It’s Monday afternoon. My mother and I arrive at the Newton Marriott, same hotel as before, but a decidedly different room. I instantly feel the associative energy from being there the night before my mastectomy. Dread. Anticipation. Loneliness. Courage.
There is no view of the river this time, just the empty end of the parking lot, where a lone cop, his car parked under the trees, sleeps off his recent donut binge. There will be no lovely white swan coming over to greet us this time, just a small clumsy bird careening into the broad window outside of our room before flying off, apparently unharmed. What am I supposed to take from that?
We picnic in our room and watch some silly TV before retiring to bed with our books. I think I’m ready to sleep, but as soon as the light goes off, my head starts to whirl. Maybe I’m missing my blue light, or the comfort of my own bed, or perhaps all my anxieties leading up to this next surgery have finally found me, nestled in a quiet moment of repose, and have sprung their malevolent gossip on me.
It’s early Tuesday morning. I’ve woken with the sun that shines through the curtains to bathe the room and spring me from my eerie dreams. I doze off until about 5:45 to take my Tamoxifen and drink a good spat of water. I have slept only in snatches, here and there, struggling at first to quiet my quickening pulse and deepen my breathing, and later, to find some semblance of comfort in the overly warm bundle of bedding that bunches around me in a sort of suffocation. I slide back under the uppermost layers of sleep, and dream I am nursing Dominick, and then Luke, both toddlers again. And they’ve been cranky and sad and afraid, and when I put each of them to my breast, left side of course, the troubled look in their eyes vanish, and I suddenly realize why they’ve been so out of sorts. But of course!, I tell myself, I’ve been forgetting to nurse them.
That’s the trick of parenting, isn’t it? Knowing how to “nurse” your children long after they’ve stopped nursing? There’s an art to knowing how to calm their fears, soothe their anger and frustrations, stay connected, and show them how much you love them each and every day, no matter what’s going on or how crazy they’re making you feel. It was so much easier when I could just snuggle with them on my lap, attach them to a nipple, and watch their worries disappear. If only it could be that simple now! I am aware that the dream is processing this next phase of finality—of losing my breast, of teetering on the edge of having to watch my kids grow up and go, Luke pushing away only to pull back again, those tethers tenuous at best, the letting go paramoun to the inevitable loss. It's just so painful sometimes.
Overnight, I’ve felt the pinch of guilt—or perhaps it’s regret—and I’ve been wanting to go back and be kinder to the expander that’s helped me grow my new girl. Like one of those ugly, modular, temporary classroom buildings they often erect until the new, more-fabulous, permanent one can be constructed, the expander has done its job, after all, stretching the skin and pectoral muscle to create a pocket of space for the new implant, with a little extra skin for the natural droop and softness of comport that will help my new girl look more like a real breast, and not some freakishly hard, overstuffed artificial entity.
I suppose I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, because I am, and as much as I’ve complained about her, I know she’s been necessary, a real critical part of this reconstruction process, and for all her hard work—I salute her.
Ok, now she can go.
We’ve arrived at the Surgical Center at NWH. I’m always amazed at what I don’t remember from the last time: the route we take from the Marriott to NWH looks totally unfamiliar, and I realize how so many things slip away and off your radar when you’re focused on something else. I sit only long enough to read a bit about Paul Pierce in the newspaper, and then am hustled into the pre-op area, where I don the usual: hideous johnnie gown, gray no-slip socks, and sexy blue shower cap. The first nurse tries to get the IV set up in a vein on my right hand, but gives up after only one or two tries, declares my veins “delicate,” and leaves it to the anesthesiologist nurse to figure out. Delicate? Me? Can you have a pelvis like a mach truck and still be delicate?
