This Body is Bullshit

Seven

Let me back up.

After sepsis — or “after,” in the loosest sense of the word, because I don’t think my body ever actually fully came back from it — the expanders had to come out. My surgeon decided my body was rejecting them. So back into the OR. New expanders in. That lasted a few weeks before he decided to just move straight to implants.

Technically, fine. But nobody mentioned he was going to cut me from my chest all the way around to my back. I woke up with a scar I didn’t know I was getting. My body was already beat to hell from sepsis and healing at the speed of someone twice my age, and now this. The tightness. The pressure. The constant low-grade wrongness of it.

I went back to work. I functioned. I smiled. You know how this goes by now.

At some point I noticed something near my chest. Thought it was a cyst. It had been there a while — two years, maybe. I mentioned it. Got brushed off. Everyone seemed pretty unbothered by it. Eventually I saw a new doctor who took one look and said let’s take that off.

It wasn’t a cyst.

It was cancer.

I had already had a mastectomy. The cancer was supposed to be gone. I had already done the grief work of losing my breasts, survived reconstruction, survived sepsis, tried to find some version of normal — and the whole time, for two years, I was walking around with cancer still in my body. And nobody caught it.

I don’t even have words for that. I’ve tried.

Another surgery to remove it. Then radiation — thirty-one days in a row. Then the latissimus flap, where they take muscle and skin from your back to rebuild your chest. More expanders. More drains. Another infection. Another setback. Back in for more.

Seven surgeries. Total. For breast cancer alone. That’s not counting the hysterectomy, the oophorectomy, the gallbladder. My abdomen has been cut across twice. My body has been opened and closed so many times I’ve lost count of the drains and the stitches and the mornings waking up groggy in a hospital gown wondering what was new and broken this time.

I felt like a project nobody could finish.

And through all of it, I looked fine. That’s the thing people don’t understand about this. You look fine, you must be fine. You’re smiling, you must be okay. Meanwhile my body felt foreign and tight and heavy and nothing like mine, and I was just quietly living inside it trying not to make it weird for everyone else.

This is what survivorship actually looks like. Not pink ribbons. Not bell-ringing. Not the inspirational before-and-after. It’s missed diagnoses and infection and scar tissue and side effects you’ll be managing for years. It’s never getting to feel done. It’s the next thing, always the next thing, and somewhere along the way you just stop being surprised by it.

I’m still here though.

I haven’t quit.