Searching For The Underbelly
Sunday, May 11, 2008
It is Mothers' Day today. And it is tragic. It is confusing. It is melancholic and anxious. There is some relief mixed up in there, a little hope, and a lot of wishing.
One year ago today, I announced that I had cervical cancer.
All these emotions are here somewhere, but I am not truly feeling them. I am taking muscle relaxants and listening to CocoRosie and wondering why I cannot turn any of these anniversaries over to see what they mean. It is as though they have no underbellies.
What does it mean to be told you have cancer? What does it mean to go through invasive examinations and day surgeries to see just how bad it is and then a hysterectomy at thirty-five? What does it mean if you have always resented this female body? What does it mean when you more or less made the decision not to have children but had that power taken from you, and now you feel even less visible as a cultural sub-class? What does it mean that I do not feel like the person I was before this, but that the difference is transient, nearly intangible, shifty as shadows beneath a tree on a windy day?
It makes me feel like nothing means anything on its own. I have often thought this, and it is not really a terribly sad thought. It means that we are responsible for our own creation, that we see the pieces and pattern them out into the maps we become.
Part of me wants all these things to mean something beyond myself. I want this to be the universal playing itself out in the particular. I want all of this to be greater than my body and my mind and not to die with me in fifty years. I want this to be more than human
I want this to mean something beyond my own survival. People are happy that I am well now, that I am alive, that it was not worse than it was, and I am happy about those things, too, but I am still aware of this fundamental shift within myself for which I have no words.
There is a larger place than me for these things I cannot even fathom.
I want to create gods out of experience; I want the gods to know themselves; I want others to see them.
There must be an embodied sum somewhere. It's wound around my fingers, if I can only feel it.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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I Am Not A Breeder
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Do you know who can bloody well screw off? The woman I ran into earlier who looked at my shirt, then at my belly, squinted her face into a cutesified smile, and asked if I had any exciting news to share.Is she asking me if I'm pregnant? I thought.
I hardly know this woman. I wanted to eat her and floss my teeth afterward with the string from her fake pearl necklace.
I am wearing a slim-fitting pair of pants today in deep brownish-charcoal, and my shirt is black, fitted on the top, and flares out slightly below the bust. From what I have seen while out shopping over the last few months, this is a common style these days.
If people making cutesy faces and hinting about children drove me nuts before my brush with cancer, it just about makes me homicidal now. I never really wanted children in the first place, and I find most non-adults quite alien, but now that I am coming up on the one-year anniversaries of my colposcopy, LEEP, cancer diagnosis, and hysterectomy, that whole infantilizing what-have-you-got-under-your-shirt sing-song sets my neurons on fire.
I do not mean to insult anyone by the following statements, but this is what I want to have on the cover of the pamphlets I feel like giving out on just such occasions:
I AM NOT A BREEDER: How To Keep Your Assumptions Out Of Acquaintance's Vaginas And Other Tips For Living With The Possibly Barren And Otherwise
I am easy to set off these days.
So now I have spent the better part of the afternoon wondering exactly how pregnant do I look in this shirt? And can I ever wear it again now that I think it makes me look preggers? Because, lord knows, I do not want to run into this again.
I can think of nearly no other situation in which I would walk up to someone I did not know very well, ogle an individual part of their anatomy, and then make comments about what they were doing with it. I might tell them if they had lettuce stuck to their moustache, but that's about as far as I would go. You will hear no That's quite the set of breasts on you, Meredith! Did you have them enlarged? from me (at least not if you are only an acquaintance of mine and your name is not Meredith).
In short, I apparently look pregnant in this damn shirt, which shirt was once one of my favourite shirts. And I am a little touchy about it.
Damn the cancer, and the uteruslessness, and the never wanting babies anyway.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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Hysterical Domesticity
Sunday, March 9, 2008
The Palinode at lunch yesterday.
I have been in serious nesting mode lately. I spend my days plotting which laundry I will do first and wondering if the picture in the hallway will look better in the living room above the imaginary couch we do not own.
I have secretly smelled the towels in the bathroom cupboard, because they are there and clean and, you know, in the cupboard, where people normally keep towels. Mmmmm, towels in a cupboard. It is an assurance of domestic rightness to have them folded and layered together in a stack.
Sunlight shines through the Palinode's flexible keyboard.
Isn't this nesting thing what pregnant women do? And female cats? I have not had a uterus since last July due to cervical cancer. What am I nesting for? More cats?
My aunt's border collie was never spayed, and she occasionally goes through an hysterical pregnancy. She steals all of my cousin's small stuffed animals one by one, lies them in a line beneath a desk, and lies there with them as though to nurse them. During these false pregnancies, her nipples even get hard and dry.
One day when I was at my aunt's house, I saw the dog walk by with a red teddy bear in her mouth. The dog paused to look at me sideways, anxiety showing in the whites of her eyes.
Don't look at her when she does that, my aunt said.
Why? I asked.
She gets really embarrassed about it, she said. If we pay attention to her, she'll hide for days.
Later, I saw several small plush animals lined up along the wall under the desk. The dog had them huddled close together so they would stay warm.
That Girl falls in love with a dog all alone in doggie daycare.
As long as I am not dressing my cats up in bonnets and suckling them, I suppose I am doing better than my aunt's dog.
