Truth Feels Good

Things have been going well. I went from wanting to stay in bed all day watching TV to feeling like there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do. It's so nice feeling happy again.

And still, thoughts creep in every now and then. When I was depressed, I didn't want to live. Now that I'm happy, I'm afraid I might get a recurrence and die. Of course, I don't think that thought a lot but sometimes it creeps in. Funny how I didn't care if I lived or died and now that I'm enjoying life, I'm afraid of dying.

But I don't want you all to worry about me. It's just nice to voice these thoughts that float through my head from time to time.

I have never been afraid that I might die. I've lived my life like I would always be alive, forever. Truthfully none of us knows when our time is up. Could be hit by a bus tomorrow. So even though I've been diagnosed with cancer, it doesn't necessarily mean I will die from it. And so we just go on with our lives as if we are totally in control of being alive. How could we dwell on the fear? Some terrorist could drop a bomb on us tomorrow. Can't live your life worrying about that.

I do like exploring my pain though and putting words to my painful experiences, fears and anger. It helps me to feel myself all the way through. I used to find a lot of solace in writing poems about my pain. I was able to turn my pain into poetry - into something beautiful.

So I tried writing a poem today and thought I'd share it with you.

Tears

A tear drop falls down my face
It's a constant reminder my body
isn't the body it once was
My right eye drips every day now
And I dream about screaming
as I touch my chest

Work - a way to feel like I'm still
Whole
To push past what happened
To move on without looking back
To run away and believe it was just
a bad dream that I can leave behind me

But now I'm awake.
And a tear falls down my face
All day long.
Wakes me up from my sleep -
This Is Me Now
My body has changed
My right eye now sheds constant tears

And it's sad -
I'm afraid of losing my life!
The bad dream filters through my
Awakening:
You are mortal, life can be sad
You deserve to cry
You can shed tears for your own pain
And all the pain.
The shtels are gone
and so is your innocence.

I cried when I got to the line: "I'm afraid of losing my life." It felt so good to cry. I feel so much compassion for myself. And love. The pain is beautiful. And it brings me back to myself. And I'm not in pain all the time. But I can touch on it and feel able to rest there. Then I go back to my Life. L'Chaim!

Reality Settles In

I suppose it took me 5 days to really feel what had been done to my body. I started to feel my body again and notice what had really occurred after going to the surgeon yesterday. Later that afternoon, I noticed that I could feel more without the bandages and the drains. I felt very vulnerable and the image of what I saw when he took off the bandages kept going through my mind. Then last night I had a very strange dream that seemed to go on forever.

Then this morning I was going to go to acupuncture but had it in my mind to get cleaned up first. The surgeon told me I could now take a shower but that felt intense to me. I love showers but I wasn't ready to have water falling freely where I'd been cut. There was this spray stuff they gave me to take home from the hospital that I could use to hand wash myself but the thought of a shower appealed to me more.

So I took off all my clothes and looked in the mirror to see if there was something under my arms that I shouldn't get wet or should be careful of. That's when I had the melt down. I told Geoff I couldn't see an extra scar where the nodes should have been taken. I freaked and called the surgeon but he wasn't available until tomorrow morning. Then I felt nauseous.

Geoff told me he didn't want me going out today. It was raining anyway and he wanted me to stop doing things and get back in bed and rest all day. By then I was crying and got into bed naked and tried to relax. Geoff told me he remembered that the surgeon said he got nodes on both sides yesterday. And that may be what tripped me up because I thought he was only getting them from one side.

After calming down I thought that I really wanted to get cleaned up. So I washed the compression bra that I need to wear and gave it to Geoff to put in the dryer while I used the hand wash to clean my body. It's great stuff and smells like baby shampoo and you don't have to rinse it off, so it's easy.

I felt so much better all cleaned up with fresh clothes and so I just sat and watched TV all day and napped. I read through my poem again and looked at the photos and collage I made to go with it and that helped. And I read through my goodbye letter to my breasts which I decided to copy for you below.

