By Jennie Nash
It's hard not to fall in love with a man who draws on your body in black Sharpie pen as if you are a priceless canvas and who then uses his scalpel and thread to craft you a new breast from the cancerous wreckage of your original one. Add in the fact that the man looked like Matthew McConaughey, walked with a Harrison Ford swagger, and spoke with the authority of a general on a mission to save the Earth from alien invasion, and you can see how natural it was for Dr. Black to become the hero of my recovery. I fell hard -- but I'm a happily married woman and it wasn't real love. It was fantasy love, a schoolgirl crush, something I would never have declared out loud, or acted upon, or even, probably admitted. But still. It was love.
"There will come a time when you don't even remember my name," my doctor said, at one of the last appointments before he released me. He spoke in a wise, generous, slightly mocking tone, and I laughed at how knowing he was about patient's temporary devotion and blushed at how transparent I was about how much he had meant to me. You made me whole, I thought. I will never forget you.
But it turns out he was right in spirit if not in fact. Ten years later, the name of my swashbuckling plastic surgeon still blazes bright in my mind, but there are many days when I don't remember that I had breast cancer -- or I suppose it's more accurate to say that I don't register it. It has faded in my mind, receded like a storm. There are days when I put on a red bathing suit and think nothing. Days when I wear a plunging neckline and think nothing. Days when I look at my scar-crossed body in the mirror and think nothing. I look at the big slashing scar across my belly where my doctor "harvested" my flesh and I look at the beautiful, balanced breast he made me with its Saturn circles of scars, and I don't think breast cancer. I just think, This is me.
But then what to make of this? Recently while on vacation, I was getting a massage. The massage therapist had my right arm pulled up high over my head as she worked the muscles in my shoulder and back. My underarm was exposed, the base of my rebuilt breast. There are scars that run through that part of my body like winding roads. She will notice the scars, I thought, and She will say something.
I have often had the experience where a massage therapist "reads" my body -- or my mind. I have had a therapist tell me that she felt grief in my body at a time when a dear friend was dying. I have had a therapist ask me if I was a "sage" woman (a native mystic/storyteller) at a time when I was writing a book about a wise old woman. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that this therapist would see my scars and say something about my cancer -- You have the soul of a survivor or Your body has the wisdom of wholeness. It would be something insightful, something uplifting, something grounded in the flesh where cancer used to lurk. I waited for it, but the massage therapist never said a word.
When I got up from the table, I was disappointed, because there's a part of me that doesn't want to forget.
Jennie Nash is the author of "The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer" and the novel, "The Last Beach Bungalow," about a cancer survivor. Visit her at www.jennienash.com or on Red Room, where you can read her blog.
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It is a lack of awareness that is both frustrating and strangely comforting: Because if someone cannot 'get it' that some pain is not visible yet is no less real, it probably means that they don't 'know it'--and that is a blessing, is it not?
Hopefully there'd be more awareness of those illnesses and conditions and cancers that are less visible and less 'popular' (as far as lay people's exposure to them and their treatment sequence), and people will be more sensitive to the realities that not all disabilities are visible, and pain need not be judged by the size of a scar.
I HAD MELANOMA 31 THAT IS THIRTY ONE YEARS AGO .
AND DEVELOPED A STAGE ONE UTERUS CANCER THIS YEAR
I AM A CANCER SURVIVOR
I had the mastectomy and never had reconstruction surgery. At the time my only priority were my children. My dr. told me to try to find a relative to care for them b/c he didn't think my survival chances were that great. Even though I lived in a different state...no one stepped up.
Now almost 20 years later I am still single because I am to embarrassed to date a man. As strong as this made me it destroyed my self confidence.
My children are grown and on their own and I am so lonely because of the way I look.
Right now I don't have any medical insurance so any surgery is out of the question.
But I do thank God for everyday and never take life for granted.
Money. Shame on them !
you dismiss too quickly, without even sparing a moment to do some research and look into it yourself. surely your smarter than that.