Dr. Pitts arrives with her black sharpie in hand. She encircles the old incision, and points out the tiny bump, a slight puckering of the skin on the upper edge of the scar left over from the mastectomy, that she’ll smooth out during today’s surgery, thereby erasing all traces of the skin-stretching that took place over these past two and a half months. She makes a crescent moon-shaped sliver around the top part of my areola on my right breast where she will perform the lift—but explains that she’ll only do it if absolutely necessary; if the girls are well enough matched, then it won’t be worth the scar to have the lift done. I tell her that I will leave it up to her best judgment. I’ve realized that there are far more important things to think about. I refuse to get hung up on something so trivial. Lift or no lift, it really doesn’t matter that much to me.
The anesthesiologist arrives—an older man, and a Brit, judging from his accent. He is kind, wraps a warm towel around up my right arm to plump up my veins. A short while later, his assistant comes in and successfully gets the IV started, dispelling all rumors about my so-called delicate veins. She tells me I have big, juicy veins. Could have been a junkie (though I’m awfully glad I’m not). The nurse herself is a recent breast cancer survivor, and we share a few tales while she’s needling my veins. It’s always reassuring to meet other women who have beaten back the breast cancer beast, and are living their lives cancer-free and on their own terms.
When the OR opens up, things move quickly. I say good-bye to my mother, whose eyes have filled with tears, and the nurses wrap my lower legs with the pulsating squeeze action to pump blood throughout my body, lessening the risk of blood clots forming and working any mischief. They start the drip, drip of the sedative, and I try to keep the conversation going, but more likely, I am merely spouting gobbledygook, and they are rolling their eyes.
Suddenly, I am coming to. Big lights swing overhead; I am still in the OR. I feel them scrubbing my left side. “I think I woke up too early,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. We’re pretty much done here.” I feel like a floppy doll as they lift my head and torso off the table and wrap me up tightly. There is a sense of hustle and bustle. They are not rough, but they are not gentle, either. Efficiency has taken over. The oxygen mask rounds down on me, filling my system with an intense chemical smell that fries my lungs. Amidst all the shower caps and surgical masks, I see eyes only. People are talking around me and about me but not to me. They lift me from operating room table to a gurney, and I am wheeled to the first recovery area.
I think the clock says 12:30, but my eyes are pretty shot. I don’t remember much about being in the first recovery area, other than that my voice is husky with all the meds and I keep having to repeat myself. I start to feel some pain on my left side; despite my best efforts to ask for something less sinister, they administer some fast-acting morphine. This loss of control inherent in my best-laid recovery plan reminds me of the first birthing plan I concocted before Luke was born—full of the very best intentions to keep the labor as healthy and natural as possible—and how once labor set in, and I found myself hooked up to the monitors, reeling with Pitocin, and begging for something to help take the edge off, the birthing plan was suddenly blown to smithereens. After the morphine, Toradol, a liquid form of motrin, flows through the IV. Slowly, I claw my way to the outer reaches of awareness.
Once I’ve been moved to the outer edge of the recovery circle, where I sit in a recliner and try to navigate through the fog in my head, they offer me something to drink. My whiskey voice is weak. Cranberry juice, please, I croak. Pitiful. They bring me some saltines that glom and stick in my dry Morphine mouth. They bring over Vicodin, another glass of water. My mother arrives, carrying some pink roses from my father, who is visiting a friend but will stop in later. I ask for my hair brush—my hair, wet when I arrived, has dried in a tangled mess of curls. It feels good to brush it out and feel a little more dignified. You quickly learn that it’s the little things that matter—and dignity ranks high on the list when you’re sporting disposable underpants under an ugly johnnie gown, and you’re looking—and feeling—a little bit like a truck has quite run you over, and somehow, you’ve peeled yourself up and off the asphalt and are sitting there, wondering what to do next.
My mother reports that Dr. Pitts decided not to give my right girl a lift, that the expander—and now the implant—was positioned so well that she thought it just wouldn’t be worth having the scar around the right areola. I appreciate her decision for respecting who I am and anticipating what would feel best for me. That doesn’t always happen in the medical world. I’m also relieved, because it means my girls will get along without having to force the issue, and that my right girl may still be girlish enough to keep up with the left. And the more I talk with women, it seems that most of us aren’t perfectly symmetrical anyway, that nursing our babies, who invariably favor a side, creates an imbalance that often stays with us for the rest of our lives. And then there’s gravity! Imperfect, asymmetrical breasts are just one more of those well-earned vestiges of life experience, along with our scars and wrinkles, which I think most of us would never want to part with.