I think, and this is just a theory, that my brain is not in sync with the rest of my body about what went down with that hysterectomy last summer. I used to spend two weeks out of every month worrying about whether or not I was pregnant and silently cursing that doctor who would not tie my tubes in my early twenties. Aside from the rare biological twinge when I thought about taking my genetics with me when I died, the idea of rearing children made me feel like I was looking at the death of all that I desired for myself in my life.
Here I am, though, fantasizing about grown-up furniture, a clean refrigerator, and buying new sheet sets that match the rest of our decor. I even typed out the word "decor" in relation to my living space just now. The last time I thought about decor was when I contemplated buying white over green garbage bags so that our trash would not stand out like a sore thumb on the floor next to my garage sale, harvest gold Tupperware containers.
We bought a kitchen garbage can!
Just hucking our garbage on the floor got old.
My brain and my body seem to be working out some sort thing between themselves. I am not sure what it is, but at least now I do not have to worry about being knocked up, and, hell, it looks like I'm getting an improved living space out of it.
I do want to gain a better sense of domestic balance, though, because aside from my towel-sniffing, I have taken to standing in the kitchen for long periods to marvel at our new garbage can and to informing the Palinode repeatedly that our cats truly like their new scratching post. There is only so long that he can take such scintillating conversation before he begs me to please stop overstimulating his brain.
Labels: the cancer, the photographs
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#801: The Belly, She Swells
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
There is this HysterSisters-coined word, swelly belly*, and I have it in spades, thanks to my hysterectomy earlier this summer.According to the HysterSisters website, this swollen belly is not due to being fat, having weak muscles, or overeating but is due to trauma during surgery and can last for weeks or even months afterward. I am guessing that I have the months-long variety of the condition, because it has been more than two months now since my surgery, and it still swells up and down from day to day depending on how much I have been standing, sitting, walking around, or cleaning the apartment. I am now starting to understand why some older women wear those ugly, elasticized pants, (but this understanding in no way means that I will resort to such a measure, because, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, ew.** Stop it. There has got to be a better alternative).
When I wake up in the morning, I am relatively slim for my frame. My underwear fits, my pants fit, and I can do up my coat. In truth, I have lost six or seven pounds since my surgery, so prior to twelve noon, I feel pretty darn svelte. The afternoons and evenings hold a different body in store for me, though. If I have walked or bent over or lifted too much, which really means any amount of work more than your average eighty-five-year-old could handle, my gut expands. If it made me curvier in a way that I found attractive, I wouldn't mind so much, but that is not what happens. I get the nasty muffin top, and sometimes I can look like I am in the early stages of a second trimester pregnancy, which is really one of the last things I want now that I am uterus-free and my eggs just float about inside my abdomen without a purpose in the world.I spend my evenings sitting around the house without any pants on, parading my bare ass and protruding stomach throughout the apartment for all two cats, the Palinode, and probably several neighbours to see. I look like I am in the midst of having myself potty trained. Sadly, no one in our apartment has that particular fetish.*** I figure that, despite this particular fetish lack at home, it is far better for me to feel free and easy than to mentally battle the fact of a swollen muffin top and my lack of a belt to fit my new evening size.****
I think if I looked a little less like my great aunts, I would find this part of my recovery much less bothersome.
* Swelly belly is far too cute-sounding a name for my tastes, and I only mentioned it here for the sake of linking to HysterSisters' description of it. I think that there is nothing cute about abdominal surgery and its after effects, and there need be no application of feminity's infantilizing silliness. The cutesification of a subject belies the sincerity of its experience and makes me feel as though I am being patted on the head.
** My father once bought a pair of light yellow Sansabelt pants*****, and when he asked me what I thought of them, I stated quite bluntly that they made it look like he had given up on ever having sex again. After that, I only saw him wear the burgundy ones.
*** Hello, all you infantilization fetishists who googled your way here!
**** Scratch that "evening size" comment. Today, it is choosing to start up the puffiness over lunch. I should take bets on how sizable I might be by nine o'clock.
***** Sansabelts pants are not all that bad as pants for older individuals go, but honestly, baby yellow/blue/pink slacks of any kind make anyone look like a health professional. I have long wondered why so many people over fifty-five go for the nurse's uniform look.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#797: I'll Just Be Over Here, Yawning Myself To Death
Thursday, August 30, 2007
I had no idea how exhausting I would find going back to work, but since I started back on Monday, I have been getting a pretty clear idea. I originally had this completely unfounded notion that two months following my hysterectomy would find me up and about and ready to take on cubicle life with a vigor heretofore unknown in the world of cubicle farms. I obviously did not do my research.On Monday morning, I walked to the bus filled with an orderly sense of purpose. I was going to work! My life was back where it should be! I felt a completeness when I revisited my pre-hysterectomy habits and purchased a coffee and a muffin on my way to the office. I could do this work thing! It was time! I sat at my desk, drank my coffee, and started working my way through a backlog of four hundred and seventy plus e-mails. I felt productive and, for the first time in a long while, pleasant.
