Super tough day on Friday, precipitated by a consultation with the plastic surgeon. She is great; I like her a lot. But the process... yeesh. A bit hard to fully ingest in one sitting.
I won't go into the details here and now. There was something about looking at pages and pages of pictures of scarred breasts, however, that really hit home. The scar is just a sliver, a line. Clean and precise. But coldly impersonal. Clinical. Surgical. It was like looking at mug shots, where the strip of black covers the person's eyes. Eradicating individuality.
The psychological aspects of this are pretty profound. In a very good way, getting cancer in a breast must be one of the best places. It's pretty much a non-functional organ (for those of us over 45) (hopefully), so the cancer doesn't impede its daily business. I don't feel sick. It's not affecting my digestion or my breathing or my swallowing or anything like that.
However, people rarely mourn the loss of their gall bladder, at least cosmetically. You don't look at yourself in the mirror and say, wow, in two weeks I won't have that gall bladder any more. Whereas with this thing... you do.
It's tough. It's tough in deep subterranean ways. It's tough even though it's Stage I. It's tough even though I'm not a woman who spends more than 30 seconds every day picking out what to wear.
It's tough because I alleviate anxiety by working. I cannot sleep anymore, at least not with some help from outside sources. If I wake, I stay awake, running through the endless list of things I need to be doing. Or I'm up until 1 am fueled with a seemingly bottomless supply of buoyant energy, an energy that is borrowed at an extremely high interest rate from the next day.
My worklife is ludicrously fubar, a perfect storm of stress and futility. I am being battered against a hard deadline for a big release after the loss of the second writer on the project, using a new development process, and inundated by a daily tsunami of emails containing unclear communication, insufficient information, requirements for even more work, and follow up that always requires more follow up. Instead of covering one team, as the system is designed to be set up, I'm covering five. Instead of writing one product, I'm writing three products. As I've been joking: the only thing that could be worse in this scenario is if the sole writer for all of this got diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.
Nighttime is the worst. I can slip into these utterly blissful black holes of sleep, only to wake up and feel consciousness knocking insistently at the edges. I try to force it out, but there's too much of it these days. Too many things to categorize and list. Too many unanswered questions and things I know I cannot do anything about, without the ability (at 3 am) to rise above, remember to breathe deeply, and get past it all.
It's tax time. There are words to write. Projects around the house that have been put off for years that just rankle as I scan my eyes across my domestic landscape. Ongoing bills and checkbook balancing. Looking at these things, making the lists, calculating how much time all this dumb brute labor will take... it deflates me. Deflates me in a way that only doing it can relieve. And yet I cannot, and should not, be spending all my time working right now. I need to rest, and I can't rest, at least not at the right intervals. I am forcing myself to spend the time to do the yoga, take the walks, eat the right foods, do the right thing. There simply isn't enough time to do all of it; and the imperative is to do what has always come so unnaturally to me. Despite years of doing the opposite, I need to take care of myself first.
So that's how it is these days. A kind of soul-constricting anxiety and fatigue alternating with these incredible bursts of energy and gratitude, fueled by the good will and support of all my friends and family. Mostly it's the latter. And I don't at all feel crushed by despair or anger or guilt or anything like that. Just this kind of nightmarish urgency to slog forward despite the continue slippage behind, to clean up the disorder, to make right the things that I can make right. To control the 1% of stuff I can control. And to accept the 99% percent that, these days, I cannot.
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