slowly going

Healing is a slow process, and I am impatient. Each day I test the shrinking limits of my arm's reach, prod at the new breast, and feel frustrated that the reaching is painful, that the breast is so hard. I do find joy in my progress and acknowledge that much progress has been made; no doubt many of you have heard about my excitement to now be able to wear pants with zippers and pull-over shirts. More accurately, I can wear one particular pair of pants with a zipper and a rather stretchy fabric waistband - my one attempt to put on jeans was an uncomfortable failure. I could always jump on the 'leggings are real pants' bandwagon for a couple weeks and evade public judgement because so many real pants-haters before me have paved the way for me to leave my house in tights and a t-shirt. But seriously, leggings just aren't real pants.
I can drive again, the liberating result of both taking no pain medication during the day and having had my last surgical drain removed. I can sleep in my bed with my husband and shower and use the stairs when he's not home without fear of becoming light-headed or falling. For the most part I walk like a person without any ailments, and if I wear a bra, no one would know anything had happened to look at me, that thin, thin cup and a sweater sufficiently disguising my malformed, bandaged breast.
I am adjusting to the scar on my butt and how I had anticipated that my underwear would hide it, but they do not (time to invest in some high-waisted granny panties!). The skin feels thick, taught and hard. Sensation is missing which makes the pain that emerges at odd times throughout the day difficult to pinpoint. It's there somewhere, but I can never be sure what I'm touching, pointing out. I spread the contents of a capsule of vitamin e over the scar and my fingers no longer recoil, startled, at the feeling of it - so unlike the rest of me. It feels very thick and looks very thin. 
My effort to regain a full range of motion in my arm is both the most painful, and my favorite part. I can control it. I can practice and work on it, will it to reach, where I can do nothing but wait for my breast to heal. I cannot will the skin to grow any faster, to become less bruised, cannot stretch away the ugliness of it. I can get my arm up over my head but when I do, the resistance starts near my diaphragm and reaches up past my shoulder. I breath deeply and walk my fingers up the wall again. Turn and try to reach up up up with it straight out to my side, feeling a heady mix of pride and defeat when I can get it just above a 90degree angle from my side. "Jason! Look!" while internally it is nothing but, stretch, stretch, stretch, ow ow ow. Too far and I'll only make it worse, by body's reaction a reminder to stop. That it could ever reach as far as the left, which extends with ease until my ear touches my bicep, is a distant reality (I hope).
I want an instruction manual for the first time in my life: "how to manufacture patience for the remarkably impatient patient." Because as wonderful as it is to get out of the house, to see people, to know that I look mostly like my old self, (and it really is wonderful) there's a persistent little flicker in my own mind that I'm not there yet.