Then about an hour ago I got messages off my office voice mail...something I'd been putting off. There was a message from a reporter from the Sentinel asking to interview me for a piece for Mother's Day. That's when I remembered she had called me the very day I went in for surgery and I forgot she'd called. It was too late for Mother's Day but she still wanted to interview me and told me to gather names of people (not clients) who know about my work with mothers. (That's when I realized this article was going to be about me and my work and not just soundbites for a Mother's Day article.) So I told her to give me a week to gather my thoughts and apologized about having an emergency situation that prevented me from calling her sooner.

So far, everyone I've told this story to (aside from myself and one friend) is telling me that I should tell her about being a breast canser survivor. I never would have even begun to think of talking with a reporter already about that. It's too soon. Maybe one day I'll be open to working with this issue, but now? So that will be occupying my mind over the next week. Am I ready to go public with this? Or am I going to simply talk about mothers. Wow, I hope I feel up to this interview by next week.

My mother-in-law asked me today if I knew what "synchronicity" meant. The Sentinel calling me on the day I get surgery is an example of synchronicity to me. Breasts are such a double edged sword. They enable us to give to others with pleasure and yet at that very same time we feed our babies, they drain our every vital nutrient. They are both nurturing and deadly at the very same time. Goodbye breasts, hello mothers' needs.

Here's the goodbye letter:

Dear Breasts,

Thank you for being there for me for so many years.
You’ve helped me be attractive.
You’ve helped me nurture my babies.
You’ve helped me enjoy sex.
You’ve helped me quiet my babies, go back to sleep after being woken up, given me pleasure.
You’re now giving me a symbol to hang my dysfunctional behavior on.
I’m sorry you are having to take the fall for that.
But I’m angry at you for giving me cancer.
And thanking you for giving me canser.

You made it hard for me to say no to Geoff and caused me lots of insomnia due to my saying no to Jason and Aimee.
You stuck out too much and I never felt like I could hide you or protect myself from your attractiveness. You grew too big and I could never lose any weight. You’ve been too weighty and heavy and took part in making me depressed & unattractive.

But still, I will miss you. You are beautiful. You are soft. You are a part of me. You represent the soft, gentle, yielding, nurturing side of me. I don’t want my kids not to feel you when I give them a hug. I don’t want them to miss your softness. I don’t want to miss the way you feel and the feelings you give me. I don’t want to let go of my gentle softness or my nurturing. I only want to have some discipline around that so I can also be hard-nosed when I need to be.

I don’t want to believe that I have had to go through this over you… I never believed I would have to lose you. I don’t want to lose you forever. It’s unimaginable how forever means the rest of my life. Will I even live long? Will I live a long time without breasts? Has this canser spread? How long do I have?

I want to get rid of you to get rid of the canser. I hope you understand. Thank you for surrendering yourselves for my sake. Thank you for sacrificing your existence for the sake of my being able to live.

I don’t ever want to endure anything negative that comes along with having you in my life. Including the heat rashes. Including the weight. Including the grabs. Including the inability to say no. And I never want to have to face this disease ever again.

So I hope you can understand. I just have to get rid of you.

Thanks for being there for me all these years,
Melissa

Struggling and Making Peace

I've been praying today for a way out of this gloomy mindset I've been in. I called the Katz center and talked with someone there about ideas for what I'll be wearing after the surgery. I'm not the kind of person who even likes to wear make-up and I'm really into comfort. So I can't imagine I'll ever consistently wear those heavy prostheses with a bra. I'd like to come out of this never having to wear a bra again! But that would look so different from where I am now...so obvious... So I did get reassurance that there were things I could get to wear in a camisole and was told where I could go to get those. (In fact they have them free at the Katz center like everything else!)

And what would be so bad about being flat now? What would be so bad about not having to wear anything?

Another thing I've done to work through this gloom and doom is to create some kind of letting go ritual. First I had Geoff take photos of what I'm going to be losing. Then I wrote a poem. I will put them together somehow with maybe some collage photos or some other kind of art.

So once I was done writing the poem (if you can call it a poem), I decided to share it with you.

