Oct 8, 2012 - Day # 61 - 200 square feet of space

Day 61: I’ve decided that everything in this entire journey is relative. What I may have experienced on Day # 17, Susie Q down the street status post mastectomy also day #17 has an entirely different day, vantage point, and impact. To each their own journey.  At my last clinic visit, as I waiting to be called back, in walks a lady presumably about my age and falling right below her zip up jacket you see the unmistakable snake of drain tubes. Well, let me just say this woman in no way resembled me and my days of drains. She waltzed in with a big smile, unaccompanied by supervision, walking just as normally as the next person. I had been stiff, awkward, a little pouty, and nothing like this ray of sunshine I saw before me. Immediately, I wondered if I had over-reacted to my drains. Were they really all that bad? Had I over dramatized? This, I pondered for quite some time and caught myself people watching the full hour wondering about their story and trying to relate what I was seeing to my own experience  on some level. There were all different kinds of faces. Some flat and absent of emotion. Discomfort. Bewilderment. Contentment. Contorted with laughter.  Some chipper and energetic as the woman who had just walked in with drains in tow. Head scarves decorated the scalps of the less fortunate than I. I was so intrigued by the assortment of women (and men) in the waiting room. What a collection of stories that must lie in these 200 square feet of space.  Yet, we all sat silently in our own cocoons.

I’ve never known anyone on a mastectomy journey.   Sure, I’ve known people on the periphery and even mentioned them on my “wall of fame” in previous posts, but I’ve never gone through the depths of mastectomy with anyone. I didn’t have a single expectation or understanding about this journey on the front side. I went into it about as blindly as one possibly could go. I learned as I went. And in hindsight, I think that was absolutely naïve and absurd on my part. I didn’t know if what I was experiencing was “normal” or not.  Was I completely off the wall? Could I have done something different to speed or alter recovery? I spent a majority of my time worrying about where I was on this charted course and being slapped in the face by every single new blind day. It was scary trying to navigate in the absolute dark. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I reach out to women who had traveled this course before? Maybe, knowing I didn’t have breast cancer made finding someone else in a similar boat a little tougher. I knew I would be faced with different emotions and outcomes than a woman carrying that diagnosis. But I could have searched harder.  I mistakenly (or maybe God planned it that way) did this blindly, and I now feel the absolute necessity of needing to get my story out there for that other woman starting to chart the same course.

I do firmly believe that only about 10% (random number) of life is meant to impact you and you alone. Yet we so cautiously and carefully control what we allow people to see on the outside of our neatly landscaped lives. On any given day each of our lives are an unorganized field of engulfing weeds. We all have weeds, yet we only display the prized tulips. Shameful! Watered down! Unsalted! I was extremely close to falling in to that trap of self-censorship. Praise God that he removed my pride and prompted me to be open about this mastectomy. Believe me; it went against every fiber of my being to send that very first face book update 3 days afterwards. Even now, I glance back of some of my writings and wonder what in the world allowed me to speak so openly about such a sensitive topic in first person.

There are moments I wonder if I will ever regret someone knowing the painful moments of that first shower. The humility of vest changes. The uncontrollable sobbing. The exhausting acknowledgement of lack of control. The craziness of the woman of August. There are moments when I see one of you in person and immediately feel the vulnerability of you knowing the most personal moments of my life, the scenes of concave chests and now chest wounds, and I not even knowing where you work or the name of your spouse. But at every point of life I have to walk what I believe. Trusting God with my life translates to trusting God with my story and what plans he may or may not have for it. I felt to my core that you were to know my story. Every nook and cranny even if that goes against my extremely private make up. For whatever purpose and in disregard to how it may be received.  I couldn’t be more surprised by the intensity of that conviction.  So I listened and threw it all out there despite momentary relapses of wanting to climb under a rock.  And you know what? Amazing things came of that transparency. Support from people I never dreamed of. Encouragement to get through the next day. A feeling of being in God’s will with each passing moment. Empowerment by the flow of words onto a page and the dialogues between old and new friends that would result. Seeing God change a moment in your life because of a transparent moment in mine. It truly does make every pesky drain incision worth the discomfort. And it makes me crave knowing the story of each woman in the waiting room in return.