Since being diagnosed with breast cancer, I’ve had a hard time trusting my body. To be clear, it’s not as though before I was diagnosed I loved my body deeply. Like all relationships, my relationship with my body is complicated. There’s a whole mix of love, despair, admiration, frustration, caring and neglect.
I generally feel – or felt – that I understood my body, that I knew what it needed even if I didn’t always manage to give it what I needed. I trusted that if I gave it what it needed, it would give me what I needed.
I had a motorcycle accident years ago that the doctors said would leave me with a limp and constant pain. I walked out of the hospital after just 9 days, against doctor’s orders and “treated” myself with the things I believed my body needed. And guess what? No limp. No persistent pain (except that I started having migraines after that accident – but even those have diminished to just one or maybe 2 a month).
Even the migraines responded to my personal regimen of massages and CBD and regular hot tubbing!
Then I went in for my first mammogram (on my way to top surgery) and they discovered cancer.
Here I was, doing all the right things, working out in ways I enjoyed, eating food I liked, working at something that really mattered to me, giving back to the community and being in a flourishing, loving relationship. How could I have cancer? Even a little one?!
I know, I know. Anyone can get sick. There’s no way to protect ourselves completely from cancer or any host of body ailments. And yet I could not shake the feeling that my body had betrayed me. That I had taken care of it, and it had forsaken me.
I have been running for literal decades. When I was training for a marathon, I would feel a little nervous before the long run on the weekend, but otherwise I feel good and strong when I run. In fact it’s been a go-to method for improving my mood for a long time. But these days, every time I set out, I feel a little more than just nervous. These days I’m not sure I can trust my body to do even this simple thing, putting one foot in front of the other, over and over. While my body feels more like me than ever before (remember all this started with potential top surgery), it also feels less like my own, somehow. It feels like I don’t know my body. Like I’m not sure how it will respond, or what it will do.
I’m glad to be recovered from surgery and revisions (just so you know, I had a TERRIBLE experience with multiple surgeons at UCSF – I’ll tell you the story if you ask). I’m glad I had health insurance and a partner who loved me through all of that. And I’m glad to be cancer free. And at the same time, I’m worried every time I go to run or work out.
Relationships are complicated. Guess I will have to make peace with that.
dots doc n roc 