How many times in your mind have you envisioned things one way and reality was something else? Totally different? For me, that was my second surgery for breast cancer---my ‘nipplectomy’. In my mind, my partial mastectomy was just to remove the nipple, build up the remaining area of the areola and make a new, though fake, nipple. Reality was still a partial mastectomy by removing the nipple, but the rest was not.
What I saw 63 hours after my surgery made me cry, made me feel like I was damaged goods, defective merchandise (untrue as that thought and statement is and was). My once normal left breast was now this lumpy, bumpy line across my areola, minus a nipple. (Robin said early on that he would get me a pirate’s patch to wear on my right breast and call me “Patch” the pirate. I joking said that that maybe we should add fake eyelashes to my left breast so it would look like I was winking at him. We tried to find humor any way we could to lighten this heavy emotional load I was carrying.)
Surgery was a choice I made to eliminate any LCIS cells that still lay directly behind my once left nipple, in the 2mm margin, that remained from my first surgery. I could have opted to not have the surgery as it is and always was my decision. 50% did the surgery, 50% did not. (Tamoxifen and radiation were a given either way for me.) The choice, the decision was mine to make and mine alone. What could I live with in the long run was the real question.
I chose the surgery because not having it made me feel as though I was playing Russian roulette. As if not having the surgery the 2mm margin that remained would be like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off at some unknown, undetermined point in time in the future. Or not. Maybe nothing would ever happen (I didn’t feel that lucky because nothing about my breast cancer was doing what they said it would do normally.) That by catching it this early I would be cancer free forever. God willing that will be the case. But life is uncertain, and the future still unwritten.
With the surgery over, for now I pray this is the end of this part of the blackened highway---the unknown road of this journey still lies ahead, still unknown, still unmarked, still unlit.
Just as before, I continue to go forward, with no way to go back. Going back is not an option as I cannot turn back the hands of time. I must continue on, no matter how small the steps I travel. To where I don’t know, to become what is still a mystery, chapters of my life yet to be written. Maybe how I handle all of this will determine my path, the length of my journey, the prize that may await me at the end of this battle I’ve fought.
This blackened highway peeling back layers of myself until what is left of me is fully exposed, naked, and vulnerable to the elements that lie in wait. The only warmth I feel is what little is inside my car. Outside, extending beyond the car lights, the blackened highway is cold, desolate, and foreboding to the unknown that still lies ahead of me. Waiting. Ice pellets occasionally thump and ping against the car’s windshield, causing me to grip the wheel even tighter so to try and stay on the road, to stay in control on an uncontrollable highway.
