I feel as if I’ve entered a new phase of my treatment and recovery. I think it’s probably most accurate to say that up until recently, I’ve been mostly a passive participant in my cancer treatment. My medical oncologist told me what chemicals they would be using to fight my disease, and subsequently nurses administered the chemotherapy while I sat there and watched. My surgical oncologist told me that best practice involved surgery, and I went under anesthesia while she removed my disease. My radiation oncologist informed that radiation for 6.5 weeks would dramatically reduce my risk of recurrence, so I go in like a good little soldier every weekday while the techs radiate my left chest wall. After that is done, my medical oncologist will prescribe for me anti-hormone therapy, given in pill form, which will also reduce my risk of recurrence, since my cancer is (was? I’m not quite sure which tense to use anymore) estrogen-receptor positive, meaning estrogen encourages its growth. I will take that for five years, because all three of my oncologists (plus several years of research) have told me to.

But the further I get into treatment, the more active I am becoming in my own recovery. At first, this was scary, because it involved deciding which doctor to believe, since there was disagreement as to whether or not to continue any kind of cancer treatment, due to my compromised heart functioning (more on that in a future post). My reaction to having to decide for myself which way to go, after passively allowing others to care for me for so many months, was a bit on the panicked side. I’m not trained for this! What if I choose wrong! Can’t someone else just tell me what to do?? But after making that first decision (deciding to believe the radiation oncologist who said he could protect my heart, and who was way nicer than the cardiologist who I didn’t like anyway), active participation is WONDERFUL. I feel like I finally have some control over what happens to this life I’ve learned to value. I listen to my doctors’ recommendations about strengthening my heart and further reducing my cancer risk through diet, exercise, and mindfulness meditation, and implement them with gusto, tailoring them to fit who I am and how I live. I do my own research on how to reduce the discomfort of burning during radiation, and add that to what my radiation oncologist says. But most of all, I am rethinking old decisions, rethinking what I should look like in this post-cancer life.

As I wrote about in Anticipating Surgery, I was incredibly nervous, during the weeks and months prior to surgery, about how I would look post-mastectomy. I was nervous that my new appearance might cause me to sink into a depression. I thought about how I could best dress to camoflauge my new shape. I dreaded seeing people I knew. The reality, though, is that I don’t mind my new look at all. In fact, I kind of like it. It’s true, I’m all scarred up (7 in all!) and misshapen. No, let me rephrase that: I’m shaped differently than I was before, and differently from how the typical female body is shaped. I don’t have the smooth, rounded, gender-typical lines that I’m used to. And it’s not pretty. But it’s interesting. My body tells a story now. It reminds me of the strength that I had no idea I possessed before all of this. It shows that my life is different, unique, that I have something to say. And I’m finding, to my surprise, that this is more valuable to me than pretty.

So I’m rethinking reconstruction (and reserve the right to rethink it again. And again). My new form of active participation in my cancer treatment is to rethink old decisions. To recognize that I hated the total dependence that surgery created, and to tell myself that maybe another, more involved surgery isn’t right for me. We talk a lot about embracing body diversity. Do we honestly only mean that we should be accepting of varying heights and weights? More and more, I’m thinking that maybe to really walk the walk of body diversity, I should embrace my differently-shaped body, not camouflaging its difference, but celebrating the strength in the story that it tells.