Holding on to Normal

by Alana Somerville

  She looked more closely at them. “This one doesn’t have much gauze around it, and it was partially clogged with a blood clot. I’m going to change the dressing, and I’ve milked the drain to get rid of the clot.” She took care of everything and packed up her supplies. “Call me back if you have any other problems and when the drains are producing less than 30 cubic centimeters of fluid in less than twenty-four hours, so I can come back to remove them.”

  Fortunately, the drains didn’t leak again. For the next few days, it was business as usual, if usual business consisted of milking drains and taking sponge baths. I played with the kids in and around the house to make the time go faster, but didn’t go too far because of the drains. Luckily the weather was beautiful outside, so we could play in the backyard. I also kept myself occupied with plans for the new house while getting ready to list ours. I showed Greg a draft plan that I’d received from an architect.

  “It’s three thousand square feet. Don’t you think it’s too big?”

  “You can’t take it with you,” he said, referring to the money we’d be spending on it. “And there’s not much we can take out. Let’s just do it.”

  “I’m pricing out some things. Maybe we should wait a bit. Who knows what’s going to happen with me.” That was my fear talking, fear that I wasn’t going to make it.

  “You’ll be fine, Alana. Don’t worry. Let’s list our house and start digging the second it sells.”

  I wasn’t totally convinced, but at least I was busy for a while.

  I was so excited four days after my surgery when the home-care nurse pulled in our driveway.

  “These drains will never be a part of my life again,” I said to Greg. “But I think getting them out is going to hurt this time, because of that pinching feeling I had.”

  “If it does, I’m sure it will last less than a couple seconds, kind of like a bandage coming off. Once it’s done I’m sure you won’t feel a thing.”

  “I hope so,” I said as I went to the door to let her in.

  The nurse unpacked her supplies and ran through the same routine as the last time while I got myself comfortable on the bed. She counted down and I took a deep breath, bracing myself, but she was so quick, she had to tell me when each one was out.

  When it was over, I said, “Thank you so much. You were great,” and sat up, quickly pulling on my shirt. I wasn’t trying to rush her out, but Greg and I walked her to the front door to show her out. As she left, I said to Greg, “I feel as though each time I close a door on someone like that, I’m moving on with my life.”

  And I was. We were. I went downstairs to e-mail an update.

  Hey, everyone!

  I’m done! The exchange surgery is over, the expanders are out, and my breasts look amazing. I am so happy with the way it all went. We all are. In fact, I’m going to have a drink to celebrate.

  I hit send, then stared at the screen. I’d sat in front of this computer for so many hours, wondering what was going to happen to me, looking up statistics, scribbling down numbers, doing everything I could to try to get control. I thought, Am I really here? Is it over? I stood up and shook myself.

  It was.

  The house actually went up for sale a few weeks later in the summer. In fact, we listed it and it sold within a couple of weeks to the first person who looked at it. We then gave the builder the green light to go ahead and start building our new house, since the closing date for our old house was in February 2012, and we needed to get moving—literally.

  Chapter 36

  FINISHING TOUCHES

  I was thinking about nipples all the time: having them, not having them.

  “Charley is four years old and curious,” I said to my mother. “Before I had breast cancer, she saw my breasts all the time. I didn’t make a point of covering up when she walked into the bathroom after I got out of the shower, and three-year-olds definitely don’t knock before entering. I was also breastfeeding Rudy when she was with me a lot! But now my breasts have changed, and I don’t want her to be frightened by that. She’s too young to understand the complexity of it all.”

  “Has she said anything to you yet?”

  “No, but she hasn’t seen them lately. I’ve been trying to cover up my chest so she doesn’t.” I wasn’t sure yet what the right approach to take was.

  “Why don’t you just keep yourself covered if you don’t feel comfortable with her seeing you like this?”

  “I don’t want to always feel the need to cover up if she walks into the bathroom or whatever. Someday she’s going to know everything that happened to me. I need to decide what I’m going to do. Originally, I thought I wanted to have a nipple-creating surgery, which I could do if I wanted. But now I’m not so sure.” To create a nipple, skin from each breast would have to be cut, pulled together, and then tied. An areola would then be tattooed on to create a natural look. “I was talking with some girlfriends and they mentioned the possibility of a 3-D nipple. I think that might be the better route for me.”

  “Have you talked to Greg about it?” she asked.

  “I did talk, and he was supportive of whatever decision I made, but said it needed to be my decision. He said he didn’t care if I had nipples or not, which is nice, but it’s hard having to make so many decisions on my own.”

  “What are the pros and cons of each option?”

  “I guess it boils down to having a nipple that protrudes. With surgery, my nipples will always stick out. With tattoos, they never will but might look like they are, because the tattoos are 3-D.”

  “That seems simple to me then. With the tattoos you can have the best of both worlds.”

  I agreed. I realized I’d just needed some validation, so I felt as though I was making the right decision.

  I began looking into the 3-D tattoos, and discovered there was a medical tattoo artist a few hours away from me who specialized in micropigmentation and nipple tattoos. I called her up.

