First Look
Fear defeated me. And yet,
not in faith and not in madness
but with the courage I thought
my dream deserved,
I stepped outside.
- Mary Oliver, “The Chance to Love Everything”
Before the surgery, our younger son had asked, “So you’ll go to sleep, then you’ll wake up and your breast will be gone?” Yes, I replied (we had just established that they wouldn’t cut me open while I was awake, which I thought he should have been more relieved to find out. Instead, I got a barrage of questions: do they give you something to drink? No, they put it in your veins; works faster. Do they use a needle for that? Yes, they use a needle to get into the vein, but then slide a tube over it, and the tube stays in while the needle comes out). At the end of this largely technical conversation, he concluded matter-of-factly, “so the hardest part will be when you wake up and look under the bandages.”
He was right. That moment came a few days ago, and I got through it by giving my nauseatedly-nervous self a pep talk (be brave be brave) and pretending my body was a patient I was examining. I talked myself through the steps in the manner of senior to junior resident: clip drain to lanyard. Peel off tegederm. Palpate subcutaneous tubing. Rule out hematoma or erythema. Note degree of ecchymoses. Confirm incision is clean and dry. I was shocked by my surgeon’s wizardry: she had managed to conduct a dissection that I knew had to have extended from a fingers’-breadth below the clavicle down to the rectus insertion, from sternum across to mid-axillary line, through an incision not much larger than the lumpectomy scar had been. I thought of how it doubled or tripled the time it took me to excise an eyelid lesion when working through a small incision to minimize scarring, and I whispered a quiet thank you.
One part of me was noting all this; the other was trying not to look too hard at the whole thing, remembering what a fellow uniboober (yes, that’s a term) had said: it’s okay to not want to look at it for a while. Give yourself time to adjust.
So I bundled myself pretty quickly back up: drain site dressing, pads, camisole, binder, drain bulb pinned to binder. The binder is like a medical device trying to masquerade as a fashion statement, with its lavender floral print gathered into ruching (it has frills) that is probably supposed to make me feel more feminine (and therefore better about the whole thing?) but instead gives it a texture impossible to hide under anything but the baggiest of tops. In my opinion, it should either just go all the way and decide to be an edgy tube top, or look more like one of those disguisable bullet-proof vests. In the meantime, baggy tops it is.
Under the bagginess, I probably don’t look all that different. And I don’t know that I ever really will, to the world. But I am. My body feels like a new house I’ve moved into, one I don’t quite feel at home in. I don’t know which drawer to open for the cutlery or where the light switches are: everything works differently, my back and shoulders curving itself around the soreness, my arm and fingers surprised by the occasional numbness, my non-dominant side maneuvering awkwardly through tasks. It’s all tolerable, just a bit more uncomfortable, a bit more slow.
Let yourself be slow, I think. There is a reason why we surgeons count post-operative days like sheep: post-op day one, POD2, POD3. There are things that nothing but time can touch. I know this, but I have to tell it to myself, to my body, like a bedtime story. Lay yourself down. Something happened to you. Something that for you has become part of living in this broken world, full of blight and blessing. Nothing feels right, and it doesn’t have to. Not now, not for a while. Not for a while.
