Befriending a Body

Dear Friends,

Today, my nurse Christina came by to take off the final bandages. She called to say she would be by in about 20 minutes, so I took some Tylenol (just in case) and jumped in the shower to allow the hot water to hit the steri-strips. There were probably about 25 strips to be removed, and they didn’t hurt when she took them off. Then she cleaned me up and complimented me on my scars – apparently, they are quite impressive.

I stood in the living room after Christina left, looking at the gentle snow falling outside, and decided to go into the bathroom and take some time to get to really look at my scars, I don’t know, say hello to them. It’s not that I am sorry to have lost Tito and Blanket, it’s just trying to make sense of this new shape, one I never imagined for myself (I have imagined several shapes and configurations for my chest, but never this one). It’s also the process of looking at your body after it has been so banged up with the area around the incisions hard and numb. It has clearly needed to protect itself after the insult of surgery. Who can blame it?

I think we are going to be friends.

Then, this afternoon I was reading a blog Catherine told me about last week. It was written by UBC professor Mary Bryson who was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy a few years ago. It’s a very good blog where she asks a different set of questions about the politics of breast cancer, treatment, etc. (anyone interested can read it at http://brys.wordpress.com/). It’s so interesting that I encountered this blog today: in one entry, Bryson cites Anne-Marie de Grazia, who also had the bilateral procedure and writes of her experience:

“I now look at myself every morning, every evening, naked, in the mirror, equanimously, as I always did, and what I see is not a maimed body. Some might call this denial. Yet - I look at this flat expanse of my chest and I do not find it ugly, or repellent. My face, somehow, "goes" with this chest, there is a harmonious continuity from my face all the way down my body. There is, in all human beings, when they are bare-chested, a touching symmetry between the eyes and the nipples, and this symmetry, of course, in my case, is gone. Yet, and this may sound scandalous, absurd, or even mad: this breast-less body is not devoid, in my eyes, of a certain pure and abstracted beauty. If it is indeed monstrous, it is so in the manner of some magical, not quite human creature - a fairy, a mermaid - an Amazon.”

It was meaningful to read another person's experience in the post-surgical mirror, today, just after I first encountered my new chest for the first time fully exposed. While the fairy, mermaid and Amazon don’t resonate with me, I might let my imagination play with the “magical, not quite human creature” part. Now that could be healing and even quite intriguing...

Here are my wishes for Catherine to feel better soon, and for everyone else to get home safely on this snowy winter day.

With much love,

Kip