When you have a health issue there is just so much information that can fit in your head. I’ve sat here in front of a screen for hours, over many days trying to put words together, trying to string moments together like beads on a necklace but nothing felt right or fit.

On July 18, I found myself in a small hospital on the North Shore of Long Island, it’s where the plastic surgeon works to revise previous initial reconstruction surgeries. When I tell people that I had another surgery, they are shocked: People think that after a breast reconstruction, post-mastectomy, it’s all done. But from my first experience in 2004, I learned that wasn’t true, it takes months to complete requiring about four procedures.

I had the usual pre-surgery anxiety weeks before, up until the last minute. I was scheduled to be at the hospital at 2:00 PM after having fasted from midnight the previous night. I was called and asked to come in an hour earlier. There’s paperwork and intake and all the “here we go again.” Then there is the assembly line, waiting to go into an operating room, the triage. Several patients are separated by curtains, the energy is building, crackling, you know the anesthesia is waiting. In the next bed, behind a curtain, was a Spanish-speaking woman whose doctor was explaining what was going to happen: he held a phone, on the other end was a translator. The doctor was yelling into the phone which was being held up to the woman, then the translator would yell back.

Lots of yelling. With each word, in English, then Spanish I felt an assault, for myself and the woman behind the curtain.

“I am going to remove both breasts and your lymph nodes and test the lymph nodes to see if the cancer has spread…does she understand?”

I don’t think the woman behind the curtain fully understood that she was about to have a double mastectomy, but I did, and the curtain, symbolic of our boundary began to melt and I became that woman, trying to make sense of what was going to happen, trying to make sense of what did happen in 2004 and again in 2023, trying to comprehend that I was not facing the big surgery again, no, that was behind me; this was a mop-up surgery, a refining, a corrective one that would ostensibly make me look more “normal.” But, I still didn’t get it, I melted into the words of another doctor and I absorbed them, they became part of me and then … I … just … lost … it.

I heard the words that weren’t meant for me and they became mine, they permeated me along with the fear and post-trauma of having been on an operating table many times. Many, many times since those first tests in 2004. The body remembers the fear. Here, about nineteen years later, blindsided and in disbelief, it was happening again. This time, in 2023, I was fending for myself, doing it alone. There was no husband—the man who used to live here up until the end of November 2020, was gone in many ways.

I was on my own.

I had the nurse who was near me lower the volume on the speaker of that phone. I pulled myself away from the clutches of the words that were not meant to me, and stood up, naked in front of my surgeon, for him to draw on me with purple marker.

At least here I didn’t have to walk into the operating room, I was wheeled in and shifted to the table. There are always lots of people, bright lights, like a party, a celebration, but, it’s always cold, so that if you had a set of nipples they’d be standing on end.

I gave in: I grabbed the OR nurse, Maria’s hand, and didn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go. I needed a connection to someone who was somehow related by circumstance even if it was due to a job. I hate having an oxygen mask, it makes me hyperventilate especially when my heart is already bashing against the other side of the chest wall that would be, on the outside, cut up again, tacked, stitched, recreated to fool cancer into thinking that it had lost.

It had lost. So why wasn’t I at the party?

Wait, now I am in recovery.

I saw a clock that said 5:00 pm but it wasn’t until about 10:00 that I decided I had a choice, to demand to stay over one night or haul myself off the gurney with the help of three nurses and go home in the middle of a heat wave. I felt like a bus hit me as opposed to the initial surgery when it felt like a semi hit me.

I went home.

This time there would be no live-in aides. I was fending for myself, figuring it out as I went, managing, dealing and coming face-to-boob with another reconstruction in the mirror. I mean, really, is a mastectomy so bad? So, they scoop out the tissue that can kill you and stuff the created pocket with your abdominal, or your thigh fat so no one looking at you would ever know. But you know, you know the fear that lives in that harvested fat that just gets moved to another place within you, fat that keeps the memory and thumbs its nose at cancer that was not supposed to return especially not in this different form.

It all heals. Slowly. It takes weeks and each day has an issue of some kind. A drain, again. Stitches, grafts. The ooze. Future tattooing: 3-D nipple art is what they do now around the origami skin fold that simulates the real thing.

When you are a little child you learn who you are and that you live in a body, a body that you, at one point in your young life, suddenly realize has consciousness. That sudden realization is that you had a past — that you might not remember, and that you will have a future —  that you cannot imagine. You are a child: pristine, perfect, living in the present, never getting caught up in what could happen. It is a life of moment to moment, a string of bead moments, linked as Zeno’s Conundrum: will the beads of time ever touch, be contiguous, lead one out of childhood to this place that was never imagined or imaginable, where everything changes, and yet, the child within always stays the same?

📌That series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey
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