  “It’s a process of inserting color pigments underneath the skin in layers,” the artist explained, “which is different from regular tattooing. Because it’s layered, it creates a 3-D effect. The needles I use go into the skin at different depths to help me get exactly the right look.”

  “It was fascinating,” I told Greg after the call. “I was so impressed by what she had to say, I’ve decided to meet with her.”

  “If that’s what you want. You have to be happy.”

  My appointment was at the end of August. The artist’s name was Kyla, and her office was located in a medical building in Peterborough. I was happy to discover that she worked in conjunction with a plastic surgeon—I figured her work must be good if that was the case—and the reception area and waiting room were for both practices. When I arrived, the receptionist had me fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. Then I got to talk with Kyla, who soon put me at ease. I couldn’t wait to ask her how she got into this line of work.

  “I studied art at Oxford and became a professor. But when I was twenty-seven, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.” She explained that because of chemotherapy, she was left with no eyebrows and lost much of the pigmentation in her lips. While she was in the hospital, a nurse offered to tattoo her eyebrows, but because the nurse wasn’t very artistic she was left with asymmetrical purple eyebrows. A permanent makeup artist then offered to fix her brows and add pigment to her lips. But the pigments caused severe allergic reactions and had to be cut out.

  I was stunned by her story and not surprised when she said, “I became dedicated to researching the latest advancements in medical tattoos and helping patients like you.” She showed me pictures of her work. It was amazing—it all looked so real. I went home and called my mother. “I’m ecstatic about the idea of this. It’s so much less invasive than surgery, and it looks so realistic. I’ve booked my appointments already.”

  “How many are there, and when is the first one?”

  “The first is in October—I need to make sure that the swelling from sur
gery has completely gone down before I go. Then I’ll have another one four weeks later.”

  October was a couple of months away. I couldn’t wait, but so much would be happening by then: I would be well into teaching the new year of school, Charley would be starting her first year of school, and construction on our new house would be well under way. By the end of August the foundation was dug, the framing had begun, and the doors and windows were on their way.

  Charley was definitely ready to start school, and I was ready to go back as well. Getting into a routine would be good for everyone. It would be hectic, though. Lunches would need to be packed the night before. I would have to get the kids ready to leave the house by 7:45 each morning, drive about fifteen minutes to Rudy’s day care, and then another fifteen minutes from the day care to school. That would leave me some time in the morning to get prepped for class but not much, since I’d have Charley with me for a while, too, before she headed over to her classroom. After school we’d have to pick Rudy up, drive home, unpack everything, get dinner ready, have baths. Then after the kids went to bed, we’d start the whole thing over again.

  As it turned out, I was right about the routine. It was good. School was going well, but any free time I had after the kids went to bed was spent focusing on the new house. I was exhausted, but the time flew by.

  Mom came with me to the first tattoo appointment. I had no idea what to expect. I’d never had a tattoo. A friend who had one had told me, “It feels kind of like tiny little pinches. Not so much throbbing pain but irritating.” Even so, I was nervous.

  When we arrived at Kyla’s office, everyone was just starting to come back from their lunch breaks, and things were quite quiet. When she was ready for us, I swiftly realized that she was a perfectionist.

  “I need you to sit up straight so I can draw with a marker where I am going to start the tattoos.”

  “How do you even figure that out?”

  “Ideally we want them to sit slightly lower than center so they look natural, and the nipples themselves should be mirror images of each other.” As she explained that, she showed me how she’d used an inkblotting trick to replicate the image of the first nipple that she’d drawn onto the other side. Although we kept chatting, she was completely focused on her work. She was meticulous about everything. After we were both completely satisfied with the potential size and location of the new nipples, it was time to start tattooing.

  “It feels so weird,” I said to Kyla as she began. It didn’t hurt, but it also wasn’t a pleasant feeling. I still didn’t have much feeling in my chest, but my friend was right: it did feel like tiny little pinches. Every so often Kyla would stand back, take a look and add more ink in certain spots, switch colors on the machine, change needles, wipe away blood and then continue. After almost two hours, she got up and called me over to the other side of the room, where there was a full-length mirror.

  “Well, what do you think?” she asked.

  I stood in front of the mirror, new nipples staring me straight in the face. Although the freshly inked tattoos looked a little red, they were uncanny. “Wow. That is incredible. They look so real!”

  “I don’t want you to get them wet. Here are enough supplies to last you a week,” she said, handing me a care package filled with gauze and ointment, as well as a detailed instruction sheet on how to care for my new nipples. It sounded kind of funny: my new nipples.

  It was a long drive home. I was excited to get back and show everyone, which also was kind of funny. Never before I had cancer had I wanted to show anyone my breasts, and never before did anyone want to see them. I’d never even worn clothing that was too revealing, but if any part of my breasts were ever exposed at all, my nipples certainly weren’t. That was taboo, culturally, wasn’t it? You’d see cleavage in magazines, but never nipples. But this was different—these weren’t actually my nipples. They were fake—in essence, pictures of nipples—so I had no problem showing them to anyone. I still felt almost separated from them, so it was no big deal in a way. All of my friends were curious, and I was happy to oblige. And the responses all made me very happy.