Until 10:30 a.m. Halfway through my morning and two hundred e-mails later, a sodden lump of exhaustion settled itself into my lap, and before I knew it, I felt like several hundred pounds of wet sludge. My skin ached, I was so drained. So, in an effort to battle the fatigue, do you think I took deeper breaths? That I got up to get more coffee? No. I wept. Actually, what I did was more pathetic than true weeping. I dropped my head to my chest, stopped breathing, and allowed three or four hot tears to seep out from my lowered lids. Luckily, I have a quick turnaround time when I get that pathetic, because I have a cousin who used to do the head-drop, tear-squeeze move when we were kids, and I hated it. I hated watching it happen to someone else then, but it is quite another, much more serious, matter to feel your own face contorting into a display of abject wretchedness, even if the only witnesses are a tape dispenser and a broken calculator.I dabbed a few tears from my eyes, took some deep breaths, told myself that I could too get another cup of coffee, and plunged myself into a battle with sleep that has lasted for four days. No one told me that I would be this tired even after my body began to feel normal again. Were I the sort who lived in reality, I might have taken note of the fact that, as recently as two weeks ago, doing a simple task such as washing dishes meant I had to take a nap, but no, I prefer to wander around in a peachy denial that would have me believe I was going to be running lively and free through green fields, glorying in being alive as though life were a shampoo commercial. I have done some asking around to find out if what I am experiencing is reasonable, and apparently, this weariness could go on for months. Months. M-O-N-T-H-S.
I guess that I could decide to be cup-half-full about it and look at this as an opportunity. I have been getting a lot of e-mails from Russian women who offer to send me photos of themselves, but not before they tell me how tired they are. They write to me and say: I am tired this evening. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you... Mind me sending some of my pictures to you? We have photography and tiredness in common! We could be friends! Those Russians are such a tired but friendly people.
This took me a very long time to write, because 1) I was tired, 2) I was hungry, and 3) I kept taking breaks to drop hints to the Palinode that we need Asian takeout, stat. The wonton soup and fresh rolls rallied me a bit, but I kept nodding off. I think I'm thirty-four going on eighty-five.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#794: I Am Working On Readjusting Myself To My Cubicle
Monday, August 27, 2007
Ten things you can't do anymore when you find yourself back at work after taking seven weeks of leave to recuperate after a hysterectomy:- You may have become accustomed to picking your nose whenever you damn well pleased when you spent your days cooped up in an apartment with nobody to watch but two delinquent cats, but that's a habit that must be broken once you are back in your cubicle. In mid-pick, when some excess snot may be stuck to the outside of your nostril, a co-worker may or may not show up to ask you how you are recovering.
- You can no longer continually stick your finger in your bellybutton a) to try to quel that bizarre post-surgical nerve twinge or b) to make that bizarre post-surgical nerve twinge happen on purpose out of curiosity.
- You don't have any tampons or maxipads to loan out to your co-workers anymore.
- Black chin whiskers are no longer kept around for a couple of extra days just because it is fun to run your fingers over them when you are thinking.
- Clothing is no longer optional, which is kind of a downer now that you are used to sitting around buck naked for an entire week if you feel like it.
- Also, you had better strap that bra back on in order to prevent the rest of the office from being harrassed by your nippliness.
- Faux-hawks, no matter how fetching, do not comply with the generally accepted standard of office dress. You must now make a habit of washing your hair and stop moulding it into the shapes of tropical fish fins.
- Talking to the objects you are manipulating - the toaster, blankets, the computer, the coffee table, your underwear - is an easy habit to fall into if you are used to being alone for long spans of time, but once you find yourself back at work in your cubicle, resist telling the stapler that it wants staples and promising the speakers that you will love them more if they tone down the buzzing. They can't hear you, but the co-worker on the other side of your half-wall can.
- At home:
drawing lipstick circles on your face and calling yourself the Bubble Girl = playful expression.
At work:
this same activity = extended psychological leave.
Please refrain. - Three naps a day are no longer feasible, even if living with two cats has convinced you that this is how things should really be.
Two things you can do when you find yourself back at work after taking seven weeks of leave to recuperate after a hysterectomy:
- You can borrow Pamprin from female co-workers just for the mood-enhancing high and, in fact, find that it goes even better with beer, especially now that you have no aggravating menstrual cramps to get in the way of your good time.
- You can decide to buy Pamprin despite your menstrual lack, because, hell, that shit's legal and does good work.
Labels: the body, the cancer, the lists
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#787: Joy And Apprehension
Saturday, August 18, 2007
As of 1:30 yesterday afternoon, I am CANCER FREE.My initial reaction to that information confounded me. I stepped outside of the doctor's office and stood blinking at the sun. I wanted to cry but would not allow myself to, because I felt devastated. I did not feel elation or relief. I felt wrung out.
I went for coffee with Savia, bought laundry detergent, and went for a walk, but still my body shook. I was reacting as I had the day I was first told of my abnormal cervical cells. I had never experienced being told my cancer was gone, and I was sure I was doing a horrible job of it.
Luckily, my lack of enthusiasm for not having cancer was a short-lived phase. I decided to go out where the people were and get over whatever it was that was holding back the joy I just knew had to be hiding around my person. I decided to tell every single person I ran into whose name I knew my good news, and by the time I had told five people, one of whom was some guy I didn't even know who bore a striking resemblance to someone else, some of that joy started to kick in.
And that joy was, well, pretty joyous, right up until I woke up this morning. I lay in bed looking into the light filtered through my eyelids and wished that I would never have to open my eyes again. I wondered how easy it would be if I could just simply quit breathing.* My first morning cancer-free was anything but happy. I was starting to wonder what kind of consummate asshole I must be to to be so ungrateful for the good fortune of having such a short and relatively easy battle with the Big C.
