This Is What I Am Now


Death. Decay. Destroy. Mutilation. Relief. Recover. Shame. Hope. No. Not hope. There was too much pain for hope, too much agony for hope to be left. These words are embedded in what used be my left breast. A part of me is gone. It was taken when the doctor first told me I had breast cancer. “You have breast cancer,” he said, staring vacantly at my face. He wants you to say something my mind told me. But all I could think about was how hard my heart was beating against my cancerous breast. My witty reply, “Yeah?” He then went into the spiel of medication, chemo, ‘We’re gonna beat this’ blah, blah, blah. Bullshit. How many times in a day has he said this? How many times has he sat with a woman just like me and said ‘You have breast cancer’? Do they care? Do doctors really care? Do they feel the pain of waking up every day to a broken, scarred body?

Half of me is gone. My womanhood, part of what made me is gone. It’s just a breast my mother told me. It’s just a breast my friends told me. It’s just a breast my doctors told me. It’s my breast. The ripple of scars splayed across my bosom a warning to any who see, caution I am fragile, I am weak. The brand of cancer forever displayed on my body. Always marked as the survivor; as a woman who “overcame the odds”. I am not that woman. The will to be strong that should course through my veins as the last round of chemo ends is not there. All I can think of is that lone breast. Sometimes I want to scream, “Look at me! Look at what you have done to me.” To who I would tell these words to, I do not know. God? I am not the only woman praying to be healed. What would make me stand out from the others? My doctor? “He’s only doing his job,” they say. “He’s saving your life,” they say. Maybe, just maybe I didn’t want to be saved.

God, just thinking about it makes me sound so damn vain. Looking at myself in the mirror though, the dark brown of the scar as it stretches from my sternum across my rib cage, a sense of uncaring washes over me. Sometimes I run my hand over the breast that isn’t there, feeling out each line that was created, over the points where staples punctured my skin keeping the wound closed and recreate the night of my surgery. I can’t remember the pain as the blade of the knife slid across my skin, the sound as it sliced as silent as falling snow. All I can remember is the glistening utensils, each sterilized, eager instruments ready to maim new flesh. Plastic fumes tinge my nose as anesthesia rushes in and then in an instant: euphoria. Whether it was the drugs they pumped into my body or the storm before the calm, my body did not let me register to myself that my breast was gone. Even when shroud of haze lifted from my eyes, the realization of what I have lost does not set in. Only when the pain registers, which creeps slowly in on the edge of my consciousness, do I realize what has happened.

Death. Disfigurement. Depression. Fatigue. Listless. These are the words to my life now. I live, therefore, I am alive. A human shell of emptiness, misshapen and worn; an awkward shadow of minus one. This is what I am now.