August 12, 2015 - Let it "be".

There have been moments during this 3 year journey where I felt “less”. Less of a person, less of a wife, less of a woman.  Not necessarily in the way you might be thinking, but rather in a “why did this bother me so much” kind of way.  I felt guilty that this would get under my skin sometimes. It's hard to admit that in the open like this. But it's honesty. And honesty is important in this. There were moments when I felt like I should be doing “better” at all of this. I would get so frustrated with myself when I would get upset. I scolded myself when I would cry at the smallest of things. I felt like an idiot when it took me months to look at the scars after the second surgery. The only reason I looked after the first surgery is because the medical resident came to remove the bandages the morning after surgery not knowing the Lead Breast surgeon didn’t want me to watch him do it. (you can find the start of that story here Part 1 and the end of that story Part 2 ). So I can’t even take pride in the fact that I looked. It sort of just happened. There was one moment in my very first solo shower that I looked, but I ended up balling my eyes out in the process so where is the pride in that? (I know there is some pride that can be found there, but you really wanted it to be a “better” moment for yourself.)

If this surgery #6 has taught me anything it’s this. 1) Sometimes you don’t have control over your emotions, and there is no shame in that. 2) The exact same experience on paper can be a totally different experience from one person to the next.  3) Time heals everything. Maybe not fully, but enough to do things differently as you go.  

It is not that these are totally new revelations, but certainly a heightened awareness of. 

I’ve really had very little “trouble” this go round. The drain is the perfect example. I recall meeting people along the way who kind of looked at me funny when I relay my intense dislike to my drains. They truly were one of the most physically painful parts of surgery 1 and surgery 2.  So when I would hear women say they didn’t have this intense hate for them as I did, I immediately felt like I must have been very high maintenance with a very low threshold for pain. I felt “less” of a person because I let the drains bother me so much. Well, little did I know that sometimes drains truly don’t hurt all that much. I had never experienced that before. And I have no idea why the first 2 go rounds they would bring me to tears and this go round I sometimes forget it is there. It’s a terrific reminder that though 2 women can both have a drain, one may be super painful and one may be neutral. That’s not a reflection of the woman and her pain tolerance, but maybe a reflection of the state of the breast, or the technique it was put in, or whatever reason. The women loathing the drain is not “less”, she is just having a different experience for no fault or reward of her own.

The scars are another example. I mentioned my ability or inability to look at them during these surgeries. The first and second go round (which really could be one experience in and of itself since the two surgeries happened with 2 weeks of each other) it took me MONTHS to really sit down and look at these scars head on. It was simply a mental block, that I was having a difficult time trying to navigate. It was primal. It was innate. It was some block that I couldn’t surmount in that given moment. But with surgery 3 (cellulitis and implant replacement) and 4 (lipografting) and 5 (skin tuck), I really didn’t have any trouble at all mainly because there really wasn’t a new scar per se. And now that we have surgery 6, though I haven’t looked yet, I think it will come very soon. And I don’t dry heave at the thought of it, which really is spectacular since I have done enough heaving in the past 48 hours to last me a lifetime thank you very much.  So it isn’t so much the scar itself that is the issue, but rather my underlying state of mind at the moment the scar occurs. For the first 2 surgeries, going boobless for a bit really messed me up. I would have never dreamed that would have been the case. But it happened. And it was deep. And that scar represented something else at the time. I don’t know that I will ever have that fully figured out, but I know that the scar I have today with surgery #6, though it truly is the exact same scar, is more of a triumph than a hill to get over. I’m not “less” for what I felt then, and I am not “more” for what I feel now. It is just different. And Bessie Sue most likely will feel something totally different in the exact same details.

So we need to quit being so hard on ourselves. Yes, things can always be worse, and yes, things can always be better. But things can also just “be”. I am no less of a woman, I am no less of a human, I am no less of a wife. In fact, after these six surgeries, in many ways I am “more”.  And you are no less of a woman/human/wife/mother for whatever you are navigating (in 95% of cases anyway; there are times we simply make bad choices and continue to make them over and over again) and you can just “be” without comparing yourself to Trudy Mae down the street in similar circumstance. Your journey is yours. And you should be empowered by that!

I’m heading back to that room again in a few hours. That room of emotions. The Breast Cancer Center Waiting Room. I used to walk through that room all the time (before surgery 1) with little to no thought of its contents. It used to be a room full of people waiting for an appointment. Now, it is so much more. A woman waiting to see if the lump means anything. A husband trying to hold it together because he knows his wife is mentally hanging from a thread. A grandmother who really wanted to be at the card game last night, but was instead puking her stomach out after the chemo dose. A graduate student who now has one breast and is trying creative ways to make that obsolete to the “guy” she met who could be the one. A newly wed who simply wanted to start a family and now has to put that on hold. The 40 year old wife with no kids who chose to have a double mastectomy because she was dead set against going through breast cancer having already beat cancer once but had no idea what she was getting in to (yeah, that one is me).  It’s hard to walk into that room the same way I used to oblivious to what that room contains. And now I walk in knowing that for each of these, there is nothing "less" in what they are experiencing. And I really hope they figure that out too. 

The stories change you. And I’m oh so glad that they do.