It wasn't until I had a chat with Neil that I realized what it was. As much as cancer sucks and the last several months have been difficult to get through, this period of time has had the strongest narrative of my life. Something was large in my life every day. I came from somewhere and was going somewhere and there were points of import dotted along the way. As soon as I walked out of the doctor's office, the next point of import was nothing more my cubicle and horde of favourite pens in a week's time.
See what I mean? Asshole.
Of course, I am happy to be rid of the devil rot. Who wouldn't be? But I have become accustomed to having the tide that carries me forward be something a little larger than the city bus to and from work. Does anybody know of any circuses I can run away to?
* It is difficult to die by refusing to breathe. There is that issue with the passing out and the involuntary breathing process.**
** Also, I didn't actually attempt to stop breathing this morning. I tried it when I was nine or ten years old, so I know it doesn't work from firsthand experience. Plus, it makes me panicky.
Labels: the cancer
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#786: Here's To Hoping
Friday, August 17, 2007
I am going to see my gynecologist today for my post-hysterectomy follow-up appointment, and I am completely nervous. Yes, completely. Even my toes are fidgeting. My skin feels like it is vibrating.It is not that I am afraid that she is going to tell me that I have to have further treatments or that there is more cancer than they bargained for, because I would have heard of something like that several weeks ago. I am afraid that she is going to tell me that I need more time to heal. I don't know how all of this is supposed to go, but I am still tired, I can't stand or walk for long periods without my hips/stomach/lower back aching, and last night, I was spotting blood again. There was not a lot, just a bit, but apparently the place where my cervix used to be is not done healing yet.
It is not like I am itching to get back into my beige cubicle under fluorescent lights, but I do want to be given the go-ahead to return to normal life. I am impatient for this to be over. I am crossing my fingers that in two-and-a-half to three hours I will be walking out of her office with good news, because this waiting is not good for my mental health. If my brain were a dog, it would be one of those cartoon ones that yells YIPE! YIPE! YIPE! as it disappears into the horizon.
Yipe!
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#779: At One Remove
Thursday, August 9, 2007
When I was three years old, I would drag our beige, plastic laundry basket up the stairs to the living room, where the floor was wall to wall blue and green shag carpeting. With a fistful of cereal and my blanky embroidered with the alphabet, I would curl up in the basket, folding myself into the bottom until the blanket hung smooth across the top. I would close my eyes and imagine that the carpet was the sea and that I was lost adrift with no one to find me. In reality, I lived in a city far from any ocean, but I must have paid rapt attention to television, because I knew to eat my cereal very slowly. On the sea, you see, there is nearly nothing to eat.I felt most comfortable when alone and following my mind through its knots of thoughts. When around other people, I felt far away, as though I were on the other side of a glass, slightly off dimension. People talked and moved around and wanted things, and other things made noise and touched me. The world was a circus of too much too much too much. In a corner on the floor of my closet, it was quiet and cool and still. I could hear my hair against my t-shirt.
This sense followed me throughout my childhood and teenage years and persists now as I type this. Even typing is an external interaction that causes me to go behind my eyes and look out. Lately, I think about how being an adult pushes you out into the world in front of people, in offices, on the street, at stores, on the telephone, in restaurants. You will be medicated if you choose instead to set up a tiny reading room in the back of your closet with a lamp, a pillow, and a small desk made out of a box and a man's handkerchief.
Anyone who knows me out on the street is now wagging their heads No, no, no, she is extroverted. Schmutzie comes out all the time, and they are right about my being out socially a lot. The bit about extroversion, though, is entirely wrong.
Since I lost my uterus over a month ago, my sense of separateness is amplified. In a way, that organ was one of the few concrete things that grounded me in this reality. It bled, it contracted, it made it possible for me to bring forth life from my life. Now it is gone, and everything seems to be at a further distance than it ever was. I am the ghost in a shell.
As much as I enjoyed the space in my mind when I was a child, I tend to run from it now. It is a much more difficult place to navigate at thirty-four than it was at three years old. So I go out for hours on end, I watch television, I surf the internet. Dodging myself is almost effortless.
I do not know if my sense of remove is a congenital defect, but I do know that it is all I have ever experienced, and I have wished to feel stapled in place, solidly put, for decades. I want to say I am here. I am in this place. I am breathing this air. and mean it as though I can feel it all at once, but I am only aware of my foot pressing into gravel or my hair against my cheek. I am an experiential zero. The concert of perceptions is too much too much too much, and it is the drug that keeps me running time and again.