My father arrives just as the nurses are starting to crank out the paperwork. I walk to the bathroom, gingerly, with the help of a nurse, who carries my IV bag and makes sure I don’t caterwaul through the hallway. As I attempt to empty my bladder, I am reminded, again, of how much all my systems have slowed, and how much time it will take for the body to restore functionality and rebound fully. I change out of my hospital garb into more comfortable clothes, sign a few papers, and climb into a wheelchair. Eviction complete, it’s time to go.
I brace myself for the long ride home. I have not been looking forward to this, but the pain meds have done their job, and I feel okay. We drive through bubbles of stop and go traffic early along Route 2, but for the most part, it is smooth enough for me to write a little in my notebook, before breaching the wall of some strange kind of sleep to doze the rest of the way.
At home, I am glad for hugs from the boys and big wet sloppy kisses from Daisy, but I feel exhausted, a little nauseated, despite the Scopalmine patch behind my ear, and head-trippy. All I want to do is retreat to my room, find some quiet within. I’m tapping into a strange sensation of hovering between layers of wakefulness and some other level of consciousness that borders on hallucination and total flip city. I can’t sleep--my head instantly fills with imagery that makes me think I’ve gone totally insane. I can’t watch TV or a movie—it seems overly chaotic and loud, and only adds to the over-stimulation that courses through my veins. And I can’t read—the words are jumping all over the page, and my eyes can’t seem to still them long enough to actually understand what they are saying. On my bed, I lie on my back, knees up, eyes closed, but the effect is so strange that I get up and head outside to sit on the porch, trying to find some kind of center. The clouds have cleared out, and a light breeze sings through the trees, their tops ablaze with afternoon sun. I am content to just sit and feel the sun, and listen to the wind and the birds settling in for the night. It’s nice not to have to do anything at all.
At bedtime, I go to sleep reluctantly, my body screaming at me to give it rest and sleep, my heart urging me to stay up late to watch the Celtics game, my head playing broker to the two. My head, of course, wins out, its logic prevailing over the longing of my heart, to see the awesome Celtics crush the Lakers. I sleep fairly well, waking up at some point to down another blasted Vicodin, and resisting the temptation to turn on the TV and see who won.
There is no view of the river this time, just the empty end of the parking lot, where a lone cop, his car parked under the trees, sleeps off his recent donut binge. There will be no lovely white swan coming over to greet us this time, just a small clumsy bird careening into the broad window outside of our room before flying off, apparently unharmed. What am I supposed to take from that?
We picnic in our room and watch some silly TV before retiring to bed with our books. I think I’m ready to sleep, but as soon as the light goes off, my head starts to whirl. Maybe I’m missing my blue light, or the comfort of my own bed, or perhaps all my anxieties leading up to this next surgery have finally found me, nestled in a quiet moment of repose, and have sprung their malevolent gossip on me.
It’s early Tuesday morning. I’ve woken with the sun that shines through the curtains to bathe the room and spring me from my eerie dreams. I doze off until about 5:45 to take my Tamoxifen and drink a good spat of water. I have slept only in snatches, here and there, struggling at first to quiet my quickening pulse and deepen my breathing, and later, to find some semblance of comfort in the overly warm bundle of bedding that bunches around me in a sort of suffocation. I slide back under the uppermost layers of sleep, and dream I am nursing Dominick, and then Luke, both toddlers again. And they’ve been cranky and sad and afraid, and when I put each of them to my breast, left side of course, the troubled look in their eyes vanish, and I suddenly realize why they’ve been so out of sorts. But of course!, I tell myself, I’ve been forgetting to nurse them.
