Update, and: Guitar? At YOUR age?

                First, here’s a quick update. I just had my two-year mammogram and all is well there, so far. Yay! And gradually, the Frankenboob is looking less awful.  Things haven’t quite shrunk to a normal size, but we are definitely getting there.  We may need to do some tweaking at the end of the day, but maybe not.  I can tell that the breasts are going to look fairly normal and fairly similar to each other, when it’s all said and done, and really, that’s all you need. Don’t worry. I won’t be posting photos!

                There is one other new thing going on. The newest cancer-related bummer is serious arthritis in my hands. My right hand is particularly badly affected, and I of course am right handed. This plays hob with the guitar playing, the painting, the housework, etc., believe me. Yesterday it hurt so bad that I had trouble taking a picture or using my electric toothbrush or opening my front door. I thought I was going to die at the gym. It wasn’t the exercise my trainer was trying to get me to do that was killing me; it was the act of picking up the weights in the first place.

                I had thought this arthritis was just another fringe benefit of getting old. But now my oncologist tells me this is not old age. Rather, it is a side effect of one of my meds, tamoxifen. Now, all the studies show that a person with my type of breast cancer should be on tamoxifen for ten years if possible, to minimize chances of the cancer recurring.  I have almost two years under my belt. But if the arthritis becomes crippling, I may have to switch medications. We really don’t want to do that. So, in the meantime I am going to try to channel my badass mom, who truly knew how to dismiss pain, and put mind over matter. And I will buy stock in the company that makes Advil. But I swear, if I tell my trainer that I can’t do something she wants me to do because my hand has seized up like the engine in my brother’s Chevy Vega, I am not bullshitting her.  It really hurts.

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                In happier news, there’s music.

                On Friday, the Washington Post Magazine ran an article about a musician, Manny Bernardo, who runs a music school in Bethesda called Middleway Music Studio. He teaches people—mainly adults—to play the guitar. I stumbled on this article while sitting in a car repair shop in Derwood, waiting for new tires for the Mommymobile. It charmed me because it was almost exactly a year ago when, at the age of 49, I started taking guitar lessons from Jeff Burnett at Rocketeria in Olney. And as I later learned, Manny Bernardo is Jeff’s jazz duet partner, and they are of course friends.

                Reading this article, it was gratifying to learn how many persons like me turn to the guitar fairly late in life. I am the only one I know of, personally. I understand that Rocketeria has many other adult students, but I am not to the point yet where I attend any of their jam sessions or socialize with them. For me, the reality is this:  listening to my fourth-grader, Matt, who has been taking lessons for a couple years and is a much better player than me. He is at this moment practicing his version of “Blackbird” by the Beatles for the school talent show next month.

                But while it was nice to learn that there is precedent for grown men and women suddenly picking up the guitar, on the other hand, this article was also kind of annoying. The writer and/or the editors played up their theory that middle-aged people who decide to learn to play the guitar probably harbor fantasies of playing in a rock band. The article was titled “Rock Dreams.” It compared the Middleway Music Studio to Jack Black’s “School of Rock.”

                This did not ring true to me. And I thought it was a little condescending. Do I have rock n’roll fantasies?  Not so much. Or at least, it is a lot more complicated than just that. But it got me to thinking about why was I doing this, anyway?

                God knows, I harbor no secret desire to rock an arena. Please. I have not taken leave of reality. I have no wish to be Joan Jett or Pat Benatar. I get that I am a middle-aged semi-bald housewife, who does not know how to sing, and has other things to do all day, and I’m fine with all of that except the bald part. But that is not why I wanted to learn to play the guitar, and I bet it’s not why a lot of these other grownups are taking guitar lessons, either, whatever the Washington Post features desk may think.

                I can’t pick out just one reason I started taking guitar lessons. There are probably three or four different reasons.

                I signed up for lessons after two of my kids had already been taking lessons for some months. This was about a year after I was diagnosed with cancer. At that point, we were not at all sure how the cancer thing was going to turn out. So I started working on my bucket list. Learning the guitar was on that list.