Labels: the cancer, the crazy, the past
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#775: Physically, I'm Doing Alright
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Since I had a hysterectomy on July 3rd, I keep asking myself if I feel different physically. There are some obvious answers to that question. I had abdominal surgery, and despite the fact that it was done laparoscopically, which is technically less invasive, I still have abdominal discomfort. A combination of four abdominal incisions plus one internally where my cervix used to sit, the resituation of various internal bits like my intestines and my bladder, and spending a lot of time sitting or lying down for over a month means that I have limited abdominal and lower back strength at the moment. As long as I am not carrying anything over a few pounds, I can go for walks, but one walk equals one nap. Doing dishes equals one nap. Going for lunch equals one nap.I am not a napper. I have shunned napping since I was a tiny kid, much to my mother's chagrin. I always want to be awake and thinking and doing stuff, because sleep cuts into all that conscious experience I could be having. It has not been my favourite thing to spend half, and sometimes more than half, of my recuperation time sleeping. I am one who has a lot of vivid dreams, and when you spend as much time as I have immersed in dreaming, that shit can get really strange. I watch my brother butcher a Punch and Judy puppet show at a family event to celebrate cawgs (cat/dog hybrids), I am sexually pursued by many another blogger's significantly older partner, I eat live mutton, my mother repeatedly throws out all my socks and makes me buy a whole new sock "wardrobe", the Palinode teaches me chess with a chess set in which all the pieces have matching canes.
I suppose that this could all be seen as a better substitute for the real world, the one in which I nap and maybe get it together to do dishes or clean the cat litter.
So, we have covered the exciting topics of abdominal discomfort and being tired. And you are still here. I love you. What next? Oh, yes. PMS.
I have always become more aggressive/depressed/bloated/hungry within the week before my period, and then within an hour of getting my period, I become what I like to think of as myself again. What? you are wondering. Why is she talking about PMS? She's had a hysterectomy. Well, yes, I did have a hysterectomy, but I kept my ovaries, so I still get the hormonal cues. About a week ago, I bloated up, broke out in zits that rival my grade ten complexion, and muttered all kind of violent statements under my breath if anyone had the gall to try to engage with me. Yay me. I was curious to see how it went, because I usually rely on the arrival of a period, which is just not going to happen anymore, to signal my return to a preferable state of me-ness. This time, the crazy/ugly just ended without note, and I could not tell exactly when it happened. I just noticed that I wanted no one dead by my hands anymore. Basically, I feel different physically in this respect, because I no longer have to endure what I have always felt is an unnecessary annoyance for several days every month, a period.
The function of my external lady parts, and, oh, when I call them that I sound so bleeding conservative, so here it is, my vagina, seems to be absolutely up to snuff. It is a happy campground, which, I must say, is excellent. Horror stories abound about women who never orgasm again or live with constant nerve pain, and me, not so much. In fact, not at all, so far. All praise to my lovely surgeon.
And now, I can feel a nap coming on. I walked to this little café, you see, and my body's all Those three blocks were a killer, and now you have to walk back. Let's give ourselves two hours of dreaming about ripping the legs off upended turtles, shall we?.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#765: The Whiny Ghost
Monday, July 23, 2007
I am finally beginning to feel again. The anaesthesia is mostly out of my system, pain isn't constantly driving me to sleep or take drugs, and proper nouns are slowly making their way back into my brain where I will be able to use them again. With my brain restarting its thinking capabilities, my emotions have kickstarted as well, and I am not terribly fond of what they have taken to feeling.Until recently, I was somehow able to float along with the cervical cancer/hysterectomy ride. I was a step removed, watching it all transpire and explaining to myself in no uncertain rational terms that cancer is what it is, my cancer was the nicest kind to have, and that my choice to have a hysterectomy (uterus only) was logical and could be a point of liberation for me. I was a nodding and smiling human version of Spock.
Even I knew that my outward show of being perfectly fine had to fall apart at some point, because whenever I spoke to friends about my health, I heard my own voice as though it belonged to someone else at the end of a long tube. I knew that whoever was talking was doing a pretty decent job of keeping me from having to cry in public every time someone brought it up, and I was somewhere else inside my skull waiting for a change in conversation topic. I felt mentally very tidy. Each corner was swept clean and any remaining debris was neatly folded away into the backseat self who watched and listened. I felt very stepford.
This removal from the immediacy of my condition was a relief from psychological pain, but it also relieved me of my short-term memory and a sense of the passage of time. For the last three weeks, I am told that I have said and done things of which I have no recollection. Something that happened yesterday can feel like it happened two hours or two months ago. Have I eaten? Have I taken my psych meds? When did I last drink water? What day is it?
The other day, I broke out into tears when I was talking to the Palinode. I started crying because I could not figure out where all my money went, but it swelled into a breakdown about an overwhelming sense of futility that hollowed out the inside of my chest, and I hated it. I hated feeling it and naming it. But there it sits.
I once trusted certain things about life and the universe, but when I lost my uterus to cancer, I lost that trust. I no longer trust that my life is meaningful or that life is anything but making it from one end to the other. My body has always betrayed me, but this seeming betrayal to end all betrayals pointed out to me that this is not the situation at all. My body cannot betray me. It is what it is and does what it does. It does not love me. It is not attached to me beyond its need for basic care. I am suffering from that terribly boring and bourgeois malady which can best be described by "Ryle's "dogma of the ghost in the machine".