That’s the trick of parenting, isn’t it? Knowing how to “nurse” your children long after they’ve stopped nursing? There’s an art to knowing how to calm their fears, soothe their anger and frustrations, stay connected, and show them how much you love them each and every day, no matter what’s going on or how crazy they’re making you feel. It was so much easier when I could just snuggle with them on my lap, attach them to a nipple, and watch their worries disappear. If only it could be that simple now! I am aware that the dream is processing this next phase of finality—of losing my breast, of teetering on the edge of having to watch my kids grow up and go, Luke pushing away only to pull back again, those tethers tenuous at best, the letting go paramoun to the inevitable loss. It's just so painful sometimes.
Overnight, I’ve felt the pinch of guilt—or perhaps it’s regret—and I’ve been wanting to go back and be kinder to the expander that’s helped me grow my new girl. Like one of those ugly, modular, temporary classroom buildings they often erect until the new, more-fabulous, permanent one can be constructed, the expander has done its job, after all, stretching the skin and pectoral muscle to create a pocket of space for the new implant, with a little extra skin for the natural droop and softness of comport that will help my new girl look more like a real breast, and not some freakishly hard, overstuffed artificial entity.
I suppose I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, because I am, and as much as I’ve complained about her, I know she’s been necessary, a real critical part of this reconstruction process, and for all her hard work—I salute her.
Ok, now she can go.
We’ve arrived at the Surgical Center at NWH. I’m always amazed at what I don’t remember from the last time: the route we take from the Marriott to NWH looks totally unfamiliar, and I realize how so many things slip away and off your radar when you’re focused on something else. I sit only long enough to read a bit about Paul Pierce in the newspaper, and then am hustled into the pre-op area, where I don the usual: hideous johnnie gown, gray no-slip socks, and sexy blue shower cap. The first nurse tries to get the IV set up in a vein on my right hand, but gives up after only one or two tries, declares my veins “delicate,” and leaves it to the anesthesiologist nurse to figure out. Delicate? Me? Can you have a pelvis like a mach truck and still be delicate?
Dr. Pitts arrives with her black sharpie in hand. She encircles the old incision, and points out the tiny bump, a slight puckering of the skin on the upper edge of the scar left over from the mastectomy, that she’ll smooth out during today’s surgery, thereby erasing all traces of the skin-stretching that took place over these past two and a half months. She makes a crescent moon-shaped sliver around the top part of my areola on my right breast where she will perform the lift—but explains that she’ll only do it if absolutely necessary; if the girls are well enough matched, then it won’t be worth the scar to have the lift done. I tell her that I will leave it up to her best judgment. I’ve realized that there are far more important things to think about. I refuse to get hung up on something so trivial. Lift or no lift, it really doesn’t matter that much to me.
The anesthesiologist arrives—an older man, and a Brit, judging from his accent. He is kind, wraps a warm towel around up my right arm to plump up my veins. A short while later, his assistant comes in and successfully gets the IV started, dispelling all rumors about my so-called delicate veins. She tells me I have big, juicy veins. Could have been a junkie (though I’m awfully glad I’m not). The nurse herself is a recent breast cancer survivor, and we share a few tales while she’s needling my veins. It’s always reassuring to meet other women who have beaten back the breast cancer beast, and are living their lives cancer-free and on their own terms.
When the OR opens up, things move quickly. I say good-bye to my mother, whose eyes have filled with tears, and the nurses wrap my lower legs with the pulsating squeeze action to pump blood throughout my body, lessening the risk of blood clots forming and working any mischief. They start the drip, drip of the sedative, and I try to keep the conversation going, but more likely, I am merely spouting gobbledygook, and they are rolling their eyes.
Suddenly, I am coming to. Big lights swing overhead; I am still in the OR. I feel them scrubbing my left side. “I think I woke up too early,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. We’re pretty much done here.” I feel like a floppy doll as they lift my head and torso off the table and wrap me up tightly. There is a sense of hustle and bustle. They are not rough, but they are not gentle, either. Efficiency has taken over. The oxygen mask rounds down on me, filling my system with an intense chemical smell that fries my lungs. Amidst all the shower caps and surgical masks, I see eyes only. People are talking around me and about me but not to me. They lift me from operating room table to a gurney, and I am wheeled to the first recovery area.
