adjusting

Since the first surgery I have felt like a foreigner in my own skin. It has horrified to me know that just a week ago I lay, skin open on an operating room table while a sterile, stainless nozzle washed away what couldn't be scraped, an abrupt push of fluid coursing over me, antiseptic. I have felt vulnerable and damaged, like confidence and sexuality were flushed from my system with so many bits of ruined tissue. As though those things were located in a particular place-- not in some sense of vanity about my body, but in it's relative normality, in the simple, predictable, reality that all the pieces were there. 
I was so sure I wasn't that attached to my breasts, but now, as I contemplate this unbalanced physicality, I cannot but think how, as little as I may have liked my them, as little as I thought of them, they lent me at least a little of the stuff of womanhood. It would be easier if it weren't just one missing. The severe asymmetry is something in and of itself to contend with.
I once imagined that after a mastectomy, the chest would be flat, as though the only thing cut away was the protrusion of the breast itself. In reality, the wall of muscle that wraps around ribs is scraped, muscle and fat pulled from the collar bone to the shoulder, just inside the armpit, and across to the sternum, so what is left behind is concave, a palpable gap, a shallow sinkhole. This was all done as the first step of my first surgery. The reconstruction then filled in the empty space, or at least most of it. Last Monday was the undoing of the reconstruction, a step back to square one.
My v-neck shirts hang, skewed in such a way that the entire collar lies too far to the right, exposing sometimes all, sometimes just the outer edge of the concavity. This is a difficult adjustment. Still, something about it looks safer, cleaner, less damaged than what held its place so recently. In that way, it is easier to interact with my body in ways I once took for granted, mostly showering, and dressing. Still, the absence startles me on occasion, as I sit holding a book open and reach across my body with my free right hand for the cup of tea steeping on the end table to my left, when I turn onto my side in bed and my arm slumps, crossing over me on it's drop toward the mattress.
For now, I have finagled a temporary solution that makes it easier for me to be out in the world, minimizes the sense that my body is a sideshow spectacle.
Strangely enough, for all the difficulty these repeated adjustments have brought, I'm finally settling in. At least at this point I know what's in store.

Let the chemo countdown begin.