Don't get me wrong. I do not feel this way one hundred percent of the time. That would be tiresome. My life is uncomplicated enough that I have the luxury not only of feeling this terrible sense of futility but also of dousing it with television, food, drink, and sleep whenever I so choose while I am off work. I feel spoiled and ungrateful, like a petulant child who has been denied sweets.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#760: Swing Low
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Guess who is out for the very first time on their own since having a hysterectomy? Me! And it feels amazing. I walked three whole blocks to the nearest café with wireless internet all by myself. It hurts a little, but I think it is worth it, considering that all this time spent sitting on my butt in bed watching "What Not To Wear" and "Three's Company" had put me squarely in my fat pants again.I am not sure what to do with myself. I mean, I can write and knit and make comics (yes, there will be more than just the first one) and watch television and go for the occasional beer or lunch, but now that a little less of my energy is spent on the physical healing process, these things just do not fill the time like they used to. Now I actually have some energy left over for thinking, and it everything else has begun to feel hollow in comparison. All I want to do is crawl back into my cave of cushioning diversions in which I have retreated for the last few weeks, but this brain of mine keeps intruding with thoughts.
Brain: You've been through a lot, haven't you?
Schmutzie: Shut up.
Brain: Don't downplay it, now. This is what you always do, but it doesn't mean it's not important.
Schmutzie: I already know that, Brain, but I don't want to talk about it. It hurts.
Brain: Of course it does. Things that suck as bad as cancer and hysterectomies are supposed to hurt. That's how you know that God hates you.
Schmutzie: Hello! I have a remarkable lack of stupid over here. And stop trying to be funny. You're not good at it.
Brain: Okay, but look, you've got to deal with this. Didn't you break down crying two nights ago because you felt an overwhelming helplessness, a betrayal by the Universe itself?
Schmutzie: Yeah. You're right. I hate it, but you're right. Wanna watch "That 70s Show"? I think they're running four episodes back to back!
Brain: Sweet jeebus. [smacks itself in the limbic lobe]
I cannot run far from Brain, so I guess I will just have to keep breaking down and having occasional paroxysms of existential dread and alienation. In the midst of a fit of tears, I will suddenly be filled with a terrible sense of betrayal. It is as though the Universe has become other; when once I was a cog in its works, I am now apart from it. It is one thing to be alone in the Universe, and it is quite another to feel set completely aside from it. This is a non-rational, emotional reaction to my situation, but I cannot shake it.
As strange as it sounds, this also feels somewhat hopeful. Part of me acknowledges that because what I assumed was so firmly established left so easily, there must be something else for me. There always is, I know that rationally, but I can still feel it despite my sense of loss and being lost.
All the same, I resist change like I am being forced into chattel slavery by the greater Universe.
So, I hang in this tenuous balance of knowing and not knowing, feeling betrayed and trusting that there is more.
Labels: the body, the cancer, the photographs
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#750: Day Five, Post-Surgery
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Hello. Hi. Whatcha up to?Oh, me? I am sitting in bed. Still. Yeah, it's a thrill ride. Just an hour or so ago, one of the cats licked my right big toe, and I said Aw, thanks, nice kitten!, and he said Myeh!. Those were good times.
No, wait. I think the codeine has squelched some of the synaptic firings through my grey matter, because I forgot that That Girl took Savia, the Palinode, and I out for lunch. I ate this guacamole-chicken-brie sandwich thing, which was really quite good, I think, and everyone talked and talked about stuff that I kept missing chunks of, because I was staring out the window at this dull expanse of leveled earth that stretched for blocks west and south of the restaurant. All that was left for it was to become more warehouse stores and asphalt slaps and knots of cheap condominiums painted grey or salmon. I wondered what was there before the faux mongolian grill moved in to service the shoppers trapped in the webwork of big box stores.
Parking lots are depressing.
Part of this disengagement stems from my complete lack of patience with enfeeblement. That Girl had to help me open the door to the women's bathroom, because it was too heavy for me. My hysterectomied gut has been swollen and hanging out like I am six months along, and none of its muscles have the wherewithal at the moment to do any complex activities that involve flexing. Also, that door was really heavy. I betcha it was solid wood.
I am not even allowed to pick up my favourite cat, because he is at least three pounds over the ten-pound weight limit that has been set for things I can move. There are benefits, though, which I have to keep in mind. I just pressed the Palinode into service so that I could get my hands on another bottle of beer, and not only being allowed but being expected to stay in bed and watch television and make requests for beer and various food items is a gift I should not begrudge.
Of course, I would probably be more thankful if I did not have to rip out all my baby belly hairs with first aid tape every day to redress my incisions. The little roll of tape the nurse gave me at the hospital to get me started turned out to be Eat Through Stomach Skin Tape, which I don't remember specifically requesting, but then I went through twelve doses of morphine and four of demorol in a six-hour period, so my account of the events cannot be trusted. I tried some other first aid tape from the pharmacy, but it left far too much adhesive behind. I looked like a marshmallow had exploded onto my abdomen. Now I am relying on the creative use of band-aids tailored with scissors to cover my incisions. My belly looks like an alternative game of tic-tac-toe, only O left the game and X kept playing. At least the band-aids leave me my skin. Almighty.
I think codeine makes me a whiny bitch.
Love,
Da Schmutz.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#749: I Have A Rubber Cock And A New Hobby
Saturday, July 7, 2007
This is Harlan. He arrived the other day to squeeze water out of his butt in my bathtub. I know. The nerve of him. Thankfully, he was fairly polite about his inquiry, and I was able to avoid having an awkward conversation with him by explaining that I am not allowed to soak my post-hysterectomy self in the bath for another three-and-a-half weeks. He has agreed to live inside my typewriter until such a point as I can bathe again or we have become more adequately acquainted. Such tub antics take a certain degree of familiarity for me.I am going stir crazy in this apartment. It is over 40°C outside with the humidex, my gut hurts when I sit and stand and lie down, my butt has grown numb from pressure-induced blood loss, and I am sick of the cats milling about and trying to bite all the flowers that have been sent on account of my uterus being cut to smithereens and suctioned out into a bucket. This is only my fourth day of recuperation, and already I am going on with the woe-is-me and the boredom-is-a-suckass-luxury. I should get a new hobby.
