Chapter 5: I Am Woman Hear Me Roar

Mom says, "I went around the house the next week singing Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar."  What follows I find hard to believe and understand.  Maybe others can empathize.

In her own words:

Somehow part of it was exhilarating.  I began a water aerobic exercise program at the YMCA just days out of the hospital.  The dressing flowed out of the top of the bathing suit as I swam with my head above water.  Two weeks out of the hospital I began the masters program and a counseling internship placement in nearby school systems.  I felt I had no more time to give the medical world.  I did very well in my classes that were in the evening; the girl next door would come over to babysit my school-aged children.  Being in a counseling milieu is a great place to be during a major life transition, and I felt I handled all of my issues up front the best I knew how.

Now this I sadly believe, and so timely to our own time:

I did not pick up a dating and social life afterwards, and it was clear that being in the midst of a divorce during a mastectomy was a tricky process in terms of self esteem and body image.  I had to stop the divorce proceeding because I was not insurable without the military, and could only begin it again after I had been hired the next year as a school counselor. 

Chapter 5: The Paprika Pixie - Round 2 Begins

I'm going to skip ahead here.  The important thing to know is that at then end of Chapter 4 mom is feeling like a top, brand-new VW model fresh off the factory floor.  She's got her man, her children, her purpose, and her spiritual quest.  A page into Chapter 5, she feels like this:

My Body Looks Like Our Beat-up Old V.W. Bug
[she writes in pen below "But I'm still running"]

In Mom's own words:

I felt a lump in my breast while taking a shower soon after we settled into Rapid City, and I called the base medical hospital that still covered me until the divorce would be complete in the next few months.  They answered that it would take a long time for a new patient appointment, so I dropped the wildcard of having had terminal cancer as a child, and got an immediate appointment that day.  I was smiling to myself how clever I was to have learned how to work the system.

I went in for the appointment, had a biopsy the next day.  As I stayed over night the surgeon came to talk about how it was undoubtedly benign from its type, and we talked as two colleagues while I described what I had done for the military medical group in the Philippine Islands.  The next day, as my friend Ramona came to pick me up, I was taken completely by surprise with the news of the lab report of cancer.  My friend Ramona was picking me up; she and her radiologist husband helped set me up with consults in the Rapid City medical community once the young military surgeon said he would do a radical mastectomy immediately because that was the surgery he knew best.  My friend Ramona, who was picking me up, made an intervention at this point.  She recommended getting other medical opinions ASAP.

The surgeon I chose found that the medullary carcinoma was not in any of my lymph nodes and didn't require follow-up treatment.  So, I again felt that the ordeal was over and probably a by-product of the divorce and living in a foreign country under immense tension for the last two years.

After the surgery I came home and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror without the bandages on.  I had staple marks across the left side of my chest where a breast had been.  I was turned-off by my appearance, but I had two saving thoughts.  One was that I looked like our beat-up old Volkswagen bug that we drove for years [affectionately named the Paprika Pixie].  It, too, had been scarred, survived many close calls, looked like a mushed aluminum can at times.  But this vehicle of my body was still getting me where I wanted to go, still delivering me to what came next.