In Which I Get Cut Down to Size

                It has been a busy couple days on the breast cancer front. Heck, it’s been a busy couple days on every front. The high-schoolers are taking their AP exams, and the fourth-grader just did his CTP tests. It is the end of the lacrosse, track, and baseball seasons, which means playoffs. My oldest son, Sean, is graduating in two weeks, and that means meetings, dinners, breakfasts and parties. Oh, and John is in China.

                Yesterday was also the finale—we all hope—of my long, drawn-out breast reconstruction. In the end, the nipple they made out of skin from under my arm was just too big and droopy. So they had to literally whittle it down to size. This they did yesterday afternoon. It took about twenty minutes, after I went to the gym, and before carpool.

                I think I earned my badass credentials yesterday. They do this procedure without any form of anesthesia whatsoever. I had been so convinced that there would be Novocain involved that I did not even bring a flask of huckleberry vodka with me.

                Ha.

                The doctor said, sure, they could numb it, but I wouldn’t feel anything anyway, so why do that?

                I thought about walking out. I pointed out that they had said I wouldn’t feel anything for the tattoo, either, and that turned out to hurt like hell.

                “Oh, lots of people feel the tattoo,” she said. “Nobody feels this.”

                And she went on to demonstrate that, in fact, my inch-wide tattoo circle zone certainly has gotten its feeling back, as nerves have regenerated.  But the actual nipple itself has no feeling at all.

                She was right. It didn’t hurt. But I was wincing and grimacing and holding my breath just the same, because technically, someone was cutting off part of my nipple while I was wide awake and hadn’t had so much as an Advil. My skin might not know enough to hurt, but my brain understood what was going on.

                “I know you aren’t feeling this,” the doctor said, “because you are wincing at all the wrong times.  I already did the cutting. It’s done.”

                And so it was.  I felt the stitches, though. Ouch. Although it was more the weird sort of sensation that, for example, you have when you have a C-section. You feel someone pulling at you, and while it doesn’t actually hurt, you know what they are pulling on is your guts, and your brain tells you it probably hurts anyway. “Creepy” doesn’t cover it.

                So I did earn my badass wings yesterday. I got my stitches, utterly unmedicated, and went out and drove carpool and watched a track meet got the boy a haircut and took him to his piano recital. I got the cookies there on time, and I didn’t forget to feed him. And I had already seen my trainer in the morning. At about 9pm, when I finally got my glass of wine, I sat down and fell asleep. Being a badass is exhausting.

                The upshot of all this is the boobs look pretty good now. Truly. If you look you can see some surgical scars, but they are the kind that anybody who has had any “work” done on their breasts would have. And a lot of it is on the underside anyway, so you wouldn’t see it unless you were, well, looking from a fairly interesting angle. Otherwise they are pretty normal -looking breasts. This is amazing to me. I believe if I waited until the stitches were out, I could show up at the clothing-optional hot springs and get naked and nobody would probably notice anything amiss at all.

                Well, if I am being completely honest, I should admit that the “real” breast is a little bigger than the “fake” one right now. That’s because I’ve put on ten pounds, mostly from comfort eating in the wake of my mom’s death. And if I gain weight the “real” breast gets bigger.  The other one is like the boob of Dorian Gray. It stays the same, while everything else grows or shrinks or sags around it. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s just added incentive to not let my weight get out of control. Otherwise, it’s all good. In fact, the girls are downright perky. Take that, stupid cancer!

                Flying the metaphorical bird at stupid cancer has been the other theme of the week. Saturday morning was the Race for the Cure here in DC, and our family participated as Team Honey Badger.

                John and our son, Sean, ran the 5k race. John actually ran in serious fashion. He came in 26^th overall, second in his age group, which made him very happy. He was beaten by one of Sean’s friends from school, Manny, which made him happy.  And he was beaten by one very perky breast cancer survivor woman, which no doubt made her very happy.

                I did not run; I walked with my younger kids. It was the third time I had done the Race for the Cure, but only the first time I had done it since developing breast cancer myself.  What was different?

                The race was certainly smaller than it used to be. There was a story in the Washington Post that said there were about 21,000 people formally registered to run. That’s a lot fewer than the last time I ran, and 6,000 fewer than last year, according to the Post. They quoted Komen as saying the shrinkage was due not only to the kerfuffle over Planned Parenthood getting money from Komen, but also the economy, the number of competing breast cancer events that are now available, and the fact that the U.S. Park Service asked Komen to move the race from June to Mother’s Day weekend.               

