Happy Now?

 The phone call came on the Wednesday of half term as I was sipping my morning coffee.  I was off later to see my friends in Suffolk as part of the pleasures of the week.  The timetable of my half term was unfolding to plan.  I didn’t pick up the call as there was no identification number or name.  Too many times have I answered briskly to be met with a fractional delay and a script declaimed with faulty intonation.  However, this time there was an answerphone message, not a nuisance call then.  Far from it.  The message was from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital bookings and could I call them.  My heart leapt.  Could this be my surgery?  Yes, it was. 

“I can offer you a date for your surgery”

“Yes, please, when?”

“27^th February”

10 days!  Having waited for the original appointment for some months, I was given a date in March 2020 only to have it cancelled as the first wave of the pandemic overwhelmed.  I had thought it would be until at least next year before my name came up to the top of the list.  I hadn’t reckoned with NHS systems.  Patients waiting more than two years are a stain on the hospital.  Therefore, the N&N was running Sunday operating lists in the Arthur South Day Procedure unit to attempt to cut the numbers.  I was one of those numbers.  I should have felt joy, or at best relief.  I felt neither. 

 

My attitude to my scars has changed over time.  The initial relief that the tumour had been removed carried me through the uncomfortable weeks after surgery.  The stitches got infected, and opened up so they had to be re-done under local anaesthetic.  I didn’t look at the surgery area for some time, but when I did, I was disappointed.  Not with the previously tumour laden breast or even the crude second layer holding my skin together, but the healthy one.  It sagged and had a shelf of flesh where none would be naturally.  ‘But what did it matter?’ I told myself.  The cancer had been removed and I was alive.  Surely that was enough to be grateful for?

My surgeon is a clever and sensitive man.  For him it wasn’t just about cutting out the cancer, it was giving me a quality of life after the treatment.  As a single woman what did it matter what I looked like, who was ever going to see me in a state of undress?  He pointed out to me his beliefs and I tentatively suggested what I found unappealing about my post surgery body.  I felt like I was asking too much, being spoilt and picky.  Expecting him to make me beautiful when I didn’t deserve it.  Yes, even writing these words makes me tingle. 

I am not alone in struggling with a sense of self-worth, and that, I am unashamed to admit, includes what I look like.  Yes, of course I should know I’m beautiful inside and out, but honestly, I don’t think that.  Not that I think I’m hideous, just I’ve been subject to that half a second assessment of first glance many times and I know I’m no show stopper.  Before the cancer diagnosis life was different and it is quite hard to try and remember how things were.  It’s almost a relief now because I don’t feel I need to worry about appraising looks.  There is within me a strength I didn’t have before.  ‘That’s good’ you might say to yourself, but I’m afraid to say, the strength is born from suffering, and possibly fueled by the shock of just how fortunate I was to have the treatment.  Having had this second surgery, I can see that strength was a coping strategy, not an asset.

I was having a suspicious lump checked by a radiologist sometime in late 2020.  The lump turned out to be nothing more than the tissue moving and changing.  She told me that living after treatment for cancer was in some ways more difficult than living through the treatment.  She didn’t mean to insult those suffering through treatment, but the mental anguish of living with the possibility it could happen again can be exhausting.   Especially so with my type of surgery, a therapeutic mammoplasty, a breast reduction with a lump removal.  All the tissue had been moved and cut so much (I lost a fair amount of skin too) that the breasts didn’t feel as they had done before.  It was hard to know your own body.  Her words were enormously reassuring.  I took from this that I had to live as I hadn’t before.

I had all the usual routines prior to my Sunday appointment at 11am.  My alarm was set several times so I wouldn’t miss my deadlines.  I woke before the first one rang.  A light breakfast and drinks with milk were allowed before 7am but not after.  I had washed my ‘hospital’ dressing gown.  It was the one I had bought to take in for my ‘big’ surgery.  DN2 picked me up at 10.20 (a chip off the old block, she was due at 10.30) and I got to the hospital at 10.45.  Probably helped by me driving the route on the Thursday before after I’d had my PCR test. Just in case.

A quick hug and DN2 and I parted, neither of us trying to show the fear in our faces.  We both failed.  I walked to the door to be met by the barrage of instructions covid rules had imposed on us.  I stood quietly in a space no-one would have noticed prior to the pandemic.  I was first in the queue and therefore was accorded the seat on the right hand side of the automatic doors.  I couldn’t impose a pattern of symptoms upon the people who queued behind me, only that they all carried a ‘small bag’.  Clearly had some had smaller dressing gowns than my hooded ‘hospital’ number.

