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.