I think the clock says 12:30, but my eyes are pretty shot. I don’t remember much about being in the first recovery area, other than that my voice is husky with all the meds and I keep having to repeat myself. I start to feel some pain on my left side; despite my best efforts to ask for something less sinister, they administer some fast-acting morphine. This loss of control inherent in my best-laid recovery plan reminds me of the first birthing plan I concocted before Luke was born—full of the very best intentions to keep the labor as healthy and natural as possible—and how once labor set in, and I found myself hooked up to the monitors, reeling with Pitocin, and begging for something to help take the edge off, the birthing plan was suddenly blown to smithereens. After the morphine, Toradol, a liquid form of motrin, flows through the IV. Slowly, I claw my way to the outer reaches of awareness.
Once I’ve been moved to the outer edge of the recovery circle, where I sit in a recliner and try to navigate through the fog in my head, they offer me something to drink. My whiskey voice is weak. Cranberry juice, please, I croak. Pitiful. They bring me some saltines that glom and stick in my dry Morphine mouth. They bring over Vicodin, another glass of water. My mother arrives, carrying some pink roses from my father, who is visiting a friend but will stop in later. I ask for my hair brush—my hair, wet when I arrived, has dried in a tangled mess of curls. It feels good to brush it out and feel a little more dignified. You quickly learn that it’s the little things that matter—and dignity ranks high on the list when you’re sporting disposable underpants under an ugly johnnie gown, and you’re looking—and feeling—a little bit like a truck has quite run you over, and somehow, you’ve peeled yourself up and off the asphalt and are sitting there, wondering what to do next.
My mother reports that Dr. Pitts decided not to give my right girl a lift, that the expander—and now the implant—was positioned so well that she thought it just wouldn’t be worth having the scar around the right areola. I appreciate her decision for respecting who I am and anticipating what would feel best for me. That doesn’t always happen in the medical world. I’m also relieved, because it means my girls will get along without having to force the issue, and that my right girl may still be girlish enough to keep up with the left. And the more I talk with women, it seems that most of us aren’t perfectly symmetrical anyway, that nursing our babies, who invariably favor a side, creates an imbalance that often stays with us for the rest of our lives. And then there’s gravity! Imperfect, asymmetrical breasts are just one more of those well-earned vestiges of life experience, along with our scars and wrinkles, which I think most of us would never want to part with.
My father arrives just as the nurses are starting to crank out the paperwork. I walk to the bathroom, gingerly, with the help of a nurse, who carries my IV bag and makes sure I don’t caterwaul through the hallway. As I attempt to empty my bladder, I am reminded, again, of how much all my systems have slowed, and how much time it will take for the body to restore functionality and rebound fully. I change out of my hospital garb into more comfortable clothes, sign a few papers, and climb into a wheelchair. Eviction complete, it’s time to go.
I brace myself for the long ride home. I have not been looking forward to this, but the pain meds have done their job, and I feel okay. We drive through bubbles of stop and go traffic early along Route 2, but for the most part, it is smooth enough for me to write a little in my notebook, before breaching the wall of some strange kind of sleep to doze the rest of the way.
At home, I am glad for hugs from the boys and big wet sloppy kisses from Daisy, but I feel exhausted, a little nauseated, despite the Scopalmine patch behind my ear, and head-trippy. All I want to do is retreat to my room, find some quiet within. I’m tapping into a strange sensation of hovering between layers of wakefulness and some other level of consciousness that borders on hallucination and total flip city. I can’t sleep--my head instantly fills with imagery that makes me think I’ve gone totally insane. I can’t watch TV or a movie—it seems overly chaotic and loud, and only adds to the over-stimulation that courses through my veins. And I can’t read—the words are jumping all over the page, and my eyes can’t seem to still them long enough to actually understand what they are saying. On my bed, I lie on my back, knees up, eyes closed, but the effect is so strange that I get up and head outside to sit on the porch, trying to find some kind of center. The clouds have cleared out, and a light breeze sings through the trees, their tops ablaze with afternoon sun. I am content to just sit and feel the sun, and listen to the wind and the birds settling in for the night. It’s nice not to have to do anything at all.
