It is always there, at the back of my mind, like the tick of the clock: sixty of them throughout any given hour, twenty four hours a day. It is the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of the washer and dryer doing work for you as you write, cook, talk, scold your dogs for barking at the workers in the front yard.
It is those moments after the bass player plucked the notes and their vibration remains and remains and remains as the other music makers move along on other notes.
This bass note is vibrating so resoundingly I almost want to bury this underneath some other post like my recent love for hat making. It is the ripples in the water, way out there you can barely see. It is the tick of the clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the sound of the washer and dryer doing work for you as you write, cook, talk, scold your dogs for barking at the workers in the front yard.
I need to be truthful, though, and say what is really up for me in my healing process.
Once again, the recovery from my melanoma surgery wants to be written about here. And it also doesn’t want to be written about here, either.
In between writing these lines and doing a load of laundry, a sure sign of words wanting to come out of me that I would rather stuff elsewhere, I took a photo of my scar. It isn’t nearly as scary as it was even a week ago. Most people when they actually look at my scar from Nora say something like "It's a heart. Did your surgeon do that on purpose?"
My scar looks better than it did two days ago, when I was certain a second surgery would be coming in the early 2013.
Surgery may be coming in early 2013, but it does me absolutely no good to worry about it now. It is completely unproductive and gets in the way of the rest of my creativity.
When my melanoma was removed, my surgeon had to cut deeply into my face. The deepest stitch has been stubborn about dissolving so the current status of it is this: my body is saying “foreign body, foreign body!” and is building a tumor rather than dissolving the stitch.
At my last appointment, my surgeon attempted to “find” and “extract” it, but he didn’t have any luck. The evidence of it happening was there via a very small hole in my face, but it was being squirrelly.
I have been watching my face even more closely now than before I was diagnosed and then after my biopsy. “Does it look like a tiny bullet wound still?” I ask Emma.
“Is it more red than before?” and over the weekend, the darkened skin seemed to be spreading further South on my face which made me get worried that perhaps they didn’t get all the cancer after all and it was getting bigger.
This morning my scar looks much better.
Tomorrow it may be worse again.
I have committed myself to calling my surgeon tomorrow to see if we can move the appointment for my next check up closer to middle December rather than early January. The holidays really got in the way of our earlier scheduling and I didn’t know how it would continue to unfold.
Why am I writing about it here? Well, a couple reasons. One is it makes me feel better and helps me process when I write it aloud. Secondly, there may be someone else out there who has something playing constantly, whispering in the back of her mind, a static radio signal chronically there amidst menu planning, driving the car, talking to the boss and blow drying her hair.
It doesn’t get talked about by anyone, at least not by anyone I have found.
If I am meant to be that someone, I will be that someone and get over my fear that the rest of you will get so angry with me you will stop reading.
My guess is we all either have had a friend or family member with cancer or we have cancer. We all adjust to it in our own, unique way. Mine is probably more emotional than others because that is my bent. I am prone to getting lonely when I don’t express my concerns so here I am, my loves, expressing my concerns – not to receive your pity or even extra concern, but simply to say what is so right now.
If you have a friend or loved one who has recently had cancer surgery, why not give him a quick call to let him know he is in your thoughts. This means so much to me when I hear it from people. I oftentimes think people have forgotten.
Let people know you remember and you care. Make a difference with them. Let me know how it goes.
The photo at the top and the bottom are courtesy of Sarah Downie and were taken four days before surgery, September 17, 2012.
The scar photo was taken by me on November 26, 2012.