                I had tried to learn guitar twice in the long-ago past, once in college and once in grad school, and I totally fizzled at it. I was working two jobs and going to school, didn’t have time to practice, didn’t really have the money for lessons. My friend who tried to teach me was a great guitar player but not a great teacher. I am sure my practicing annoyed my roommates. Whatever the reasons, I washed out, twice. But when I got cancer, I realized, I can’t die without learning how to play the guitar.

                Happily, I have turned out to be a very slow learner.

                Now, in the middle of this Post article, there is one quote from Manny Bernardo that gets at something a little deeper than rock n’roll envy. He says his adult students are mostly busy professionals. He talks about how he keeps the boring practice drills to a minimum with his adult students, because they have enough boring technical stuff to do in their day-to-day life already. He says, “Music is the way for them to make a connection with something that is almost quasi-spiritual.”

                I am sure the bankers and lawyers featured in the Post article get this point. It may feel soulless to them to spend their days racking up billable hours. It certainly feels soulless pretty often to me to spend my life driving the Mommymobile around Montgomery County to soccer games and orthodontists’ appointments. But music is art, and art is the opposite of soullessness--even the art of very crappy beginner guitar playing.

                What is art, anyway? It depends on what day it is. Sometimes it is communication. Sometimes it is just self-expression. God knows, I paint many pictures that never see the light of day. But sometimes you find one that speaks to a friend, and that moment is golden. Music is a lot like this. It has the potential to be beautiful and communicative (at least someday, I keep telling myself). But maybe right now the only person on the hearing end of the equation is God himself, that’s valid too. It says in the book of Romans that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us in sighs too deep for words. I believe music can be like that. It can be a means of grace.

                Now, this year has been really hard, in a lot of ways. One of my kids has been sick, another injured. My brother and I both have cancer. And both my best friend’s mom and my mom died in the last several months. Loss is sometimes beyond words. But maybe not beyond music. My goddaughter played the piano at her grandma’s funeral. She played the tuba to cheer me up after my mom died. My friends took me out dancing after we had my mom's funeral. That’s what music is for. That's why you have music at funerals.

                Of course, most of the time, it’s not that dramatic. Usually, music is just quietly beautiful, and beauty is something to steep oneself in. Nothing wrong with that. As it says in the book of Philippians, “Beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  If excellence comes in the form of a song by Emmylou Harris or the Beatles or a wonderful harmonica solo or some great line by Bob Dylan, that’s fine with me. Let’s wallow in that for a while.               

                It also turns out that learning something new is just good for your brain. Learning music is good for fighting chemo brain, it turns out. Chemo brain is where the very toxic chemotherapy drugs take out mass quantities of your brain cells. It particularly messes up the parts of your brain that are in charge of organization and planning. My friends can tell you I was never good at those things and now, God help me, I am truly a mess. But academic studies are now coming out that show that cancer patients with chemo brain can help themselves regenerate the old brain cells by learning new things and engaging in the arts. Learning to make the right hand do one thing while the left hand does another and the eyes try to stay on the right line of music and the brain tries to remember what those notes are and what the words are—that is all really good for your poor brain cells. Ha!

                In some hazy future, it might also be helpful in a more mundane way. Maybe someday I will want to play a song at church. And, as I am still trying to figure out what I will do when I grow up, one thing I have considered is a program at the Wesley Theological Seminary in DC called Theology and the Arts. It prepares people who are planning to go into some kind of ministry to address the connections between faith and the arts. By “arts,” they mean music, writing, drama, visual art, and dance. And various hospitals around here have programs to train people who want to work with cancer patients, including art therapy options. Now, I am mostly a painter, but if I end up doing one of these programs, it might come in handy to be able to play the guitar and/or read music. Again, ha! Way opens, as the Quakers say. Sometimes the parts of the puzzle are falling into place before we even realize they ARE parts of the puzzle.