At bedtime, I go to sleep reluctantly, my body screaming at me to give it rest and sleep, my heart urging me to stay up late to watch the Celtics game, my head playing broker to the two. My head, of course, wins out, its logic prevailing over the longing of my heart, to see the awesome Celtics crush the Lakers. I sleep fairly well, waking up at some point to down another blasted Vicodin, and resisting the temptation to turn on the TV and see who won.
This morning, I am subdued, trying to shake the hangover off and find some enjoyment in the day. I am moving slowly, but am feeling so much stronger than I did after my last surgery that I have convinced myself that this will be a much speedier recovery. There is much relief in knowing that my bandages do not have to be changed today, and that when I do remove them tomorrow, I will not have to deal with the shock of having lost my breast, only the joy of greeting a new girl. Both Dr. Pitt’s office and the NWH nurses have called, checking in to see how I’m feeling. Just fine, thanks, just a little constipated, bleary-eyed and nauseated. Nothing I can’t handle. I haven’t taken any more pain meds today, intent as I am to clear all the meds out of my system as fast as I can. My eyes are still funky, my lungs gunked up, my legs a bit unsteady, my throat sore and sticky from the breathing tube and anesthesia drugs. My Morphine mouth comes and goes, and my voice sounds like I was sucking down Thai gin-tinis and Tequila in my IV bag at some all night party. But it’s all good.
I’ve received several gifts today—emails from people I haven’t heard from in a long while, who wrote to add their good Juju to the mix, giving me a much-needed lift, urging me on. The best tonic of all was hearing how the Celtics demolished the Lakers last night in the final game of the championships. I have watched highlights. The sheer genius of Paul Pierce, the return of the shooters, the great defense that stymied the Laker’s usual prowess on the court. And the best part? The post-game jumping hug circle, of course. Ah, the power of Ubuntu!
This week and next, I will have to restrain from reaching for the pots and pans above my head, picking up the cat, or chasing a Frisbee down. For another four weeks, I’ll have to stay off my bike, resist the urge to play tennis, and sleep on my right side only. But tomorrow I see my acupuncturist again, and I’ll continue with PT as soon as I am up to it. I’m confident that I won’t have to take any more Vicodin, that my systems will clean out and re-energize with rest and good food, and that I’ll be feeling much more like myself in just a few days. Things take time, if you’ve got it to spare. Paul Pierce waited all those years for a championship. I can wait a little longer for my trophy. One step at a time. I'll worry about the What's Next later. For now, that means watching the thunder clouds roll in while I try to catch a little nap.
Be well, and remember: Anything is possible ~ Kevin Garnett
5 comments:
Liz - so good to read this report that the surgery went smoothly and you're safely back home. You're an inspiration!!!!
xoxo
Nancy S.
Hey Liz - so good to hear from you and that the surgery went well. Although I hadn't read the blog in a while, it was entertaining and thought provoking as always...A hummingbird just flew up to the window by my computer - a message to you perhaps?
Keep on truckin' girlfriend! Love ya - Weeze
glad it went so well, Liz! and yeah, add me to the list of asymmetricals.
Liz, it was such a pleasure reading this recent post. I've been thinking about you recently and thought I'd check in. I was reminded by what an observant, lovable, and vulnerable person you are (among other things).
Peace and love to you,
Kristen
Thanks for the comments! I love comments! And I especially love hearing from you dear friends who have kept my battery fully charged these past few months. Thank you, thank you! (and take good care of your girls!) LOVE, Liz
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