The staff were cheerful and organised.  The potential patients moved obediently onto the floor markings.  One man knew his body weight and his BMI, rather more than the nurse expected to hear as she looked at her standard questions.  He was wearing tracksuit trousers under his anorak; I suspected he’d been for a run, or at least a workout before his arrival at the day unit.  The way he gripped his ‘small bag’ suggested he needed his healthiness to be measured by anyone in uniform.

I was called to a space beyond check in.  A smiling nurse with my details on her clipboard asked me to sit down.  Much to my surprise and embarrassment I found my eyes watering as I explained what I was doing there.  What was I doing there?

This was a straight forward scar revision, whatever that definition really means.  Well, it wasn’t to me.  Since I’d had the phone call during half term I had been in free fall.  I had coped with the need to save my life by cutting my body open and taking the tumour out.  But the breast reduction has been a choice I had made.  I could have had a mastectomy and a rebuild.  Lots of people have them, the normal thing to do.  My surgeon had offered me the option and I had to make a decision there and then.  I thought I was having a lumpectomy, but the tumour was too big.  I listened to the arguments, I nearly went for a mastectomy as it would use my tummy in the rebuild, and I hated my tummy, but no.  I couldn’t put myself for more surgery for vanity, the therapeutic mammoplasty was a shorter procedure and therefore the safer and more sensible option.  I’d keep both my nipples, so my surgeon told me, but at the time I didn’t know if this was good or bad.  I had to have radical surgery and I made my choice.

I hope no-one has known, but I have regretted my decision often.  Initially, my surgery looked horrid.  I’m pretty sure a rebuild doesn’t look brilliant and I did have my nipples.  I am aware this is uncomfortable for anyone to read.  It is pretty difficult to write about but I hope someone somewhere won’t feel as alone as I did.   Not that I was alone.  Friends were everywhere being kind but how could I tell them what I had been through? My nipples had been moved up, blood supply, nerves and all.  The operation was a success.  Except my healthy boob was a saggy mess of flesh rather than a breast.  Given the technical expertise of the surgery, what right had I to demand physical beauty I had never been given?  Clearly I was never born to be a Kardashian.

My nurse checking me in was kind.  She saw my eyes watering and gently slowed the process of check in.  Her words of comfort were expert and comforting. I was in good hands.

I walked round to my bed in the ward. My support stockings in white were handed to me by Constance, my nurse on the ward.  She was wearing cut down tights owned by her seven year old.  She’d grabbed the wrong pair as she left for work.  Constance worked her look better than I did mine. 

The surgeon arrived in my bay, tall and rangy and not obviously a consultant surgeon.  He was without the pomposity outsiders might erroneously attribute to the true expert.  He had taken over my surgeon’s list to, using his words, ‘knock off the two year waiting list’ for my surgeon as he’d done his.  He’d been working since before 8am.  Not that I would have known it.  I stuttered out my reservations about why I should be having surgery.  He said something like (and I wish I could remember the words exactly), ‘no, but it needs to be right’

It’s odd how you can fall in love with a man of power who says things kindly.  Even when you tell yourself this is how he gets you to tell him what is needed.

The felt tip marks were drawn on me.  The anaesthetist had seen me and greeted me as I rolled in on my trolley to the pre-op room.  Around me the staff were smiling and chatting, busying themselves getting me prepped.  I worried how the anaesthetist would find a vein for the cannula having had all that chemotherapy , but he got the cannula into my hand without problem and looked at me saying kindly,’ off to sleep now’ as that cold wave swept me off.

I woke to be told it was all over.  I can’t remember quite where I was, but remember being grateful I wasn’t in such pain, as the last time when I woke telling myself to have ‘no moral fibre and no backbone’.   I was just contented.  Progress.

A few hours later DN2 picked me up and I came home.  The usual post surgery tiredness has enveloped me, but now I am different.  I have braved a look at the surgery site and I was enchanted.  I cannot explain why, but I look like me again.  I feel whole.  How much this will change my outlook on life, only time will tell.  I am reminded that my mother had breast cancer diagnosed three times.  Even though our cancers are not genetically linked I am aware I could have cancer again.  This may not be my happy every after, but it is my happy now.