an Amazon in mittens

Today I ran 3 miles, up in New Hampshire's cold, with Laura and Kim and two happy dogs. For the first time since surgery, I jogged without having to press hard, holding the left side of my burned and puffy chest. It helped that I got drained for the 6th time yesterday. Besides, it's too cold to feel much. The right side? Sgood. Streamline, like. The wind just blows past my right side, with none of that annoying resistance of a breast. I am an Amazon in mittens, silk longjohns, and the pantyliners (clever bandage alternative) stuck on the inside of any shirt I wear now.

Laura and Yani have been tending to the neosporin-on-burn detail, and chide me if I don't change my shirt's pantyliners often enough. Yani seems to get a kick out of piercing vitamin E capsules and spreading oil on my incisions. Since there are so few nerve endings left, you can be up close to something that looks threatening, but somehow isn't; like being near a lion (again with the lion!) behind thick plexiglas. Laura plays a game of testing whether I can feel when she is touching various parts of my chest, near the incision sites. Mostly I can't (at all), though sometimes I can feel some pressure. It is a little like that eerie cool feeling when you were a kid and you put your palm up against your sister's palm and then you feel both her finger and yours at the same time, and get the illusion of numbness.

I have some numbness in my mind, too, I have to confess. I find myself deep in thought, trying to map a path through the coming 4 months of treatment. Then I crumple that map, toss it aside, and begin to sketch again. The cancer books say to try not to anticipate and thereby exacerbate the worst of the symptoms. But they also say to brace yourself. Be positive but be authentic. Fight like a warrior.  Surrender like a possum. Exercise when you feel exhausted. Eat good foods. Eat what makes you happy. These are not always the same things. It's a complicated map and I get disoriented. I feel like that dog Steven Wright jokes about -- the one he named "Stay." Whenever he says "Come, Stay," the dog doesn't know what to do.

Then tonight, as I lie on the couch in front of the fire, I open another book. The author talks about the option of getting excited about chemo. "Survivors held an excited belief about their treatment," it says. I've read things like this before, but wasn't ready to soak it in. I can see it as an adventure, welcome my chemotherapy as an ally that is going to ensure my survival.  In this moment, it speaks to me. Now you're talking. There's a map that works for me. I'm going to follow it as far as I can. Though I know there will be miserable and frightening times when there is a section of the map that is badly smudged and illegible, I recognize it as my map. I go to bed this Christmas night clutching my clarity, tight.