She says days go by I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire
~ Shawn Colvin
Sometimes, the mind is too unsettled to write. Thoughts have been jumping about in my head for days, and forming words and sentences that disappear as quickly as they appear. If I only had Dumbledore’s pensieve, I could unload some of these memories that seem to be clogging my pate, and lighten my load.
I wake in the middle of the night, aware that my body hurts, that my breathing is light and shallow, that my mind has not fully relaxed into restful sleep mode, and is still hypercharged with mutinous thoughts and a stubborn flow of words and sentences that won’t let me sleep. I am writing instead of sleeping. I am not actually writing, with pen and paper, pencil and composition notebook, or laptop, but rather composing thoughts in my head that I need to write down, but cannot, like nixies, stranded in a remote outpost. April is, indeed, the cruelest month, but soon the ferns will unfold their fiddleheads in a unraveling spiral of joy, and all grudges will be by-gones. I do this when I haven’t been able to spend enough time writing during the day, when opportunities for self-directed creative play have been few and far between, and the ensuing, blocked flow has suddenly bolted the gates, flooding my synapses.
It is during nights like these, when it seems that I am not meant to sleep, but instead face all the unresolved wounds of life, winding through the suffocating anxiety, the leering regrets, and stifling wanderlust, and caught in a snare of wakeful exhaustion. Mental disrepair aside, my body, too, talks to me. And after all these weeks of abuse and neglect, it’s not wonder, that at this wee hour, when the wetland critters sleep in the murky deep, my body goes on strike, telling me in no uncertain terms am I to continue to mistreat it. So, I listen. I hear you hips. I hear you piriformis. I hear you rotator cuffs. I hear you poor, sore, partially numb, forever post-op left knee. And then there’s my iliopsoas muscle, screaming at me, from all that cowering, the shortened, tightened psoas pulling my left side into itself in a desperate act of self-protection. I have no choice but to grab for my foot, pull it behind my back, and try to stretch it out. My pec muscle flips, flops, flaps. (I have figured out that when you are right handed, your left pec muscle does a ton of work, holding things in place, steadying, applying pressure, allowing the right hand to perform the intricate surgeries of domestic life.)
There are ample reasons for my disrepair. I was, after all, a fairly rough and tumble kid, a tom-boy, more often than not sporting a black eye and skinned knees. I was happy to muck it up with the neighborhood boys, fighting for the football before tackling them into leafy piles in our common yard, the same boys with whom I would later practice kissing, riding our bikes behind the dumpster down the street, where we’d stop against the grainy grime of our suburban downtown, lean forward, and press our lips together. I’d always be sure to stay on my bike, a blue banana seat Schwinn, with the very high handle bars, easy rider, and ready, always, for a fast get away. It was pure innocence, my first taste of rugby life. The same bike would land me on my accident-prone arse many times. It wasn’t a huge surprise, then, that I started having sciatica pain in my left but-tock (I love saying that word, and for best results, pronounce the way Forrest Gump does) at the age of fifteen, after trying to heave a chest of records down a set of stairs by myself. A leg length discrepancy most likely contributed to continuing problems with my piriformis, my pelvis, my but-tocks. This disparity renders my right leg shorter than my left by a large enough margin for it to be visible at my knee caps and my hips and all the way up to my shoulders, where it intermingles with an old whiplash injury from my rugby playing days in college, and wreaks havoc on everything: posture, pecs, and rotator cuffs, shot to hell from years of playing squash, lifting and carrying heavy babies and toddlers, and nursing said tantrum-throwing babies in awkward positions.
At this point in my life, I survey the scene and think battleground. Getting old sucks. And you know, I’m not even that old.
Since I had the first surgery on my bazooka, (R.I.P.), back in February, I have not been able to get my usual regular chiropractic (and attitude) adjustments to keep my pelvis balanced, to release the tension in my shoulders, and alleviate some of the neck pain. I have not been able to do my usual yoga, weights and everyday activities that keep me limber and strong. I have spent far too much time on my right side, on my buttocks, and in awkward positions for hours at a time on operating tables. And there’s the stress. Everyone's got that. And now, everything has gone to shit. My body is revolting. At 3 am, it’s an all-out mutiny. My hips cry out for mercy: “No more sleeping on just one side!”, my neck aches, completely undone by the constant onslaught of O.P.I.s (Outside Pernicious Influences), my piriformis muscle spasms in its chronic tension, sending shooting pains down my backside into the leg, and my shoulders scream at me, demanding equal treatment, "What about us??!!"
What’s a girl to do? I have three more weeks of this torture, and I am hoping that I have not over-done the vigorous activity that has been forbidden, though I worried a bit this past weekend, when I asked my mother to come help me with the piles that have been building up around me, garroting my sense of harmony and balance, and I ended up rifling through closets and drawers and under-sinks for the bulk of the day, which ended with me in a pile of exhaustion in my purple chair. Exhaustion is just one risk of over-doing at this point; lopsidedness is the other. Dr. Pitts has explained to me quite patiently (because she can tell, I know, that this keep-the-puppy quiet thing is hard for me, a rebellious over-doer) that over-doing, lifting, or vigorously exercising can trigger a host of problems and difficulties that may result in a whacked out, unhappy expander that just might move too far to the left, to the right, up, or down, and cause Trouble, capital T. And we don’t want that. I already look a bit lopsided, and Dr. Pitts said last week that she “could fix that” but I do worry that tomorrow, when I see her again for a second expansion, she may just tell me that Now I’ve done it and I’m a bad dog and have really screwed things up and will look like a lopsided whack job.
My grandmother, who had a mastectomy at the age of 51, did not have reconstruction, and so wore a “blow-up bra.” She used to joke that she’d ask my grandfather every morning what size he wanted her to be that day. And there were times when she was lopsided, and would laugh about it, because, well, that’s what we do.
Lopsided or not, the difference in how my left chest looks these days is quite remarkable. Long gone are the purple-ish hues of post-operative bruising, the berry stains that splattered across, underneath and above my newly shaped fakie, and alongside the incision, which now looks much less catastrophic. The expander is doing its job, stretching the skin to make way for the silicone implant that will be surgically exchanged for the saline expander in a summer surgery. The skin feels taut all around it, and when I lift my arms above my head, the skin under my left fakie puckers, as if it can’t be stretched too much more, and might just pop after the next expansion. One of the things that often wakes me up in the middle of the night is the feeling that I’ve forgotten to take my bra off, and it’s an underwire bra, and it’s on too tight, the wire digging into my ribs. But it’s not a bra, of course, it’s the edge of the expander, jabbing my flesh and bones and creating a deep hollowed perimeter of ache in my chest where my breast used to be. But it’s better, just tight, and now that I am allowed to stretch my arms above my head, and have graduated to being able to do so with most of my mobility back and with a modicum of pain, it feels okay. I need a few more fill-ups, after which I’ll have a few weeks of a return to full activity (I’m trying to imagine what that would be like: not worrying about feeling the flop of the fish when chopping parsley, sweeping the porch, or smashing the skin off garlic) before heading back to Newton-Wellesley Hospital for the exchange operation, when I’ll say sayonara to the saline expander and hola to the softer, friendlier silicone implant, and to four more weeks of being a puppy on restricted activity. And let’s not forget the nipple! Two months after the exchange surgery, I will greet my new nipple, Hello nipple!, and two months after that, enjoy my first tattoo (I’m still thinking about having a lizard tattooed around my new nipple, ya!).
Just this morning, Dominick told me, “Don’t worry, Mom, it’ll look like a real boob soon.”
Who’s worrying?
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