, through the magic of fat-grafting and the business end of more sharp objects, finer points will be put on the cosmetic angle of this thing. Will it be “perfect?” Hell no. But neither is any human body, and what the heck kind of standard is that terrible word based on, anyway?
R was a great comfort to me and I miss her already, now that she’s gone. She was an easy guest, and though she REALLY doesn’t like dogs, she put up with mine even as they sniffed around her feet, tried to get onto her lap, and barked at the mail carrier. “Only because I love Stella,” she explained to them.
R is former restauranteur, and the daughter of a woman who was a leading figure on the frontier of the natural food movement. In the 1970s, she served as a consultant for Whole Foods before they were even really Whole Foods, and has written several books on the subject. So, like it or not, R’s first language was food, and she’s a fantastic chef. She made more than one grocery store run while she was here, returning with exotic ingredients, which she cooked to perfection, and delivered to me day and night.
R and her mom were my first introduction to the world of food that lay beyond “SAD” (Standard American Diet). As a teenager, they were both formative for me in the early development of what would become decades of food geekery — an obsession that has persisted to this day. Yet even after all these years, I never fail to learn something new from her. This time around, it was how to identify, prepare, and enjoy eating lotus root. Have you ever had it? I had not, but it’s a new favorite. And since beautiful lotus flowers grow out of the mud, following with the law of the doctrine of signatures, eating it felt like a fitting medicine of sorts. If you are what you eat, I could think of nothing better to consume right now.
The couple who traveled here from Mississippi to support Jason on the day of the surgery, returned again when R left. They laughed again at some of the things I’d said in a stupor, still half-gone on anesthesia, when I emerged from the O.R.
When the nurse commented that it seemed I couldn’t keep my heavy eyelids open, they said I’d pointed at my belly. “Hey! My eyes are down here.”
This was a joke that started in the days preceding surgery, whenever Jason had given my belly a squeeze. I’d cover his hands with mine and ask, “So, how do you like my new boobs? Pretty firm and perky, eh?”
“What I’ve always loved about your body is what a perfect handful you are — every part of you. And that’s not going to change.”
Oh yes, I’m a handful, alright — so I’ve been told. It’s nice of him to reframe this sentiment into such a flattering compliment.
This experience of being rendered quite physically helpless has been one requiring great surrender. Even though I am a true nonconformist with an artistic temperament, one whose soul runs wild with dogs through the forest, dances to the beat of its own drum, and cares nothing for convention, another, misaligned part of my personality somehow got stuck in a time warp, 75 years ago. This displaced, 1950’s housewife part of me, for twisted reasons I am still untangling in therapy, strives to uphold certain repulsive, anti-feminist standards that center around my self-worth being tied up in having a presentable, shapely body, taking impeccable care of my husband, being ever the perfect hostess, and obsessed with having a clean house.
I am learning to release some of these impossible expectations I put on myself. If I need a nap or two throughout the day right now, I am letting myself go there. With earplugs, an eye mask, dogs in my bed (against doctor’s orders), and the assistance of heavily sedating narcotics, I am entering the sanctuary of my bedroom willingly, surrendering to the need for sleep.
I am learning to say, I can’t help right now. I’m not returning messages in a timely manner. I am unable to participate in creating the next meal, or having freshly baked cookies waiting on a spotlessly clean kitchen counter when my husband returns from work. I am not keeping the house perfectly appointed, or really getting any chores done at all. And here’s what I’m discovering in all of this: Freedom!
It’s not my husband who puts pressure on me about these things- I do it to myself. I mean, I’m sure he appreciates having all of his meals prepared, his laundry neatly folded at the ready, and household maintenance taken care of before he even has to think of it, but he understands that right now, I must serve my own need to heal above all else.
What I am unraveling in therapy is this screwed up notion that unless I am falling all over my self to earn my keep, anticipating others’ needs, going the extra mile, and maintaining perfect, wifely behavior, I do not deserve to be housed or cared for. Without going into the weeds about where that erroneous thinking originated, suffice it to say: a faint whiff of unconditional self-worth is rising from the ashes, and I’m beginning to learn how to exist independent of these insane, outdated ideologies.
I could get used to this. I could imagine a future in which I don’t look back, and no longer equate my validity as a human being with productivity. I heard a fantastic quote the other day in an interview with Tricia Hersey, a woman who wrote a book called Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. “I will not donate my body to capitalism,” she said. The minute I heard it, I could see embracing this credo without a second thought, for the rest of my life. In fact, I think I will.
I am very much appreciating the relationship between the collage and the writing on this one.
Brilliant!