The poem and my obsession with how I'll look afterward shows me how hard it is for me to just be visible as I am. I'm a survivor and will always be one. It has been near impossible to hide my status as a patient and for the rest of my life it will be obvious that I am a survivor...(at least to the people who know how I looked before).

My struggle surrounds not wanting to have people horrified to look at me. I know I can't control how others will feel or respond to me. But I've thought that I could for control that for a long time through being sweet and nice and easy to get along with and not asserting myself too much. My personality type as a 9, The Peacemaker wants me to fade into the wallpaper and be easy for others to be around. This disease was the perfect solution to push me out of the prison/security of my personality type.

Believe it or not, I'm a private person. You wouldn't know that being on this carepages all these months. But it's been a stretch for me to be so open with so many people but I've been determined to be that way because I think it's a way for me to heal. Writing this way feels semi-anonymous so it's an easy way for me to be myself with a large crowd.

Anyway, here's what I wrote today for my letting go ritual:

Goodbye to The Old Me

I went through the chemo and survived.
Now my hair is growing back.
But it’s still too short for Jason to even look at.
So I hide my head for his sake - even in this heat wave.
And now I’m going to lose my breasts.
I won’t be able to hide that.

How will I hug my kids?
What will they put their heads on?
What’s going to cover and protect my heart center?
No more cushiony, soft flesh standing between me
And possibly painful emotional attacks!
Will I feel vulnerable and exposed
Even though I’ll have nothing to expose anymore?

Funny how breast canser exposes your vanity.
There’s a deeper meaning behind that fact
That tickles me on a spiritual level.
But its complete significance stays just outside my grasp.
I’m afraid a flat chest
Will make my tummy look even bigger than it already does.
No more soft curves to take the eye away from my
Flaws.
No more long, soft locks, no more eyelashes…

Dig deeper girl, there’s more to you than meets the eye.
You don’t get to hide anymore.
No hiding behind the mask of beauty or the disarming gentle softness.
None of that truly protected you anyway.
Scratchy, noodgy wig gives you a mere semblance of
Normalcy – the only way you can deny the stark reality –
The only way you can get some privacy
The only way to keep from being seen as a canser patient
When that’s really what you are. Aren’t you?

Who are you really?
That’s what this diagnosis brings you to.
Who were you meant to be?
What do you have to offer this world?
Why should YOU live?
What is your purpose?
Why are you here?
And are you worth saving?
And more important, do you have what it takes to heal?

Well girl, are you going to stay hung up on appearances?
Dig deeper and find your True worth.
Dig deeper still and you’ll discover why you were born.
Dig even deeper and you’ll understand how to make
The Best of Even This.

No more bras.
No more saying yes when you mean no.
No more doing for others and pretending you want to.
No more heaviness.
No more disease.
No more fatigue.
No more migraines, depression, insomnia.
No more rashes during the summertime.
No more mammograms or fear of recurrence.

Just more freedom of movement,
More energy,
Better health,
Better commitment to exercise,
Better diet,
More love,
And a desire to give without feeling depleted,
An ability to stand by yourself
instead of worrying about what others think,
A renewed joy for living,
Plus some gratitude for getting a reprieve.

You get to live! (if it truly hasn’t spread).
Which you’ll find out after the surgery…
You’ll get to hear the final results.
And then you’ll have yet another cat scan
After the radiation.
After the trip to the North Shore, you lucky girl.
The chemo did the trick.
There’s a great possibility this will all be behind you.
You’ll get a second chance on Life, Chaya.
You get to do it right this time.

And you’ll never forget where you’ve been.
The scars and the new body will never leave you.
The hair will come back too slowly for you to get lost again.
The chest will look too different.
You won’t be able to forget.
You won’t ever be able to hide from your life again.

Your life, your feelings, your friends, your relatives, your family,
Your parents, your siblings, your husband, your kids, those
Nurses, those doctors, your soul,
This is all you have now. Nothing else is important.
You are loved.
You get to love back.
You get to be YOU.
That’s all that matters.