Dr Theile knew my body as only a surgeon could. He also had interests outside of plastic surgery, like mountaineering, which had once left him with a broken leg. He liked to travel with his family and read, and I was sure there were other pursuits I had no idea about. He hadn’t read the book, but I left the copy with him all the same.
As the American writer, literary critic and editor Anatole Broyard said, I was a patient wanting an amanuensis. This man as surgeon transformed my body. I wanted a two-way acknowledgement. Dr Theile was the best type of medical specialist: someone with a life that informed his humanity.
A new normal: is how I look important?
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
A year on I remained cancer free.
In the mirror my once pale chemo-face held more lines. There was a darker hue under my eyes than before. I was more tired than before. My hair was thicker, darker and greyer. The curls returned. My eyes had a clarity to them: there was no rose-coloured glass through which I looked out at life.
When I turned from my face to my body only the chest area revealed my cancer story. The rim of my portacath’s ten-cent dimensions no longer thrust out of my skin, making me look vulnerable. In place of the portacath was a 2.5-centimetre red scar.
I had perfect-sized boobs with a hatching of scars where my nipples and areolas used to live. These were the just-discernible remains of my nipple surgery. My pink-tattooed areolas set a target for the eye amid the scars on my chest.
But this was all surface.
On the inside there was so much more to see.
There were significant changes due to menopause. The sudden drop in oestrogen meant my joints ached. My hands were the worst: my knuckles had swollen and stiffened, and had a rheumatoid-arthritis kind of throb.
The dry riverbed patterning on the skin around my nails remained the same, though the tree rings on my nails from my chemotherapy cycles had disappeared. I maintained hand creaming but the skin was drier, rather like dead skin that needed to flake off. Over the rest of my body my skin had lost its moisture. My youthful beauty was fading, fast. My mirror held a mature woman’s face – a new beauty – wizened contessa.
In the last visit with my oncologist I enquired about all the joint pain, especially in my right elbow, which hurt to the point of distraction. There was no concern regarding cancer secondaries in my bones because of my symptoms, but rather the pain was likely some slow-healing damage from picking up Celso. I needed a chiropractor to check me out, not an oncologist. Of course, with any pain or bodily discomfort my first thought turned to The Big C.
To calm down and combat the joint pain, I found time and exercise the best panacea. The medicos said that the significant changes due to menopause would ease somewhere between one and five years.
At the end of September a horrible taste, akin to chemo-mouth, returned for a week for no apparent reason. When I didn’t have metal mouth I drank and ate a lot of foods rich in anti-oxidants like blueberries, powdered flaxseed with yoghurt (cottage cheese was better to get the flaxseed absorbed but I didn’t like its mashed cat-poo taste) on muesli for breakfast, any foods with plenty of garlic, onion and turmeric, and green tea. Dr Servan-Schreiber made an empowering comment about the right foods when he said that there were three meals a day you could use to do something about cancer.
I also returned to some bad food habits around sweet things, and had to rein myself in on cake and biscuit consumption, but desserts are so much more fun to bake, I’d argue.
I got a nasty cold or flu repeatedly, which might’ve been the cause of my foul mouth. In my second year post-chemotherapy, though, I was proud of my body and what it had coped with. It was not so robust. My strength had slunk away from my hands and arm muscles. I had to hand tight lids to B to open. It used to be the opposite between us.
I got intense night sweats so I was sleep deprived. Because of all of the above my memory was cruddy, really cruddy – to the point that I became seriously concerned about future learning and retention of new information; I thought I was becoming cognitively dumber.
In conversations with strangers or waiting in rooms I could instantly turn red
