Another Sleepless Night

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It's almost three a.m. and I can't sleep. Again. A cancer diagnosis does nothing for one's beauty sleep. Absolutely nothing. It's only been three hours and fifteen minutes since I cried myself to sleep. Not cried, really, more like sobbed. Like gut wrenching, audible caterwauling. This is the way it goes in the early days after diagnosis. My emotions can take me on a rollercoaster ride so fast I don't even have time to fasten my seatbelt. This was one of those nights. It caught me by surprise and took me on a hell of a ride.

I've cried more than I'm proud of during these ten days since diagnosis. I've also laughed more than I think is appropriate. If cancer is superstitious, it's gonna get me for all the laughing I've done in its face. It's fine with the crying, I'm pretty sure. Expects it even. Eggs it on. Tonight it's got me. I'm exhausted, puffy eyed, and completely and utterly awake. What brought it on was no laughing matter and saddens me as I write this.

While trying to go to sleep after doing my castor oil pack, one of the many alternative attempts to draw out toxins from my liver, I found my fingers at my right breast. I hadn't really touched my breast since the diagnosis. Maybe it's me that's superstitious and not the cancer. But in the quiet of the night my fingers searched out the lump to make sure it was there. Since my primary care provider missed it in my annual exam four months ago and again last Tuesday in my pre-op exam, I held out a delusional thought that it wasn't palpable to the touch. That I'd been mistaken when I found it myself. That every doctor, radiologist, lab technician and surgeon had been mistaken when they read the results of three mammograms, an ultrasound, a biopsy, and a MRI. That the constant phantom pain in my chest that I imagine to be my lump was just that--phantom. But then I put my fingers lightly to my breast.

My whole breast felt like the lump. Not the 2.0 centimeter lump they originally described, not the 2.6 centimeter lump revealed in the MRI, the lump that is a little larger than an almond. That's not the lump I felt. I swear it felt like the whole breast was the lump. It felt huge. Mammoth. Like it was growing under my fingers, growing aggressively, invasively. In truth, that is how it's growing, but how fast does an invasive tumor grow? This is what keeps me up at night. That the tumor is growing fast enough that it will spread to my lymph nodes by morning if I'm not vigilant. If I don't keep watch in the dark of night I will wake with my pancake breast the size of a grapefruit because scary tumors are so often ominously described as the size of a grapefruit.

In truth, I barely grazed my breast. I was afraid to touch myself. This is what made me cry. I couldn't touch my own breast because I felt so betrayed by it. And then I cried harder because I felt guilty about feeling betrayed. I mean, I was about to lose this breast, both breasts in reality because my feeling of betrayal was so huge. If it lurked in one I didn't want to take a chance it could lurk in the other. I wanted to love my breasts, to feel them gratefully while I had them, to have some other person feel them gratefully while I still had them. This last thought made me sob harder. To lose my breasts while single seemed so much more unfair than if I had a tender lover who could make me feel them passionately, intimately one more time before they were cut off. To lose them when that imaginary lover wouldn't be with me when I woke from surgery assuring me I was still loved and whole, sort of, put me over the edge. It wasn't just my breasts I was losing. It was my whole sexual self I was grieving. I'm not gonna lie, this was a pandora's box.

I've always thought myself to be a sexual being. We all are, right? Now, I know some people are more interested than others, but we all are sexual beings regardless of how we may repress or express those urges. Regardless of whether we are mated or single, sexual urges exist. And in my quest to be a quasi good quasi Buddhist, to be good in general, I've tried not to misuse my sexual nature. This has only resulted in some major grief over not having the kind of sexual life I want. By that I mean one at all.

Having been single for three years, read that as inadvertently and accidentally celibate, I was already grieving being a middle-aged woman with waning prospects and soon to be waning desires as menopause was about to hit and alter my hormones. The dating world seems to exist only online, and I hadn't tried that yet. I wanted the old fashioned kind of falling for the wrong person while imagining them to be right. Better yet, this time I really wanted the right person, to be spared the trials and errors of dating. I wanted to walk into, bump into that person at some clumsy moment, look into her eyes and fall head over heels in love. Maybe this time I even wanted to choose to love and not unwittingly fall into it. The falls were beginning to hurt.

Ever the romantic and never the pragmatist when it comes to love, I couldn't bring myself to give online dating a try. And putting myself actively in the world was making me come up empty handed. I mean, really, it wasn't like I sat home at night. I tried to meet people. I went to meet-ups, belonged to a rock-climbing gym, took dance classes most mornings, worked an extra part-time job where outdoorsy people like me worked and shopped, asked friends to set me up, traveled on group adventure vacations, and generally kept a constant eye peeled for a cute, sensitive, kind, and funny middle-aged hippie lesbian who preferably ate a plant based diet but who wasn't too hippie as to be all new agey. That wasn't too much to ask for, was it? Yeah, I know.

So prior to my diagnosis, the grief of trying to date was already apparent. It was...