At that moment I was cancer free. I could say so without shuddering. I was freer than I’d been in months and calmed by the peekaboo dawn of good feeling. The gruelling chemo regimen was over. I wasn’t sick. My mouth didn’t provide a dash of metal with every meal like a sadistic saltshaker. I enjoyed food again. Hope had washed back in and surrounded my ankles. Cautious optimism stopped it from drowning me and blurring my vision. I was happier.
The next stop on the breast cancer train was breasts off.
It was 12 days into the new year and Kubrick’s space odyssey still hadn’t happened nine years after it should’ve. Humans were still grounded on Earth. Virgin could fly you through the stratosphere. If you could afford a sizeable house in Sydney’s inner city you could float gravity free for a few minutes. But no, Earth was still our main residence. We paid an extra two dollars per plane ticket to minimise our carbon footprints in the sky, there was political argy-bargy on minimising emissions and many countries were experiencing extreme weather conditions – from snow covering all of England to catastrophic fires in Victoria, Australia.
I may have thought globally, but my world was still very much local. In a strange twist of fate, I visited the day oncology unit more often for my Zoladex injections now than I had for chemotherapy. I had Zoladex once a month, regular echocardiograms to check the drugs weren’t compromising my heart muscle and IV Herceptin every three weeks to suppress the HER2 protein that my particular brand of breast cancer liked for breakfast.
Now that I was no longer undergoing chemotherapy and the intensive support had faded, I took Celso along for the ride. He attracted a lot of attention from the nurses. Fellow patients engaged with me in a way they wouldn’t have if the subject hadn’t been babies – mainly their own and their own’s own. Celso was a bit of babbling sunshine and normality in a place where people were going through really difficult stuff and feeling sick along the way.
My new do in the new year was a faux Mohawk like David Beckham’s, though greyer and thicker. Less than two months after my ovaries had been turned off, hot flushes were the worst of the menopausal symptoms. When the hot flushes came on it was like molten lava oozing out of a volcano. The heat was red hot, and consuming. My heart went from thumpidy thump thump to boom boom in an effort to manage whatever was happening internally with the rushes. I told a young nurse about this and she informed me that her aunt named them ‘power surges’. They were powerful. Another nurse, an older one, provided some good advice:
Honey, mine used to help me get out of bed in the morning. I’d be all warm and tucked in, then the heat surge came on and I’d jump out of bed straight away. I knew I had ten minutes to get dressed without feeling the cold one little bit.
The hot flushes combined with the moist heat of the Brisbane summer made for many showers and changes of underwear.
I knew with the turn of this year my mastectomy surgery was impending.
But how do you prepare for a mastectomy?
You can’t.
Part of what killed my mother was her need to be feminine. She baulked at full removal when first diagnosed with cancer and only allowed the surgery after her third occurrence. It’ll affect my notion of myself as a woman, she’d said when we first discussed a mastectomy.
I wrote an ode on my blog to my mammaries by way of saying goodbye:
If there’s a mammary heaven mine will be with friends soon. The message I want them to take to mammary paradise is not to be good girls, but saucy minxes. May they flirt with anyone that flies by; may they bare all without shame; may they flop down in some angel’s lap and cause them to blush.
Dear mammaries, how I’ll miss you.
I’d loved my ‘ladies’, but I’d never had the sensual connection that some women talked of. I enjoyed them. I liked their shape. I was glad, though, that the intense bind of femininity to breast wasn’t present in me.
The last day of my original body was 31 January 2010. On 1 February I would become a cyborg. Living was wilder than any story I could imagine. Emotional preparation aside, I clicked into doing mode: getting rid of cancer mode.
My first female anaesthetist did a stellar job. She phoned me the Friday before mastectomy Monday and talked through my prior bad anaesthetic reactions and how she was going to handle things. I took two Phenergan (anti-histamine, anti-nausea) pills at 11 a.m., and by 1.30, when I was due to go into theatre, I could barely remain awake, slumped over the side of the well-padded chairs, drooling.
When the time came to go in, my breast surgeon loomed over me to confirm I knew exactly what was about to happen. He had a blue tinge under each eye, as if he’d been working too hard or too late. Okay? he asked.
I’m in the middle of one of the weirdest days of my life.
He gripped my left shoulder in sympathy, and then I was wheeled into theatre.
And.
Action.
In my case the procedure was this: my breast surgeon made a circular incision around my nipple, taking it away, and then through the opening removed all the breast tissue. In some women breast tissue can go up under the armpit, which mine did, so the surgeon travelled up there through the same incision site. This part of the operation took two hours. He had to scrape the underside of my skin to remove every bit of breast tissue attached there.
Next Dr Theile entered the theatre and performed the last stage – the reconstruction. He inserted
