external shows

The other night we felt like slumming it and went to pick up Dominos in Didcot, where we saw the typical weekend chav-rabble cluttering the pavement outside, queuing up for pizzas and fish and chips. Obese. Smoking. Pregnant.

And I wanted to say, excuse me, it appears as if you’ve chosen not to use your god-given bodies for anything but destruction. Mind if we trade? You may as well take this one; it’s trashed with cancer anyway.

–

Anecdote: one of my hospital roommates (of whom more tales to come) was in for a hernia operation. From the other side of the curtain, I heard the surgeon explain to her that they had had to pull her stomach out of her chest.

Pull her STOMACH out of her CHEST.

“Uggh,” she said several times that day. “I feel like I’ve been pulled backwards through a hedge.”

The figurative language, I found, was insubstantial. Surely in such an instance it is more striking to speak literally: I feel like I’ve had my stomach pulled out of my chest.

So this is what I mean now when I say I dread the question “How do you feel?” There is no metaphor for how I feel. The only adequate answer is: I feel like I’ve had a piece of muscle the size of my Riverside cut out of my back, pulled through an incision in my armpit and sewn into my chest where my breast was cut off. Do you know what that’s like?

I’m grateful to have a readership of other BRCA/breast cancer bloggers who can, with some certainty, say yes to that question.

–

It was the same with chemotherapy. How do you explain chemotherapy to someone who’s never had it? Is it like a bad hangover? someone said. Yeah, sort of. And sort of not at all. Unless you’ve ever had a poison hangover.

What IS it “like?” I don’t know. On the FEC I felt like maggots ate my brain. Or like my head had been pressed inside a mammogram machine. On the Taxotere I felt like the someone had sneaked in with steel-toed shoes and kicked me in every joint and muscle while I slept.  But mostly, it’s like: you realize what you’re submitting to might be saving your life, but it makes you want to die.

–

I’m tired of feeling awful — of this terrible awareness of my body and everything that’s wrong in it.

And I resent being told by people who have never had cancer that things will go back to “normal.” It’s as if they can feel better by convincing themselves it isn’t so bad for me, or won’t be. They want you to be normal. When you have cancer, people love to say, “your hair will grow back.” As if you hadn’t realized that, or as if that really mattered.  

Hair seems to mean so damn much to everyone. I suppose because it is the “external show.” Like if you can’t see the illness, it doesn’t exist. But can’t we transcend Piaget’s sensorimotor stage for just a moment, and imagine things that aren’t immediately visible? I grant you, the hair will grow back; that’s one thing. But you can’t have cancer and then return to “default.”

But my breast won’t grow back, for a start. Neither will the muscle in my back.

Then there’s the five years of Tamoxifen, and the menopause which may or may not be permanent. My menstrual cycle won’t go back to “normal.” Or my sex drive. Or my metabolism.

Or my genetic makeup.

To me, to return to “default” would be to not constantly be wondering whether cancer cells are quietly metastasizing inside me, constantly worrying whether and when it will become visible again.

Because as “normal” as you wish you could make it, there is no cure for cancer.