4 (or 4 million) things I've learned about the body of a breast cancer patient

Let's see, I started this journey, if we wish to use journey as a metaphor – of stupid breast-cancer way back in August of last year. It kind of seems like August is coming up again pretty soon to me. Time is both slowing down and speeding up. I need to know what year it is anymore. Anyway I've learned a lot on this decommissioned train car with no drink or food service, no trans Siberian plush nest, no bell boy, no padded velvet booth, no high tea service, and as for the alcohol, you have to get it yourself. The service stinks.

But, I'm a lifelong learner, and I have managed to learn a few things about the body, specifically the body of the patient, and the very bizarre things that it undergoes when those 70 trillion atoms that make up a body get diagnosed with a thing we know as cancer:

1. Surgery schmurgery as long as it's a lumpectomy.

Breast cancer lumpectomy surgery is not really that big of a deal. Even four surgeries has not been a big deal to me. I've had my left breast sliced into by a surgeon, who then parted the skin, then the fatty tissue, and then wormed around in between muscles and fibers and fascia and milk ducts with sharp sharper sharpest shiny steel pokey things, and scooped out slimy yellow glistening fat, black tumor cells and other mysterious goopy things (you like my medical terminology?), and lots and lots and lots of blood. I think she put stitches inside me and I know she glued the outside of my breast with some super glue. It was gnarly. And yet, not terribly painful. 

Rather amazing.

After the first surgery I was a little bit sore, and enjoyed dutifully taking my allotted pain pills. But I have to admit surgeries two, three, and four, didn't really hurt that much. The pain pills were window dressing. When she cut me open last Tuesday for surgery number four she found so much scar tissue from the previous three times that she said she had to "chop it up a bit." Tartar. The next day or so I was a little bit sore but I think it was mostly just the idea of someone slicing up the hard rubbery scar tissue inside my breast that made me think I was sore. To this – I don't know? Is pain mental? I know it's not just physical, it's partly mental. Emotional. 

Today, one week out, it doesn't even seem like I had surgery ever. It seems like a dream from something from years ago. Maybe THAT'S mental. Emotional? 

I know that having the body cut open can be much worse be worse than my experience with a simple breast lumpectomy, but the boob isn't really all that functional is it? I mean other than for feeding babies and bothering testosteroney people. I added up all the months that I nursed, and I think I nursed a baby for over 33 months of my life. Fat lot of good that did preventing me from getting breast cancer.

Not trying to diminish the pain of many breast surgeries, like a radical mastectomy, or having a very difficult lumpectomy with the lump way back against the chest or right under the nipple or near the skin - or having it done with a bunch of lymph nodes taken out of the same time. All of those can be much more painful than mine was. For me it was: Slice open the door on the left side of the mountain, reach in and take out a diamond and then close the door and seal it again. Did I say diamond? I meant a lump of poison. 

2. We are as hairy as apes.

You have 5 million holes in your body, at the bottom of each hole is a baby hair follicle squirting out a little hair. Most of these are very fine and clear so you don't really notice them too much. You are Swiss cheesed with hair holes.

"Per square centimeter, human skin has as many hair follicles as that of the other great apes," notes The Economist. "The difference," really, isn't in the number of hairs, but rather "in the fineness of the hair that grows from those follicles."

Said an article.

Why did we evolve that much hair? Well according to this article, it's to help us to check the presence of bedbugs. If you're curious, read away: 

http://m.theweek.com/article/index/222584/detecting-bugs-why-humans-have-body-hair

Apparently the human is a furball. Your skin is a farm, a forest, an orchard of hair trees. You may not notice this about yourself until all of the trees timber and you feel smooth as a piece of alabaster stone, I say is if I have any idea what a piece of alabaster stone feels like, but it seemed like something that would feel really smooth and beautiful. Yes, smooth - but you feel the opposite of beautiful. 

The whole hair falling out, and coming back thing is not nice, fair, or evenly spaced out. Kind of like the restaurant service in Japan. When you go out to dinner in Japan, let's say in a large group like with a few families at a big fancy restaurant in Tokyo in 1985, your food. drinks, salad, appetizers blah blah blah, come out as ordered… I mean everybody gets whatever they ordered  right? Right. However, the waiters bring out the food whenever they feel like it to whoever they feel like bringing it out, in no particular order. At least no order that we could ever ascertain. For example my dad might get a big bowl of sukiyaki beef. 10 minutes later I would get a salad. Mom got a pot of tea. I didn't get anything to drink but was served some soup. Annabelle got some bread. 20 minutes later Jim would receive ton katsu. We ate together in the sense that we were at a table together, but we did not eat together chronologically. The chronology was lost in translation. This happened in every restaurant every day and we were always confused. This is sort of like how chemo-killed hair departs and comes back on your body. 

