the cancer surgeon : reflections on my experience with breast cancer

The woman who took a knife to my breast is a small petite Asian lady with the most delicate hands.. When you enter her professional rooms its all smiles and then cold hands on your body.. There is not one single talk of any emotion despite the fact we all know what breast represent in life, sustenance and the womanly bounty of procreation, nurturing and hopefully, alive, vibrant, joyous, fully embodied sexuality..

The sad truth is I never came to life in that way as a young woman, my repressive Catholic education saw to that. It is said that many survivors of trauma and complex PTSD find the body too painful a place to live in, but if you consider the way our bodies are treated as kids (or were in my day) even the hard cold way we used to enter the world before the days of birthing pools and low lights and fathers present to welcome the little one while supporting and actively loving the mother, is it any wonder?

I actually had the accident on the brink of what should have been my sexual awakening, instead I felt my body to be shameful and ugly and ‘down there’ well it was just too horrific for me to think of a man gazing on me with pleasure, in fact the whole thing filled me with feelings impossible to cope with to be honest and so its not surprising I crashed and burned and got torn apart the way I did on the brink of that issue coming up with my first boyfriend.. It saddens me to think that even my my marriage our sexual life was only half alive and it was not possible for me, due to my own neglect trauma, to bring a child to life, as I do love children.. I did get to experience some of that unbridling around my sexuality in the last relationship I had but my last partner also had problems with intimacy so it was a fraught issue for both of us. Also it was impossible for me to open fully to a man who repeatedly shamed me for honest, authentic, emotional expression.

And after posting this and cuddling Jasper I remembered too, how even the dog we got when I was 14 and so lonely after my second sister got married and left home ended up getting smashed up one day when we were out. It took me ages to convince Mum and Dad to let me have a dog and then she got hurt.. and she was also in pain….just been crying a lot with Jasper over that…it seems very symbolic.

It is also not surprising I got diagnosed with breast cancer about 4 years after we finally broke up and I came home to all of my past pain and trauma. My second living sister came back here then too. At one point we were both living with my Mum, one of us on the couch..She was diagnosed 4 months before me in October 2015.

I remember my own diagnosis on the day before my 54th birthday.. I remember the fear and singing to myself the song Close To You to distract me from the pain of the needle biopsy taking place in my left breast.. I remember too, those who were in the know about such things as early stage breast cancer recommending there were other ways besides surgery.. It had been my sister who suggested I go for the test anyway..

I also remember the long lonely wait before the surgery with no one to hold my hand or even be with me. I also remember being told I had to climb on the operating table myself I remember the lights and the masks and the detachment of it all similar with the 5 week phase of radiation treatment that followed, my breathing has never been the same since though there was some recovery in recent years.. I can still wake struggling to breathe just as my sister was when I visited her on Sunday in the hospital.

Its sad to me what my poor old body has endured.. Hugs have been few and far between so I detach and I see I have done that with my sister but my family were never physically demonstrative and injuries or hurts were denied and we were told to get over it.. maybe it caused fear for our parents I do not know..

Luckily today was my last visit to see the surgeon and if my ultrasound comes back clear I will be free and just have to have my annual check, but by no means am I out of the woods.. It makes me scared sometimes that this lack of connection, comfort and touch and my tendency to reach for things like coffee or sweets to soothe myself when I am lonely may lead to illness for me..

I am seeing lately just how much I also took myself away from care and did not always know how to love my body and yet today I was able to get out in the fresh air and seek the warmth of the Sun but it just seems to me that for all of us so often the soothing warmth of a mother’s love was just so absent.. Maybe it is Mars now in the final decante of Cancer finally stirring up all of this 12th house pain of longing for the nurturing and love and mothering that was absent in our family and is, as I see it, an ever present theme in our masculinized society..

At least now I can recognize it and today in bed I let myself turn in and give my self a hug and encouragement to just take it easy for an hour or so. Maybe in some small way I am learning to try to give that love to my sister too… at least I feel softer about it all (all of the past hurt, fear, emotional ignorance and pain) I see the hard defensive part of myself that had to fight so hard to stay alive sometimes and then I just want to melt like a puddle of jello.. it would be so nice to be held and yet sometimes nature does that for me and sometimes its a human hug.. I just wish there had been far far more of that growing up… but that is the modern world, my parents as depression kids were really all a part of the unmothered and displaced generation.. and that has ripple affects no matter how much material affluence may now surround us.