Boobiversary

I woke up yesterday at 4am for no reason. It wasn't too hot. It wasn't too cold. No child needed blankets put back on or an extra snuggle. I was just all of a sudden, awake. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was bothering me.

So I grumpily rolled over and over and over again until a child requested my presence for breakfast. I moped around all day, trying to be productive. We went for a neighborhood bike ride, then hung out in the beautiful and warm sunshine for a few hours. I weeded. I played badminton with the kids. We colored. I started doing a planned, larger project of laying gravel in the front of the house.

I was making sandwiches and tears just rolled down my face. What is going on here?, I thought to myself. I chalked it up to being stuck home for the fifth month due to increasing cases of coronavirus during this blasted pandemic and tried to move on.

But the feeing ate at me. I was incomplete. There was a void. It was something.

I sat on my back porch after hours of hauling and spreading rocks and my phone dinged with a reminder to water the plants. I saw the date as my phone lit up. July 25.

July 25.

It has been one year since I had my right boob cut off, I thought immediately, feeling a kind of peace knowing I figured out what was eating at me all day.

But the overwhelming thoughts of the past year bubbled up to the surface and I let myself cry, still enjoying the sun on my face. It did not seem that long ago and yet it seemed forever. After a few minutes of tears I remembered the very first support group I went to, where one woman described how she mourned her lost breasts after a double mastectomy. I distinctly remember thinking, "I won't ever do that, I don't care if I have breasts or not." In fact, I am sure its in a blog here somewhere.

But I think it was something larger than that. Maybe it wasn't the actual mourning of the lost breast in physicality but something bigger. The mourning isn't just over that one physical loss, its about losing the control over our bodies and having to decide something we did not ask for or plan for. For me, the hardest part was not losing something. It wasn't even the surgery or recovery part. It was the decision process and finding out there was cancer hiding in a place no one detected it. And maybe it is even the daily reminder that I no longer have something that was original to me due to something that wasn't supposed to be in my body.

I texted my friends to say thank you for their support (and penis cactus, which I am happy to say I haven't killed yet). I texted my parents to thank them and immediately got responses about how uncomfortable my father was in receiving a text that said "Happy Boobiversary to me" and my mom replied that she doesn't remember dates like that and that I should be happy that I have my health.

Yeah, I am happy to have my health. That should go without saying. But I loathe the suggestion that the whole process and journey is behind me. The path is behind me. That lump in the road is behind me. But I am still on the journey. My brain is obviously still processing or I wouldn't have woken up a year later at the exact time I had to take a shower with that antiseptic soap to be ready to get to the hospital. The exact time! And yes, I acknowledge it could have been a myriad of things that woke me up, but it is hard to deny that after going through a cancer diagnosis and treatment that your brain would forget the trauma. It doesn't. The rest of it is all me, remembering, thinking, re-thinking, processing some more, and trying to move through it. Not past it but through it.

I know there will be some day that I don't remember with such vivid details July 25. It just wasn't yesterday.