Guess what? I just found one! I'm not kidding. I wrote that paragraph, got up from my chair, and started a new hobby. Here it is:
My Spiritual Uterus: An Introduction
(Thanks to Dana of Miserable Bliss for the thumbprint inspiration.)
New hobby = public therapy through thumbprints. I don't think that I am even one full step away from acting out my issues with puppets.
So, what have you been up to lately? Done anything new?
Labels: the body, the cancer, the comics
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#746: Chillaxin', Thanks To Better Pharmaceuticals
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
I was there in that yard pictured below two days ago. Doesn't that seem strange?
This is a man in a pool.
I was there, and the weather was beautiful, not a cloud in the sky, and I walked all around that yard taking pictures of flowers and a meter machine and nails on the deck and highly tolerant cats. It seems strange to be one place two days ago, and then to be here two days later, lying in bed after having had a hysterectomy. Suddenly, I am a person with four incisions dotting her belly and wearing that weird, gauzy hospital underwear (the nurse called them "special panties") and sitting next to bottles of hydromorphone, naproxen, and acetaminophen. If not for the Daffy Duck band-aid on my hand and fairly well-situated boobs, you would think I was eighty.
Believe it or not, this is a gate hinge.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
Thank you for all the well-wishing. I can't really get up and walk around much (having a uterus removed will do that), so it's nice to sit here and feel reached out to. I feel reached out to. Is there a word for that so I don't have to end those last two sentences with prepositions?
This cat did not kill me while I crawled all over
and around him, but he could have. He's huge.
You are lucky that I am basically immobilized with my bloated belly, because otherwise I would be able to find my camera and take pictures of my four incision sites.
Apparently, since that last sentence, you have become very unlucky, because I found my camera and took pictures of my incision sites, bandaged, of course. I don't want anyone to become ill. Too bad if you do, though, suckas.
The bottom left bandage pictured is actual size.
Note the edges of my wicked sexy "special panties".
Although my abdomen is killing me, the incision sites themselves do not hurt in the least. I almost wish they did, because they are all I have to show for my surgery yesterday. I am still sad that it wasn't possible to bring my uterus home in a jar. I could have been that creepy woman with the cats who keeps human organs in her closet. Now I am just the creepy woman with the cats, which has far less cache. Damn.
Now I feel bad about showing you bloody bandages. That was rude. Here, let me distract you with some clothespins:
Look! Clothespins!
And now, I must lie down. The doctors inflated me with gas in order to see my insides better, and the only way I seem to be able to fart it out is if I lie down. Between the "special panties" and the farting, I am cornering the market on appetizing, and I need to get my beauty sleep if I am going to keep this up.
Labels: the body, the cancer, the photographs
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#745: Hysterectomy Day, Celebrating The Birth Control That Works
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
The Mother-in-law's Hosta In A Band Of Morning Light After Rain
I am feeling strangely calm at the moment, considering that today is Hysterectomy Day, which will commence with a hospital admission at 10:40 a.m. and culminate in a laparoscopic hysterectomy, performed on one Schmutzie Pickles, at 1:00 p.m. Of course, I just woke up five minutes ago, and it is only 7:15 a.m., and it is nil by mouth until this evening, so there is no coffee to speed me into an anxiety attack about the nature of my reality this morning. If I could chug the usual three cups of my favoured grow-hair-on-your-chest, Schmutzie-issue java juice, my laissez-faire attitude might not be so apparent, but as things stand, I am pretty relaxed right now, if a little tight in the chestal area. I also have the Palinode to hold my hand through this nastiness, which is right fabulous.
My serenity may fly south, though, once the nurse comes at me with a rectal nozzle for the much feared enema, but that is a few hours away yet.
I think I may be displacing my anxiety about uterus removal by keeping a strong focus on the enema. I cannot remember if the nurse at the pre-admission clinic on Friday even mentioned an enema, but I have become convinced that I am scheduled to have one today. You would think that if I was avoiding thinking about a major deal going down with my lady parts, I would choose to focus on a piece of myself situated a little further away than my rectum, like the hangnail on my ring finger or the zits by my mouth which I lovingly grew for the anaesthesiologist, but no, it is the rectum. Any Freudian's out there?
If all goes according to plan, I should be back at home by about 9:00 p.m. tonight. Yes, that's right. TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED HOURS. That seems crazy to me, but I have been assured that with the laparoscopic variety of the various hysterectomy types available, I will be in surgery for three to four hours, in post-op for another three to four hours, and then the Palinode and I will be shipped off into the arms of our fair Abigail, who will hopefully be able to drag my sorry ass up the flight of stairs to our second-story apartment.
I am thinking that I should be focused on that stitch-ripping trek up the stairs more than the enema. My but the mind is a mysterious thing.
This Picture Of My Mother-in-law's Trumpet Flowers
Makes You Feel Happy And Positive
Now it is 8:13 a.m., and I am beginning to think that it is time to wash this pre-surgery body down. She's a bit funky.