                And, at the end of the day, playing the guitar is just fun. I don't need to be on a stage to have fun with this. Sitting in my office playing, or singing with Jeff in his practice room at Rocketeria, is just plain fun. Nothing wrong with that, either!  It makes my blood pressure go down, I can feel it. I find myself smiling hours later. As Dr. Seuss wrote, in One Fish Two Fish, “Did you ever fly a kite in bed? Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head? Did you ever milk this kind of cow? Well, we can do it. We know how. If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

Not even funny

                Well, forget anything I said in my last post about getting naked at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs, or any other public place, for a very long time. I guess I had understood, intellectually, that it would take a few months before this process was finished, and this stupid breast would be presentable. But I had no clue how unpresentable it would be for now.

                We are talking absolutely gross, here. Sideshow freaky. I may never get naked again.

                Stop reading right now if surgical detail makes you queasy, or if you have, or have ever had, any vested interest in having sex with me. This is nasty. And John should probably just stop right now and get on a plane and go to China for a while.

                I went back to the plastic surgeon today to get the stitches out, or most of them, anyway. The plastic surgery nurse sat me down and talked to me quite seriously before she got to unwrapping me. She really didn’t want me to freak out when I saw myself.

                Just know, she said, that we make the nipple big. Way too big. It’s going to look seriously, much too big. It’s supposed to be really, really too big. Because as it heals, it shrinks, and it’s your own tissue as well, so your body just absorbs it right up. We have to make that nipple just HUGE so that there’s something left at the end of the day. Because it would just suck if we did all this surgery and anesthesia and such and in the end, that nipple just disappeared.

                Oh, and if it turns out in the end that we made the nipple too big, we can always just trim it later.

                I have never heard the words “trim” and “nipple” used together that way, a verb and an object. I thought I was freaking out at that point, but then they had me actually look at this nipple, because they wanted to show me how to change the bandage. I am expecting “big,” as in thick, or swollen. But what is there is long. Long and dangly.

                Okay, NOW I’m freaking out.

                “It looks like a penis dangling off there,” I stammered.

                “I’ve heard it called a ‘troll penis,’ before, actually,” the nurse admitted.

                My surgeon, who I share some degree of camaderie with by this point, explained helpfully that she sewed it on the good way. Sew it on the other way, she said, and not only would it look like a troll penis—but it would have bent the other way, and actually it would have looked like a troll erection.

                Good God.

                 I mean, it was funny, but I felt like crying.

                “I promise you, I promise you, it will shrink,” the nurse says.

                It had damn well better shrink. It had better get “absorbed.” It will have to be the kind of “absorption” that happens fast and loud, like when my kid slurps up spaghetti noodles, one at a time, like a retractable cord retracting. Because this is hideous.

                I have never been unhappy with my body, ever, really, that I can remember. But I’m pretty unhappy with it now. This is by far, the worst that any part of me has ever looked. Even the radiation burns were less gross than this. I would run away screaming myself, if I could.

                Do apple trees feel like this when we graft things onto them?

                Now, the surgeon and the nurse were just delighted with how this thing is looking. Really pleased. There is no sign of infection whatsoever. Great blood flow. Everything is hunky dory. I understand I should be happy about this, and that instead of trying not to cry because of how revolting it is, I should be amazed at what medical science can do. But I’m not.

                They showed me an elaborate system for rebandaging this thing every day. It involves special sticky sealers and up to 20, yes, 20, layers of gauze, every time I shower, with a cut-out made for the troll penis with a sharp pair of scissors that I have sterilized with alcohol first. We have to keep this monster swaddled straight, too, pointed exactly front-and-center, or it could go crooked and stick like that forever.

                I am not making this up. They had to show me how to aim and focus my bra so that we don’t get any drift.

                Now I am sitting here afraid to move, basically. What if I pick up a basket of laundry and whack this thing? What if reach up on the high shelf (where the Scotch is, maybe) and I pop a seal? Maybe I just need an armored Madonna-style pointy bra, like the Amazon women in the trashy comic books.

                For the first time, I seriously wonder whether I should have done the whole reconstruction thing at all. For what? For this?

                I asked, when can I go back to the gym?

                “In a couple of weeks,” the surgeon says. “Nothing that involves bouncing.”

                Walking yes, running no. Friction is bad as bouncing, and bouncing is right out. So the fitness gains I had made are pretty much going out the window, too.

                I don’t feel like bouncing, anyway.