For a while I seemed to lose all my hair EXCEPT my eyelashes. People exclaimed "oh wow you have your eyelashes, you're so lucky!" I would bat them coquettishly and smile to myself and think Ha ha ha, at least I get to keep my eyelashes and wear mascara! Surely that will keep anyone from thinking I have cancer. 

Well, now that the hair all over the rest of my body is coming back, and my head isn't completely bald (although my eggy appearance doesn't stop people from saying to each other once I walk sort of out of earshot "oh my gosh does your mom has cancer or something!?") my eyelashes decided to jump ship. All but one of them fell out, the one remaining one sticking up straight from the middle of my left eye like a freakish acid trip windshield wiper.

3. Eyelashes don't grow in a thin even line like eyeliner or fake lashes.

There is not a single line of eyelashes that are planted like telephone poles in a gentle arc along the top and bottom lid of your eye. That is not true! In fact, there is a small forest of them, hundreds and hundreds of them randomly sprinkled about, to pop out little tiny pores all over the top and bottom of your eyelids. It looks like a dirt road or something. How do I know this? Because now, finally, my glacially moving eyelashes are starting to sprout. Let me tell you they grow very very slowly. Here is my cornrow of tiny spider leg starting to sprout in all directions:

(This is super close-up, they are naked to the human eye pretty much right now.)

4. The part of your body that cancer hurts the most is your mind.

Oh yes Virginia, the mind is the same thing as the body, and the worst part of this entire disease is the insidious mind warp that this label of "cancer" inflicts upon the labeled. Once you hear that you have been diagnosed with cancer you flip the freak out. It's like you jumped on a trampoline and jumped and jumped and jumped and then went into orbit and you're spinning over and over and over again and you can never land again. I still spinning. Sometimes I think I'm okay but then I realize that I've got this underlying anxiety that's messing with my sleep my diet my my mood. Or! Maybe what the diagnosis of cancer does is take away all of your scaffolding to show the real you, the scared shitless baby that you really are. Maybe that's it. Anyway what I've learned is the worst of this (so far and no don't test me) is infliction upon the mind.

WHAT IS THE LATEST FINAL PLAN?

Well, the next logical step will be radiation. I am still waiting for someone in the radiation department of radiation to telephone me and schedule my radiation planning session for radiation. Radiation is on my mind. And maybe no one else's?

Friends of mine have just finished it, with varying experiences, of course.  A few have said that they wished that the doctors wouldn't downplay it so much because they have burned and painful skin and that radiation is kind of terrible. 

So I'm compartmentalizing this information, and I have stopped looking at pictures online of radiated fried breasts. I stopped this after looking for 67 seconds at photographs of dark red, and even black, split open ulcerating oozing bloody burned looking breast skin. I know the photographs on the Internet can be exaggerated or only show the worst or the best of something. I don't need a lecture (you know who you are) about not looking up stuff online. I challenge anyone to be diagnosed with a fatal disease and never ever read anything about it on a vast and free network of all information practically ever written about it that you can access with a touch of a finger. Try it.

I also read an interesting article by radiological oncologist that talked about how radiation doesn't actually burn the skin, what it does is inhibit the skin from being able to regenerate itself. So he said that what you see when you see the red and damaged skin is not technically a "burn," but rather it is "missing skin." Huh? I don't get it at all, but I will forage further into the forest of radiation (20 sessions) once I start down that journey, which should start in about two weeks. Maybe one week. I don't know since I'm sitting here by my telephone...

Hello, hello, baby
You called, I can't hear a thing
I have got no service
In the club, you see, see

Wha-Wha-What did you say?
Oh, you're breaking up on me
Sorry, I cannot hear you
I'm kinda busy

K-kinda busy
K-kinda busy
Sorry, I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy

Just a second
It's my favorite song they're gonna play
And I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh
You should've made some plans with me
You knew that I was free
And now you wont stop calling me
I'm kinda busy

--- Lady Gaga