LETTING GO -photo by Helen Coetzee
It’s a cliché, but I HAD A DREAM last night. Actually, it was in the 10 or so minutes between waking and rising this morning. I am blogging my way through my experience of breast cancer. Well I only discovered blogging this year and so will have to go all retro on the early stuff. Yes, it’s therapy for me of course but I also want to reach out to other people going through this because talking through all the stages really does help.
Here’s my dream.
There is a meeting. A long, long table with chairs around, blinds at the windows of an ordinary office meeting room. We file in, about 30 of us. The Oncologist enters the room but doesn’t seem to settle on a place at the table. None of us do.
Immediately, we are relocated to the inner city, in the way that dreams can shift seamlessly and with ease. Hundreds of us now, we all sit on stone steps that bank up the steep hill with blackened old buildings at the top and sides. It is pleasantly urban. I feel like I am at a university lecture. Huge sycamore trees with contrasting light bark have lost most of their leaves which now lie on the steps providing bolts of welcome colour. They seem to be on our side. It is damp but not cold.
The Oncologist is talking. I feel like a child though he is younger than me. He becomes quite impassioned, excited by the power he holds over us and our massive presence. There is a sense among the mass that we are not all the same, though we have been summoned here as if we were. We are CANCER and The Oncologist is THE CURE. We are to report our list of treatments and we are to receive the next stage. As he asks for submissions of experience from the massed crowd, our difference becomes clear. Hands rise into the damp air and each voice claims a treatment, brave people conquering fear and confusion, clinging to their faith. They are the anointed, they have walked through the fire of retributive justice, thrown everything in the arsenal of toxic war waged upon the alien cancer cells that rose up to destroy them.
And The Oncologist salutes them. He is rallying the mass, justifying their suffering, telling them that in following orders they have dealt the blow they crave. He fires up, raises his fist in the air and is shouting about reaching every single last corner of the empires that are our flesh, every cellular outpost – “And I will seek and destroy every last trace of cancer….”
To my right just below where I am sitting, a swathe of the mass begin to boil and move, dissatisfied. Murmurs become a chant and in turn the people rise to their feet. Moving down the grey stone steps as one they turn their heads away and leave the assembly. They are singing, low and simple, “We don’t know you anymore,” over and over.
Then a voice pipes up. Her mouth isn’t working properly, the left side appears to be anesthetized and flaps stupidly, spoiling a crisp delivery. But she is straining to be heard, and winning nevertheless. The Oncologist is rising to a frenzy in the face of the dissenting party but her words are challenging his in mid-air, gaining momentum. Other people to the left and to the right, above and below, begin to pop up, arms raised freely. Mouth gaping to the left and chest hurting with the effort, she bellows –
She bellows in her heart. She wants to take The Oncologist by the hand and ask him not to be disapproving, not to doubt her, not to be worried for her. She needs to find her own way of dealing with this most personal of diseases. She grew it, she owns it, she will transform it. Don’t try to frighten me with your statistics. You don’t tell me of those who follow your orders and still don’t ‘beat’ this thing. So work with me. Let me be free. You want to be free.
It is only a little voice, trembling on the air.”You are trying to give us a guarantee that is not yours to give! You cannot say we will never have cancer again. You don’t know, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW.” And you don’t know me anyway.
I wake, my mouth flapping and my chest hurting. It’s 5 days since I had stage one of reconstructive surgery. I went under feeling incredibly fit and well. My chest wound had healed so well and I had strength once more. I have navigated difficult decisions and arrived at a place of confidence as great as anybody can really have It was harder to get up on the table this time than it was last. It was elective surgery. So why put myself through it?
At first, I didn’t think I would ever go for it. I said stuff like, “They’ll only be speed bumps, they won’t be real.” I was in mourning. We women can’t help but have such a complicated relationship with our bodies. We ask so much of them. Our ladyhumps particularly. Ask any mum who has breastfed and you will get that dismissive ‘Well, they’re never gonna be the same again are they?’ No, they are not! But to lose them completely……that was something different again. And then when I could see the years still to come unfolding before me, it started to seem like a long time to do the penance of the staunch. I don’t want to hold on to the anger and the shock anymore. Despite reassurances that I was no less of a woman, there was still the private moment I step into a bath, the secret throwing away of the naughty nighties, the sudden disappearance of the thrill of a hotel night.
This is difficult to admit but let’s get real. I think we are adult enough don’t you? So I’m taking a cue from those women brave enough to chase their fantasies and take what’s available – breast cancer or not. It’s going to take a couple of months to achieve a result initially, then a year or so before completion. And when it’s done I shall be wearing a super-sexy-cool t-shirt which you will be able to purchase from my website, in aid of breast cancer awareness. It will say –
THE RACK IS BACK
below the equator 