Before I go to meet my day, though, want to thank each and every one of you who has been kind enough to help me along my way through writing about my situation, linking to my entries about it, sending me e-mails and whatnot, commenting on the entries here, and throwing good thoughts my way. I have felt a hell of a lot of support from you people, and I will carry that with me today when I am taken to surgery. You guys make people look good. Thank you.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#744: I Nudged Him Hard, Saying: "Come, Gloopy Bastard, As Thou Art" *
Saturday, June 30, 2007
"To sacrifice [freedom], even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."- Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch.
The defence is still faulty, though, despite days of practice. Things keep getting through. My uterus gave me the big Fuck You this morning and started menstruating, when that event should not have even been in the offing. I looked down at my bloated figure and cried throughout my shower. I thought to myself: This is the last time my body does as my body has done. The change is terrifying. I do not know what it means, or if it means anything. I do not know if I want it to mean anything. I do not want it to have that kind of power. I want it to be a cyst. I want it to be a wart. I want it to be the mole that grows an ugly hair. Those things could be incinerated and then forgotten like all the slivers and ground in rocks I am sure I had during my childhood. They would not beg to mean something.
I am sure that I am ugly and too obviously aging. I hate this sudden paroxysm of vanity, but there it is. Cancer makes me feel old. It seems that I have grown arm wattle and looser skin overnight. I want my legs shaved, and I bought anti-wrinkle cream because the women in the commercial for it were relaxed and happy. I suddenly wish not only that I were thin but that I were slight. Ugly and aging disappear when you cannot be seen. I want to be a wisp of woman with less body to contend with. Body is problematic. It is heavy. It gets dirty easily. The packaging is a constant traitor to its contents. Body has no ethics. Body is pleased or it is not pleased. It survives or it does not survive.
None of this is happening to me. I am not wearing a red, waterproof wristband which declares through some esoteric hospital coding system the whereabouts of my blood, its type, my name. I am not carrying a post-surgery handbook around in my bag. I am not nauseous from the last period I will ever have in my life, one that will not be discontinued midway by a colpotomizer and a unipolar hook on Tuesday afternoon. No.
I am terrified, and part of me hates myself for this fear. This fear steals joy from me, and I feel as though I am betraying myself. I should be more; there should be more that is apparent than this severance of flesh from flesh. In my dreams over the last several nights, I have deep, black wounds spotted all over my body. It doesn't hurt, I say, and so friends put their fingers inside the bloodless holes to investigate. They pull them out and look at me blankly. They don't know what the holes are either, but somehow I know that, although they are non-lethal, they are permanent. When I put my finger inside one, it is dry and subtly fuzzy, like black mould in a damp container.
* Spam, spam, wonderful spam.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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#743: Tripping The Blog Recumbent
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tomorrow, I go in for pre-surgery bloodwork and an information session, head to Cosmopolis for the long weekend, and then I have my hysterectomy on Tuesday afternoon. I've been nothing but whiny when writing about this cancer thing, so I thought that I should write something positive before I am freed from this journey through cancerland. Nothing sucks completely.Even if I were to be run over by a lawn mower, I am sure that the newly cut grass would still smell sweet.
Good Things That Come With Cancer
Labels: the body, the cancer, the lists
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#739: Building A Better Mousetrap
Sunday, June 24, 2007
I have spent so much time waiting through tests since September 2006 - pap smears, a colposcopy, a LEEP - that it now feels like I am being rushed through the stage I bitched about waiting around for, the actual hysterectomy. It is on July 3rd. That is NINE DAYS from today. That is craziness.Until now, the hysterectomy as it related to me seemed unclear. It was an idea I could think about that was happening to another part of my life separate from this one in which I go to work and hang out with friends and write things. What I did not take into account, or was previously unable to piece together in my brain, is that I can compartmentalize the different parts of my life all I want in my head, but my body still inhabits each one of those parts. It is like I simply neglected to remember that I had to bring my body to the hospital when this whole thing finally went down.
Disembodied Schmutzie: So, I'm here! What's next?
Gyno Extraordinaire: Um, look, you're going to have to run home and get your meat suit.
Disembodied Schmutzie: What? Why?
Gyno Extraordinaire: Because the cancer's in that and we don't have the proper equipment for anaesthetizing spirits.
Disembodied Schmutzie: Damn. Why you play me like that?
Now I am in this mode in which I feel like I have to fit everything I ever wanted to do over the next six months into the next several days. I want to see every single person I even like just a little bit, buy those silk pajamas I am usually too practical to buy, clean this entire apartment for once in my adult life, read books, become famous, win the lottery, lose ten pounds, write an extra fifteen poems, travel to Cosmopolis to see the fine Cosmopolians, find the perfect body moisturizer, and figure out what kind of bird it is that makes clucking noises just down the street. [take a deep breath] I want to start that photography project I've been concocting, go for long walks around the lake, buy summer clothes, answer all my e-mails, finish up all my work stuff so that I can recuperate with a clear mind, be nice to strangers, track down an old friend, and build a better mousetrap.
No pressure.
Something tells me that all this obsessing is an exercise in removing myself, once again, from the reality of the situation. I am going to write a self-help book called How to Avoid Harsh Realities and Lead a Stressful Life.
Labels: the body, the cancer
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