what i know

disclaimer: I'm sad. When I made this I assured myself that I would share it only insofar as I trusted that I would still be honest in writing it, so that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not attention-seeking and I certainly don't want to worry anyone, but at the risk of doing both, here goes the honesty. 

At present, I don't feel like I know much about my new body. We met with the plastic surgeon yesterday and he immediately mentioned lifting my untouched left breast to match my mangled right and it sent me into a sobbing tizzy. I don't want more surgery. I didn't want him to make my right breast any perkier or different than the left. That cancer-free left breast feels like a precious thing right about now; I've no interest in meddling. It was the model we were shooting for. Just thinking about it threatens to unhinge me again.
I know I don't like it, what with it's deformities, pains and incompetencies. I know that my right breast is hard and it seems to be in the wrong place, like someone shoved a day-old bagel in there too close to my collar bone instead of soft, malleable fat. I know that it is discolored with bruises. I know by touching the bandage that where I had a nipple, the very thing that made the breast a breast to begin with, I have a circular incision that feels rough and thick. I hope that most of this roughness is glue and not scabbing. I suspect this is wishful thinking as this incision site was used twice - once for the initial surgery and again for the emergency surgery. I know by accident that at the center of this incision is a flap of skin that used to belong somewhere else and that it is grayish pink in color (peripheral vision's a bitch sometimes).
I know that we have indeed arrived at our unimaginable destination. It's real. I get it now. Which is exactly why I can't joke about it anymore. Because now it's my life. In the same way I recoiled when a family member talked in too much detail, too flippantly, about my reconstruction, I am now recoiling from my own callousness. I have never felt so brittle; everything seems to hit a raw nerve. Indeed, they're all raw.
Yesterday after we went to see the doctors, Jason asked if I wanted to get lunch anywhere. I requested a stop at the food co-op so I could get some yogurt, move around a bit, be somewhere familiar doing normal things I did weekly before the surgery. As I struggled out of the car, he stopped me, "Let me see," like a kid leaving for a date or an interview, to make sure my drainage tubes were not hanging out anywhere. "Look at me," I said back to him, "looking just like a regular person doing regular person things." And maybe, just maybe - in spite of the limp, the slow walking pace - I fooled someone into thinking just that.