Breast Cancer and Me: Hide and Seek
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Many years ago, after a relationship fell apart so abruptly that a wedding had to be canceled and an ocean crossed so I could come home and start over, I felt my body shutting down in response to the emotional upheaval and the swirl of changes — packing, moving, finding a new job. It was as if, even as I went about the practical details of putting my life back together, one part of me — the part that was lively and cute and sexy and fun — just kind of put an “out of order” sign in the window.
I gained weight, my periods stopped. There were times I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection in a store window and think, “Who the heck is that?”
I was traumatized, and my body knew it well before my mind did. My body understood, somehow, that I wasn’t ready to get back in the game. Eventually, my brain caught up. I realized it was time to reclaim myself, to find my footing again. Eventually, my old body returned, and I recognized myself again.
That all happened nearly 30 years ago, but it’s a phenomenon I’ve seen in others close to me. And now, it’s back in my life, all these years later. This time, I sense the same mind-body disconnect phenomenon in myself post-cancer. It’s coming up on two years since my breast cancer diagnosis, and since I underwent a radical treatment: a double mastectomy and DIEP flap reconstruction surgery.
My physical recovery from the surgery has been textbook. I’m apparently a superhealer (small victories, I guess). And while, early on, it sometimes felt as though my progress was halting, in retrospect, it was nonetheless all in the same forward direction. Surgically, medically, I’m a success story.
Today, I am feeling closer to fine than I have since my diagnosis. Which is to say better, sure, but not all the way better.
Because the truth is, in an echo of what happened when I was 30, while some aspects of my healing appear to be complete, parts of me have remained closed down.
I’ve been living in this body for 57 years; I know it better now than I did all those years ago. And yet I’ve still been surprised, and honestly amazed, by the way it’s reacted to the surgery and other treatment. It has, once again, quietly shut down.
It’s talking to me.
I’ve gained more weight than I’m comfortable with since my diagnosis and surgery. Everyone says it’s not the fault of the hormone-blocking meds I take daily. (Everyone who says that, I want to point out, has never taken these drugs.)
It isn’t just the extra weight on me that’s giving me those “who-is-that-woman-in-the mirror” moments, though. Instead, it’s the way those extra pounds, and where they’ve landed, make me feel. Added to the major, immutable differences in my surgically altered body, they make me feel blocky, uncomfortable, not free. I feel hemmed in, constricted.
I’m reminded of the time my cousin’s then-toddler decided they were playing hide and seek, but failed to inform her mother of this fact. She hid herself so completely and quietly my poor cousin called 911. Afterward, the little girl learned that, going forward, she should tell someone that she required discovering.
I have to do something of the same, but, in my case, remind myself that I need finding, that there’s a new me out there to discover. I’m not sure what I will discover this time. It’s not easy work.
That other shut-down time, I was working to return to myself, the woman I remembered. This time, I suspect, I’ll be emerging to something, someone, wholly new.
I’m getting there.
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