I’m starting to freak out.
All I have been allowed to focus on for the past four months is the last round of chemotherapy. And now, it’s finally over.
And onto the next thing; surgery.
The last day of chemo was one of the best days of my life. It was as cinematic and slow-moving as you might imagine. A crowd of nurses escorted me from the infusion room to the bell on the wall. As I anxiously clutched the chain to ring, the whole building began to erupt.
Patients walked to the doorways, some with their doctors right behind, to join the nurses in their applause. Women wheeled their IV machines into my line of sight and wiped the tears from their eyes. I could hear the roaring echo from the receptionist’s desks and even those waiting in the lobby.
Every second of four months had led up to the unfiltered joy of these everlasting moments. The oncology building was the whole world in one little hallway. So, after hugging the daylights out of nurses around me, I skipped to my car. And there I wept tears of joy for another solid ten minutes.
I’ll never be able to recount that afternoon without sobbing.
However, what goes up must come down. The soaring heights of ringing the bell came crashing into a deep dark hole three days later. Round #6 was raging in my bloodstream and kicking my ass. My immune system crashed into pieces like a cannonball through a styrofoam wall. I genuinely don’t remember much other than crying and vomiting for a week straight.
And honestly, I don’t want to remember.
So here we are now. It’s the first time in a three-week span since August that I’m not getting hooked up to a machine. Instead, I’ll be trading poison for weaponry. The big showdown, a knife fight against two inches of my left breast tissue.
And six lymph nodes in my left underarm.
The tissue will be replaced with a breast scaffold called the Biozorb implant. The Biozorb will hold the skin up until my tissue grows back in, hopefully within 12 months.
To the outsider, it doesn’t seem like something to freak out about. What am I gonna do, refuse it? Say, “I can’t bear the thought of going through more anatomical trauma! Please just leave the cancerous tissue in there.”
But it’s not just the surgery; it’s the implant. It’s having ANOTHER foreign object in my chest. I fight off at least one panic attack a day, trying to forget that I have my port-a-cath. Trying to fool myself into believing it could be natural to have a plastic piece going into my main artery.
Then I remember that it is absolutely disgusting.
And then, holy shit, that’s my reality!
I never cried harder than after my Port-a-cath surgery. At least not for the welfare of my physical body. I never thought it would be possible to see my body the same after healing from my emergency C-Section with Lennox.
The trauma from an emergency C-Section is horrific, especially if you’ve never had a major surgery. I’d dread taking a shower and cry through each daily cleaning for six weeks straight. When others asked about my recovery, I’d stare at them blankly and respond,
“like seppuku.”
Naively, I mourned my post-Lennox scarring with the hope that I would never be subjected to such physical trauma again. Gable and I decided not to have more kids and that I would never put my body through anything like pregnancy and birth again.
Poor 2021 Kathlyn, you sweet, little, dumb sunflower. You didn’t know how good you had it.
At the very least, I sincerely trust in my surgeon, Dr. Jones. She was the same surgeon to perform my biopsies and port-a-cath surgery. Everything about her is God-like; her grace, knowledge, and confidence. When she talks me through her procedures, it’s like a mathematician counting to ten. As if each surgery is something she’s known how to do since age three.
She held my hand as I cried before my Port surgery, alone in a hospital bed after I first cut my hair. I had never been more afraid in my whole life, and she was the one to get me through. Dr. Jones squeezed my hand as the anesthesiologist laid the mask over my face and greeted me as I opened my eyes in the recovery room.
So yeah, I’d follow her to the ends of the Earth.
In the meantime, I’ll be distracting myself by rereading The Two Towers and racing cars with Jet.
Putting Lennox on my shoulders while I can still use both of my arms for the foreseeable future.
Wondering how I’m still here, but Claire isn’t.
Watching the hours turn into days until I’m back in the recovery room. Crying in anticipation and then more afterward because clearly, I haven’t done enough of that.
But mostly, hoping like hell I leave cancer at the hospital when I leave.
Kathlyn Ramsey Moore 