Scars make your body more interesting
2.
Newtown, Mar 12, 2024.
LB is the breast I lost in my unilateral mastectomy on March 6. 2024. Rightie Tightie (RT) is the remaining (smaller) breast. Since the day before surgery I have been writing letters/odes to Leftie Bestie on FaceBook and transferring here to Substack. Find all eps here.
Dear Leftie Bestie,
Recovery at home is going well but to say I’m slowly getting used to your absence would be a lie, I’m just not falling into emotion, doing as I always do, putting the feelings away, carrying on as I must, saving that for later. Your luscious roundness is no more, you have left the body, and been replaced by a very neat scar that I’m happy to say in loyalty to your memory, I’m not giving much attention to.
As others who have been through this would know, I now have what's called a drain (an arrangement of tubing) attached to the wound, collecting your leftover fluids and depositing them in a bag that I empty each evening.
Meanwhile I'm enjoying delish food drops from dear friends and family, morning and evening walks, a bit of online teaching, bit of writing and movie watching on my fave free via my library streaming service.
Dear LB, you probably don’t want to hear about our hospital stay. While you were tucked away in ice somewhere, waiting to be transported to the some sterile lab, Rightie Tightie and I were having quite an enjoyable time. Here are some of the highlights.
- so many Irish nurses I felt like saying 'bejeezuz' and 'top of the day to ya' all day long.
- the luxury of a single room (yes, public, not private) with a fab ninth floor view over Sydney, especially noteworthy at sunrise.
- the weird massage air bed that kept me awake all night with its rolling and moaning motor that couldn't be turned off. (For circulation they said).
- my daughter Cyd helping me in pre-op to get my compression stockings and no-slide sockettes on, me thinking how many times I put her socks on and off when she was little.
- the interview with the young pre-op nurse re my medical history when I tried to explain how wild the seventies and eighties were.
- post op visitors including my kids and grand kids who helped me eat the second dinner they brought when I asked if they had something less meaty. They brought lamb and lentils w mashed potato. We polished off both!
- the grandies amusing themselves by making rude finger waterbombs from surgical gloves.
- when I got stuck in the stairwell after going up and down a few flights (getting my steps up post op) in my gown and no undies (but stockings and sockettes) and had to ask a doc to let me in so I could get the lift back to the 9th floor. Riding in a lift full of fully dressed people knowing I'm the only one with no undies on and wondering if they think I'm an escapee from a no-undie ward. Lucky my bum wasn't hanging out the back even though it felt like it was!
- being wheeled around after the op in a bed feeling like a queen in a palanquin, through all sorts of behind the scenes scenarios, packed with busy nurses in blue, me wanting to give the royal wave, and say 'what a great job you are all doing, thank you very much, it's so good to be alive, top of the day to yas all!!'
One of the special highlights you won’t want to hear about LB, was the visit from Helen the breast nurse, a perky, smiling, good looking middle aged woman who bounced in to my room with a tub of wares under her arm. She spoke quickly, charmingly, flirtingly, as she laid out a range of breast prostheses on the bed. 'You can have have silicone, foam, fiberfill, triangles, adhesive, partial or shaped, circles or teardrops, symmetrical, asymmetrical, custom, all cup sizes (shallow, average or full) & all skin colours. You can claim it on medicare and Berlei will send you a complimentary bra. What's your size? She took down my details and said there'd be a Berlei bra coming in the mail soon.
It hasn't arrived yet LB and while I could try out some homemade prostheses which were popular in my teen years for those of us who weren't so well endowed: old socks, rolled up tissues, balloons, balloons filled with water, bags of rice etc. I’m asking myself what for LB, what for?
Rightie Tightie is so tiny anyway, we are just going to go without. Flat chested and fabulous. In honour of you LB. How could we sully your memory with a chunk of foam or silicone? I couldn’t do it. Besides I’ve heard Flat Chested and Fabulous is a thing. On FB and Insta all the cool women are doing it. Isn’t that amazing LB. Isn’t it wonderful. Women are incredible LB aren’t they? Incredible.
Photo by Pablo Heimplatz (Unsplash) of the Cardrona bra fence project in NZ.
I borrowed the title for this post from Scars Make your Body More Interesting and Other Stories, by Sheril Jaffe, one of my all time favourite books first published in 1975 by one of my all time favourite publishers, Black Sparrow Press.
Follow my Leftie Bestie episodes to find out how after my mastectomy instead of opting for chemo and radiotherapy, I sought the advice of cancer adviser and advocate Grace Gawler and travelled to Japan for AIET, a non invasive immune boosting therapy. Thank you to all who contributed to my cancer fundraiser and helped me achieve my current cancer free result.