Post-mastectomy

How little must one cry to qualify as brave?

You had a long weekend booked to Edinburgh. Its fall, the boys have a school break, and you have a valid UK visa. But instead, you are sitting up in a hospital bed, with your body in full revolt. It wants out. To leave. To be left alone.

But people are peering at your - what do you call it now? – chest? They are touching something where there was something else, and now it’s gone. You are numb. The nerves no longer exist.  And yet your insides are squeezed breath in a vise. You’ve been a good soldier so far. Done what you’ve been told to do, unpleasant thought much of it has been. You’ve joked with the anesthesiologist as he’s been about to send you under. And whenever the oncologist asks how you’ve been, you answer, “well,” even though you are both aware that it’s an inane exchange.

 But you have come to this moment, when despite all good sense you no longer want to play along. No, to the needles and creams and gauze and staring eyes and probing fingers. Yet, your mouth forms a slavish “thank you.” And you know then what it is to be stripped of volition. Of bodily integrity and autonomy. And the tears are welling, even though you push them back with levee-hands. But they will not be held. They erupt, roll through the “thank yous,” in an avalanche of bewilderment and pain. And most of all in protest of the loss of consent. Of your ability to say, “stop it.” Because your wants are but tissue paper dissolving under the fluids of the drains that have sprouted inside your body and empty into sloshing, crimson bags you must empty and measure. And there is the ruin of your pitted chest, so present in its absence.  

Don’t cry. It doesn’t help. True, that. Does it help to cry when you are being raped? Does it help to cry when you are being mutilated? Does it help to cry when you must accept and be brave?

But how little must one cry to qualify as brave? A few tears in the bathroom? A gulped sob when your children are playing video games? Does a solitary tear still qualify you as courageous? Do two?

Where is this endless source of tears anyway? You never knew your body hid a glacier.

Then the dressing is over. It was only a few minutes. Your shirt is back on. And you breathe in a few times, deeply like the meditation app taught you. And you find your way back to yourself and wonder at the complexity of being human, for humanity is ever so confounding. A mess of intertwined opposites: living and dying, inhaling and exhaling, softening and hardening.

Thank God for Jasmine tea. And cats. And golden leaves. There are things you may not be able to refuse. But luckily there are others you can embrace. And best of all – you can write even when supine.

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Dear Global Jigsaw Community Writing gives me some agency over this process. And there is a strange catharsis o be had in reading about pain. My duo of justifications for this post.

You are free to share and comment.

But also to delete and unfollow if its not the kind of fare you want in your mailbox. I get it.

Although I must tell you that the next post will be by the fabulous Ananya Jahanar Kabir on the trials and triumphs of life in the Tower of Babel. It’s a good one, I promise!

Pallavi