9. Isn't Science Wonderful?

Two electrons are walking down the road. One says, “Oh, I’ve just realised, I’ve lost my negativity!”
“Are you sure?” asks the other.
“Yes, I’m positive.”

I wasn’t good at Science at school but I am lucky that plenty of other people are. It is their genius that enabled me to have reconstruction as part of the mastectomy. In previous years women had to wait, but now the surgical procedure has been developed to give us a choice. I was lucky too, apparently because I was small-breasted and physically fit, that the operation would just involve the chest area. There are possibilities to take flesh and muscle from the stomach or back, but that would have meant more scarring, more pain, more discomfort.

In the two-hours plus I was in theatre on 14 June, simply put, they removed the breast tissue and lymph nodes, then lifted skin and muscle from the chest wall, placed the expander beneath it, then stitched me up. When I came round in the Recovery Room, my chest hurt and I found it difficult to breathe, despite the oxygen they were giving me, probably due to the tightness of the muscles having been moved to a new place.

I am in awe of all the people that have made this operation possible, from the researchers who figured out how muscles and skin could be moved to the surgeons who make it happen. I am also in awe of the way the human body can accept and adapt.
Some say cancer messes with your head. In this case, my head did feel a bit messed up because it had to adapt to the new structure of my upper body, so that it couldn’t quite get things to work as they once had. It wasn’t just my strength that was affected but the ability to combine several muscle groups to do a task. For instance, basic culinary procedures became unpleasantly difficult: cutting bread, grating cheese and mashing potatoes, carrying trays, opening tins and, horror of horrors, opening a wine bottle with a corkscrew! Thankfully, buying wine with screw-tops had already become a domestic habit, so this last inability wasn’t discovered until quite recently. Ancient scientific genius ensures champagne corks need minimal encouragement to open by themselves.

Others kindly did the chores I struggled with, but the one thing I had to do again by myself was return to swimming, one of my loves and comforts. Just as on the first afternoon after the operation I had learnt to eat, speak and walk again like a two-year-old, six weeks later I felt like a toddler, back to where my children had been as babies, in the leisure pool at the local swimming baths.

It wasn’t just the nostalgia of coming to this ‘baby’ pool where we’d spent many happy hours that brought a little tear to my eye; it was the self-pity of a strong swimmer who scythed the water unafraid, covering a kilometre in half an hour, now, timidly crossing her arms over her weird-looking chest and dropping quickly to be hidden by the water. Slowly at first, she made her way across the narrow pool, telling her muscles how to move as once she would have guided the infant swimmers, and, like them, gradually joyful that water holds us up if we trust it. The rearranged muscles were working together and getting stronger. One breadth, then another, and another. Swimming was flying. Her heart was soaring.

The negative had become positive.