Driving to Abbotsford every day gives me too much time to think. Being at home I can concentrate on the computer or the TV or anything else. Driving I have nothing to do but listen to my thoughts. Not even playing my music at a deafening volume can drown them out. The last few days they’ve been playing the same loop over and over.
Now that I have no stitches and no more surgeries, now what? There’s no pain to try and overcome, no new ‘experience’ I need to prepare for. All there is is me, boobless, hairless. I can’t handle implant surgery again, not any time soon anyway. It was too painful and I’m so over being in pain. Frankly I can’t handle the implants. The one I had never felt right, but the ‘look’ would have been there. And I so wanted the ‘look’. And I would have put up with the way they felt for the ‘look’. Now I have to find a new ‘look’, prosthetics. (I’ve never liked that word). At least with implants they would have been part of my body. Prosthetics come off. My outward appearance will be ok, but I’m not sure of the inside yet. I think because now I’m permanently ‘flat’ I may be mourning the loss of a part of me that I’ll never get back, not even superficially.
I wonder too, has this experience with cancer changed me? Am I more fearful or more bold? Am I more cynical or more happy-go-lucky? Will I have more empathy for people in crisis or less? If I’m really lucky I may not have changed at all.
Then while I’m driving, trying to drown out my thoughts I become overwhelmed by all that has happened to me because of cancer, knowing that it will never really be gone from my mind. I’ll have hormone therapy for the next 5 years or so and lots of follow-up appointments to remind me. And every morning when I wake up and remember that I’m boobless, I’ll be reminded. Life as I knew it is definitely over and I’m slowly working at fitting myself into this new one I was given but did not want.