Reconstruction - happy in my own skin

“We read literature to learn how to walk around in someone else’s skin.” I tell students, justifying my existence as an English teacher and giving them a reason to read a 400 page classic. I borrow my phrase from Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ who teaches his children tolerance by telling them:
“if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...”
“Sir?”
“Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee)

Everything we say in life, I’m convinced, has a way of coming along later to mock us and this is true of this particular motto.

Two days after my second operation – reconstruction - the one that attempts to put back what was taken away, I woke at two in the morning in a panic. What have I lost? I asked myself, as if I’d been careless enough to leave my breast somewhere with the same forgetful ease I have left umbrellas on public transport.

Following the diagnosis in April I steeled myself to be without a left breast, then once it disappeared in the operation on 14 June, I had to get used to the empty space. A few weeks later, as part of the reconstruction process, saline solution was injected into the expander and gradually, every two weeks, the skin and muscles were stretched to create a new shape. The operation on 9 December was to make that shape permanent with an implant and a small adjustment to the right breast to provide some sort of symmetry.

So this middle-of-the-night panic had me desperate to work out what had gone, what had come back and what was hopefully going to stay. Whose skin am I now in? I asked myself. As I came up to consciousness, it was a relief to realise that these additions under the bandages and bedclothes will be a new part of the old me. We take our body bits for granted; they don’t cause us any trouble, but when we suddenly have to lose them as a necessary exchange for the hope of life, then it’s not just our bodies, but our heads that are affected. Cancer messes with your head. Perhaps, now I’m coming through at the other side, my mind is finally facing up to what’s gone on, little by little.

So, for now, I shall disregard Atticus Finch and the 'walking round in someone else's skin' motto and very consciously walk around in my own, hope against hope that it likes what the surgeon has put under it, and ask it to play nice and heal over. For a while after, there’ll be a silent rejoicing that I am lucky enough to be walking around, very much alive, and very, very happy in my own skin.