  “Wow, they look so real!” Melanie said as I pulled her into the bathroom at work to show her.

  “That’s just crazy,” Erin said when I showed her at my parents’ house one Sunday evening.

  “Are you kidding me?” another friend, Kristy, said when I showed her in the washroom stall of a restaurant where we were having dinner one night.

  It became quite comical. But the best part was that the tattoos weren’t even finished yet.

  Four weeks later, I went for the second appointment, and again my mom tagged along. I came out with my nipples looking even more real than they had the last time, which, if you’d asked me prior to the appointment, would have seemed virtually impossible. Kyla’s attention to detail astounded me.

  I walked out of her office feeling finished somehow: I had my new breasts, I had new nipples. I knew I had to go for checkups—somehow in the back of my mind, I knew that this would never be over—but for now I was done. And not only did my new nipples look real, they made me feel like a real person again. Whole—that was difficult for people to understand. For a woman, losing her breasts and having her hair fall out changes everything, and damages—if it doesn’t destroy—her self-esteem. I was a fairly confident woman before I was diagnosed with cancer, and I wish I could have said that I was stronger than that, and that I wouldn’t be affected by losing my hair and my breasts, but the reality is, I wasn’t invincible.

  My brother and I hadn’t chatted much throughout my whole ordeal. We joked back and forth quite a bit when we did, and it occurred to me that maybe that was his way of handling the situation. Shortly after my second tattoo session, he called to check in on me.

  “How are things?”

  “Good. Busy. It’s tough getting back into the swing of things with work.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve been milking this thing for too long?” he said.

  I knew he wasn’t serious, but I couldn’t wait to put him in his place—that’s what sisters do, right?

  “Would you like to trade places?”

  Silence. He had no response.

  Chapter 37

  A GIFT FROM THE HEART

  Uncle Jimmy, my mom’s eldest brother, hadn’t seen me at all since my haircutting party, but he knew I’d had a rough time during chemo. He was just one of about fifteen people who came over to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was the usual big family gathering, and as always, Mom had made way too much food—at least enough to feed thirty. Erin and her kids, Natalie and Jack, were there, and Charley and Rudy had a blast playing with them, as always.

  When we managed to corral the kids to sit down to eat, I looked around the dinner table and couldn’t help but think about everything that had happened over the past months and what I had gone through to be there that night. Many of the people sitting at the table had been a part of my journey. Rudy was the person closest to me when I found the lump on what turned out to be such a fateful night. My mom and Greg were there with me at the exact time that I heard the devastating announcement that I had cancer. My dad, who had turned up crying on my doorstep, was now sitting with me at dinner, looking forward to a great evening in my company, something he probably hadn’t thought he was going to be able to do for very much longer. My uncle Jimmy had shaved his head in solidarity with me at the haircutting party.

  I could see Charley’s eyes widen when the turkey was brought out. She had the gift of being excited about everything. She’d thought my hair looked great when it was cut off, and was thrilled to put barrette after barrette in it after it started growing back. She was my constant caregiver, always checking in to see how Mommy was doing, never disillusioned by anything, whether it be my appearance or my bald head. She was ready and willing to do anything. That was the way she was. And Erin and her husband, Doug, had both taken me to chemo treatments, and Jack and Natalie had made me signs an
d cupcakes for my last chemo treatment.

  Everyone around that table had been with me every step of the way, and they were there with me still. With their help, I had survived. I’d always felt thankful for many things, but this year, giving thanks had special meaning.

  After dinner, when we were all getting ready to leave, Uncle Jimmy pulled me aside. We hadn’t had much of a chance to talk during the meal, and he told me how good I looked.

  “You sound surprised, Uncle Jimmy.”

  “I suppose I am. I expected you to be weak and frail.” He bowed his head and said, “I brought you something.”

  “What’s wrong, Uncle Jimmy?”

  “It’s just . . . What I thought might have been appropriate a while back may not be that appropriate anymore, but I want to give it to you because I made it myself.” Whatever it was, was in his car, so he went out to go get it while I waited near the front door. When he came back inside, he handed me a handmade wooden cane stained a gorgeous shade of pale pink.

  “It’s beautiful.” I was so touched by the obvious thought and care that had gone into the gift.

  “I hand-carved and hand-stained it.”

  I could tell how awkward he felt, realizing only now that I didn’t need a cane.

  “It’s the best gift ever, Uncle Jimmy!” I hugged him. I meant it. “When I turn ninety and need a cane to walk with, this is the cane I’ll use. Do you mind if I show everyone?” He nodded and grinned. I knew he was pleased.

  Everyone loved the cane. As they passed it around, I thought about how things were changing. I could eat a normal meal again without worrying about throwing up. The copious drugs that had been consumed or pumped into my body were out of my system. My hair was growing back, and my eyelashes and eyebrows, too. As time went by, life was becoming more and more normal. But being a breast cancer survivor would always be my new normal. Some things would never go back to the way they were. I would always have scars—inside and out. I would never have my old breasts back. Yet I was happy. Whenever I looked at my new breasts, I felt that I was one of the lucky ones, lucky enough to have gotten through this journey and made it to the other side.