Ep.17: Surgery
There’s a small crowd in my hospital room as my surgeon takes out his thick black pen and marks me up. I stand, naked to the waist, hands on hips as he draws a line down my sternum and circles my left breast, ‘this is the do not cross line’ he says to a trainee doctor, Alice, who’s one of the crowd. As I turn my back he takes a tape measure and notes the distance from my back to my nipple, ‘your back gets worryingly slimmer every time I see it’, he comments and I bristle at myself for being so vain as to purr slightly at what I hear as a compliment, but it’s not a compliment when you’re trying to form a breast out of muscle and fat from your latissimus dorsi. Alone again and back in my gown I peak at the lines which look like a two year old has been scribbling on me, I hope his surgical skills extend further than his drawing.
Its 8 in the morning and I’ve been up since shortly after 6. I showered and drank a double expresso before my fluid fasting cut off at 6.30. The fasting bit has been the easiest part of this whole process, I generally fast each day until lunchtime anyway so this at least feels normal. David drives me the 5 minutes round to the hospital and elects to walk me to the ward. He stops at the entrance, bends to give me a brief kiss and says ‘right, I’ll see you later’ then leaves. We’re not ones for fuss or lingering goodbyes. This is tough, we both know it is, we don’t need to say more so I take myself the final few steps into the ward and tell the overnight nursing team that I’m here. Then it’s only a short wait until I’m allocated a room, I’m putting away my things, changing into a gown and pulling on surgical socks.
After the surgeon leaves I get a visit from a doctor who introduces himself as another David, the anaesthetist, he’s tall and angular but there’s a generosity of warmth about him when he folds himself into a crouch to discuss what’s going to happen to me. ‘I read you like to cycle’ he says, ‘I wore my cycling socks’ and he points to the little multi-coloured bicycles on the navy socks that poke out of the bottom of his scrubs. I take them as a good luck charm and tuck the knowledge of them away. We discuss an option to give me some initial local anaesthetic directly into my back and immediately past images from a spinal injection I’d once had and the epidural during B’s birth lurch into my mind and I flinch. ‘No, I don’t want that’ I say emphatically and he nods an agreement, ‘that would make me blackout’ and I know with certainty this time that it would. So we agree to take a different route and I’m profoundly grateful for this ounce of control that has been gifted to me. I’m about to be naked, unconscious, utterly vulnerable, sliced open but I still have this tiny choice that I have made.
David, my David, messages me ‘recovery starts now, I’ll see you later’. ‘Bring flowers’ I tell him, a challenge to the man who has never bought flowers in his life, ‘nope, you’re not sick enough’ he replies, ‘any more fecking sick and they’ll need to spell ‘mum’ ffs’ I tell him. And it’s good that our laughter and love provides a counterweight to my nerves.
I walk to the operating theatre. Is that odd? In my mind I always think surgery has to involve being delivered on a bed but no, I pop on my fitflops and walk with Dora, a student nurse, round from the ward to the Vanguard Operating Theatre, a portacabin connected by a white corridor. As we step out of the main building the rain thunders on the roof and I briefly wonder if the surgical team will have that soundtrack throughout. We go through star trek style sliding doors and I’m greeted by at least half a dozen people, all in scrubs, through another door I glimpse even more of them together with my surgeon. So many people, all here for me. And now I’m actually here, at the point of no return, I feel strangely calm. There’s a momentum here, an inevitability, a process which will be followed and not even my left breast screams it to be halted. This is what is meant to be. So I hop on the bed and I confirm my date of birth and pass small talk with the team around me. They ask the obligatory ‘what is it that you do?’ question that I now realise all teams ask when they’re trying to divert my attention so I play by the rules and tell them about making radio programmes while David inserts a cannula into my right hand. He tells me when he’s starting to put me under and I feel a lightness, a floating, then I say ‘that’s me starting to go’. Then I’m gone.
And then I’m waking up in recovery. Dora is beside me and another nurse who is watching me constantly as I come round. There’s a clock on the wall opposite and I try to work out what time it is, how long I’ve been away, but my eyes are greasy and unfocused. No matter how hard I try I can’t see the time. I pause and take stock. It’s as if I’m doing a system re-boot and my brain is systematically checking all is present and correct. But it doesn’t feel entirely correct. My right foot feels wrong and my left hand is tingling, both are disproportionately annoying. I keep thinking, surely it should be my back and chest that are bothering me, why am I so focused on my foot and my hand? But my chest is bothering me too. I feel tight, braced and uncomfortable. ‘How do you feel?’ Dora asks, ‘like I’ve been in a car crash’ I say and I do. I ask her the time and she says it 4.40 and I try to work out how long I was in surgery. I fuss about my foot and someone removes a cannula which had remained there then I’m talked through how to work my new toy, a morphine drip, which I can operate with the click of switch attached to my right hand. ‘You can’t overdose’ they assure me, ‘it won’t let you’ so I clutch it greedily as I’m wheeled back to my room.
The surgeon comes to visit almost immediately. He looks exhausted. We look at my wounds and I’m surprised by how little bandaging there is. My left breast is battered and bruised but apart from a dressing over the area my nipple used to be and one on my back, I’m all there. I’m shocked. I’d expected so much more of a mess. There’s a drain from my breast and my back, I’ve a drip in one hand and a catheter but still I don’t look or feel nearly as re-arranged as I’d expected to feel. He says it went well, he is pleased with how he got on, says I might be rather small on that side and we’d need to watch the skin as it was very thin, need to make sure it doesn’t die off, but all in all, so far, a success. I ask if he saw the cancer, he says no, he just does the mastectomy and cracks on with the job. We’ll find out what the pathology lab says in a couple of weeks.
Recovery starts here!
‘Alive!!’ I message David as soon as I’m able, ‘I know…I’m on my way’ and then there he is - amazing, strong, resilient, silent, immovable in his belief in me and clutching a mars bar Easter egg, jelly babies, mints, an opened packet of chewing gum and very large bunch of flowers. I tip over with love for him as he comes to the side of bed where I can reach to press my face into his jacket.
And I’m cancer free. And, for the first time in 6 weeks and 6 days, I feel cancer free too.
A world first - David does flowers.