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.

The Weight of It

Today feels heavy. Not dramatic-heavy. Just the quiet kind — the slow ache that shows up when you’ve been holding it together for so long you’ve stopped noticing the weight.

My best friend just had a mastectomy. She’s in the beginning of it — everything raw and new and terrifying. She doesn’t want to take the medication. She doesn’t want the side effects. She doesn’t want to feel like shit all the time. And god, I get it. I sat with her while she cried and I felt that weird cocktail of heartbreak and… something else I’m still trying to name. Maybe grief. Maybe frustration. Maybe just the quiet hope that she finally — finally — gets it. Gets what it’s been like for me.

Because I’m not sure anyone ever really did.

And I never wanted anyone to have to understand. But sometimes I wish they could see the full picture. The surgeries. The complications. The fear I didn’t perform out loud. The years of just trying to feel okay in a body that hasn’t felt okay in a very long time.

Here’s the thing about me: I didn’t cry when I was diagnosed. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t fall apart. I just did the next thing. And the next thing after that. And honestly, I’m still doing that — checking boxes, holding pieces, waiting to exhale. I’m not sure I’ve actually processed any of it. I’m not sure I know how.

I’ve been surviving for years. But surviving isn’t the same as living, and I think I’ve known that for a while without saying it out loud.

I show up. I smile. I work. I love my people. But I don’t always feel like I’m in my body. I don’t usually feel good, actually — and that’s a weird thing to admit when everyone sees you as the fun one, the strong one, the one who cracks jokes instead of crying. I’d rather change the subject than sit in sympathy. I genuinely don’t know what to do with it. It makes me squirm.

So I’m not writing this for pity. I’m writing this because I don’t want to forget what this actually feels like — to have survived so much and still just want to feel well. To be allowed a bad day even when you look like you have it together. To want more than survival without having to justify that.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the way I want to. But I’m writing it down anyway.

Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to let someone read it.