This Body is Bullshit

The Part Nobody Saw

December 2020. Diagnosed with breast cancer.

I didn’t fall apart. I made a plan.

By March 2021 I was having a double mastectomy — both breasts removed, expanders put in the same day. I thought that would be the worst of it. I thought that was the scary part.

It wasn’t.

The morning of surgery, Matt drove me to the hospital and dropped me off at the front door. That was the rule — COVID. No one allowed inside. I looked at him before I got out of the car and we both tried to be strong, and I could see it on his face. It broke his heart to leave me there. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. I know him. He cried on the way home — I’d bet everything on it. He would’ve been right next to me holding my hand if they’d let him. Instead he went home and waited and worried and held it all together from the outside while I went in and did it alone.

That’s a specific kind of alone.

About a month later I started feeling sick. Really sick. Convinced myself it was COVID, waited probably too long, and ended up at a local ER. That’s where they told me I had sepsis.

Sepsis was the scariest part of all of it.

My body was shutting down. My veins were collapsing. I remember lying in that hospital bed thinking this is actually it — I survived cancer and I’m going to die from something else. I didn’t tell anyone how bad it was until over a year later because I didn’t want to scare them. That’s what I do. I minimize. I keep the temperature down. But I was on death’s door, and I knew it, and I kept that completely to myself for eight days while I was, again, mostly alone in a hospital because of COVID.

That experience changed something in me that I don’t think ever fully changed back.

I left with a PICC line in my arm and had to keep doing antibiotics for days after discharge. And that was just the beginning. My plastic surgeon — let’s just say he disappeared when things stopped being textbook. When I became a complicated case, he became suddenly unavailable. His PA did a flush in the office that didn’t work. Another surgery. New expanders. More drains. More everything. That surgeon eventually cut me from my chest all the way around to my back, which I was not prepared for and took forever to heal from — my body doesn’t heal fast on a good day, and this was not a good day, or a good month, or honestly a good year.

Seven surgeries total before it was “done.” I put that in quotes because I’m not sure it’s ever actually done.

Through all of it, I kept saying I was fine. The world was already upside down. Everyone was stressed. I didn’t want to be a burden on top of a pandemic. So I smiled when I could and said the right things and people believed me, and I think part of me needed them to.

But nobody really saw it. Nobody saw me almost die. Nobody saw what was happening in those hospital rooms. And somewhere in there I think I just got used to carrying things quietly — like that was my job now. Like that was just who I was.

Sometimes I’m still not sure it isn’t.