surgery

Yesterday I had a surgery. The awkward, hard tissue expander that had been in place for months was removed in replaced with a much more breast-like implant.

The tissue expander was an odd, plastic pouch inserted under the muscle at my mastectomy site, slowly inflated by shots into the hard port. It crinkled and made a hollow sound with a strange rippling reverberation against my ribs when I bumped it . As it grew, it was stretched to beyond the size of my natural breast, expanding in an unnatural, somewhat cylindrical protrusion on my chest. It stuck out a bit past my rib cage so that every time I loved my arm, I brushed against it. It was difficult to dress, in its last expansion phase necessitating that I wear my prosthetic breast over top of my natural breast to compensate for the extreme size difference.

Now it is gone, and in its wake is a body that will soon feel much more normal, much less like a construction site, easier to dress, comfortable.

This is an important part of my new normal.

staying, from this end

I've had a lot of people remind me, as though left to my own devices I'd forget, that I'm lucky to have Jason. I know it, and I say it a lot, too. He's good support. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel smart and important. But that's not what they mean, and sometimes it's not what I mean either.

What we all collectively mean, at least sometimes, when we say this is that I'm lucky that he stayed.

I don't know that he even knows the extent of it, but doctors and nurses asked regularly how he was coping and how his coping was affecting me. They were always relieved to hear that I wasn't afraid he'd leave, which is so heartbreaking. Even the women who fitted me for my prosthesis kept reminding me that my husband was going to be so happy. They were wrong about that. He wasn't the one who cared.

It does not say good things about what we expect from men that so many people approach his having stayed with such gratitude and surprise. It insults Jason. It indicates that abandonment is a common experience for a lot of women, so say the nurses, doctors, and prosthesis fitters, most common for women with breast cancer.

On another level, it does terrible things to me. Because I already fell apart about what a burden it was. Because on some level I do not believe that I'm worth the trouble. Because there were times when I wished he would leave me so that he could have the sort of life I wanted him to have. The one he wanted. The one we planned. Because I sat sobbing more times than I can count, cursing the fact that the insurance came through his job, because if it didn't I could have just left, given that he showed no signs of being willing to pick a different life for himself. Because if we all think it's remarkable that he stuck by me, then don't we all think, just a little, that he would have preferred not to? Because if we think that, then aren't we all agreeing that I'm really not worth the trouble?

Because I already feel so fucking lucky and indebted that I'm struggling to consider myself his equal.

So I'm glad that my family is completely head over heels for him. And I'm glad that the people who ask have a positive story to file alongside their collection of bad ones: The Good Man Who Stayed. And I'm glad that on some level I know that he was never going anywhere. What I don't always know is why it was worth staying. But I don't think I can handle another reminder of how lucky I am. But I could take a few that this--that staying--was exactly what we all thought would happen. That it is worthwhile. Because that's the thing I still struggle to believe.

reminders

I knew when I accepted a job at a parochial school that there would be many challenges; as a non-religious person, just this new proximity to people and their faith was foreign territory.
The first time I sat through mass, blood boiling over the hypocrisy of people who would claim to love and forgo judgement praying to their god that others be denied the right to marry, I knew that this promised to be tough in ways I hadn't anticipated.
And then I found myself sitting opposite a slight, plain-faced seventeen-year-old girl and wishing her infertile. I didn't keep wishing it, but for a minute I sent mental daggers and my own meaningless prayer into the universe that experience might teach her what I know that she does not.
She was explaining to me that when she becomes a doctor, she intends to be an activist of sorts, one that does her utmost to halt the twin scourges of abortion and in vitro fertilization. This was how I learned that the Catholic church preaches against the use of in vitro fertilization.
But you have no idea, you are just a child.
I wanted to explain to her that until she has sat on the crumpling paper of an examination table listening to an oncologist tell her that disease makes pregnancy risky and treatment may make it impossible, she cannot possibly write off medial procedures--let alone seek to make them unavailable--for people in circumstances she cannot possibly understand. There is just so very much she does not know.
She wanted me to help her with a college entrance essay, and I did, though my blood seethed thinking of the ways this girl would judge me if she knew anything at all about my life. I bit my tongue carefully, talked about writing conventions.

I work in a place where judgement comes easily, slipping off the tongues of coworkers without a second thought. It is difficult to get through a day without feeling casually judged or picking up little reminders that I am not playing by the right set of rules dropped carelessly by so many of my coworkers.
But generally, my classroom is a little haven of tough questions and good books, of patience and love, a place where value judgements are addressed firmly, with efficiency and sincerity. I suppose that's why it felt like such an affront when this girl attacked something so intensely personal and dear to me.
I don't let them do that to each other; it hadn't occurred to me that I might, however inadvertently, be the target.