                Of course, this race was way different for me, personally. For me, it was much less about the race and race times, and much more about the ambiance.

                In the weeks before the race, the Komen organization had survivor volunteers call each survivor racer, including me, and it was actually good to talk with that woman. I have not participated in any formal support groups; the only networking I’ve done is talking with women at church or at school who have been through this. It probably would have been a good idea to have done more of that.

                The Komen people gave cancer survivors special shirts and hats, and laid on a nice breakfast for us. They handed out lots of pink bling. Pink Mardi-Gras beads and flags and water bottles and whatnot. Most of us were pinked-out already, so this was pretty much a waste of money and energy, as far as I was concerned.

                It was good to be there, though. It was great to see all the survivors, who were clearly color-coded a darker shade of pink. It was nice, when, at the end of the race, a volunteer, a young black guy, college age, handed me a pink medal for surviving and looked me in the eye and congratulated me as if he meant it.

                It seemed to me there were many, many more survivors in evidence since the last time I had done the race, ten years ago. Quite a few of them were older people, who clearly were surviving for the long haul. This was personally very encouraging to me. Often, breast cancer feels like a death sentence, though it may be a delayed one. These women were very much alive.

                It was fun taking photos. Photos of us, photos of total strangers, photos FOR total strangers, and they took photos of us. Here are bald women with pink deely-boppers. Here is an 18-year-old guy in a pink tutu. Here is a woman in a pink cowboy hat with all her kids! It was all very jovial and it was fun to declare a joint, “Fuck you!” to cancer.

                It was particularly lovely to be there with all my children. When my daughter posted photos of us on Face book and said, “Love you mommy,” it made me cry, but in a good way.

                It was hard when they had the sheets of paper where you write the names of who you are running in celebration of or in memory of.  I used to have one name to write down:  my mother-in-law, Diane.  Now I have more than I can list. Something is wrong with this picture, and we have to find out what it is. The club has gotten way too big.

                One thing I would suggest is that Komen re-design the walking route. There was a massive bottleneck near the beginning of the walk, which led to crowding, claustrophobia and great uneasiness among some, including my son. Had a Boston-Marathon style loony wanted to try something nasty, this would have been the ideal place to do it. There was no way to get out of there, and it took at least 15 minutes before things opened up.

                The other annoyance I could have done without was a group of loony anti-abortion protesters who planted themselves near the starting line, in the bottleneck area, with HUGE posters featuring graphic photos of, get this, aborted fetuses AND cancerous breasts. Abortion causes breast cancer, they lied. Shame on them.

                Part of me wanted to laugh, because, really, they came to the wrong parade with this one. For one thing, a good proportion of the racers were from churches, mosques and synagogues, not exactly your pro-abortion demographic. But even more funny to me, did they think really they could scare a parade full of cancer survivors with ugly pictures of cancerous breasts? Please. We have seen those pictures before. They were pictures of our own selves, and we have long since gotten over it. And anyway, we do not scare easy.

                But sadly, I did let these morons piss me off. I ended up doing some personal screaming and flipping-off, of which I am not proud, but there it is. I will never be a Gandhi, I guess. I react too much. I particularly resented their graphic tasteless hatefulness in front of so many hundreds of small kids, including mine. I guess the protesters got their martyrdom fix out of it, and I helped because I let them raise my blood pressure. In the end, I ended up comforting myself with the fact that there were 20,000 of us and maybe six of them. And Planned Parenthood is getting our money, so there. Which is a good thing if you are looking to prevent abortions, but these fools were too willfully ignorant to see that.

                In the end, I am glad I went to the Race for the Cure. I was ambivalent at first, because I thought it was ridiculous that Komen would consider pulling funding from Planned Parenthood.  And there has been disturbing press about how much Komen officers are paid, and so on. And I did not really need a big event like this to help me dwell on the fact that I am now one of those pinked-out middle-aged bald women. But I met actual people who had been helped by Komen. The money does help. And my oncologist recently told me that, by the time my daughter is old enough to worry about her genetic predisposition to breast cancer, research will have made the game very different than it is today. That research is what we are paying for even with these silly pink events. Bottom line: my daughter’s life is worth getting pinked out for once in a while.