Nipple Tattoos and Other Revelations

A long time ago, a friend of mine got a free massage as a door prize.  He gave it to me, because he wasn’t into massages.  I was trying to be a single mom to a toddler and working forty hours a week, and I was awake a lot of hours in the night wondering how I was going to juggle all my bills.  A massage was supposed to be a special treat, but I remember being a little manic out about finding someone to watch Shayne, and driving in a rainstorm to get to the massage on time and thinking the whole time, that it was supposed to be relaxing, not causing more stress.  I was all keyed up when I got on the table, but the tension just left my body as soon as the massage person touched my skin.  I think I even fell asleep.  I remember feeling like I had so much energy afterward, like I could go for a run.  That was back when I didn’t need to exercise and I felt that running was only something you should do if you were on fire  or being chased by a tiger.  And on second thought, stop, drop and roll is the preferred way to deal with flames and hiding might be a better choice against a tiger, so really there was no good reason to run.  Even as much as I enjoyed the massage experience,  I never had another massage again.  But I never forgot how it made me feel.

My problems with my arm started way before breast cancer.  They probably started the night I tripped over Darian’s pet rock and fell onto my subwoofer and dislocated my shoulder and tore my rotator cuff.  And because I don’t like doctors and didn’t want to pay for surgery, I dealt with the pain for weeks.  Then years.  When I started teaching art, my arm often ached from wedging clay or painting, but I just thought that’s how life went, so I was willing to accept on-going pain from the breast cancer surgery.  A small price to pay for removal of a few tumors and a diseased nipple.

Here’s the thing about doctors when you have cancer.  You don’t just have one doctor, but a team.  There is the general practitioner, and the breast cancer surgeon, and the plastic surgeon, and the radiation oncologist and medical oncologist, and just for fun I added a gynecologist and gastrointestinal doctor to my team.  Add in nurses and medical assistants and technicians, someone was bound to figure out that I was in pain.  In this case it was my radiation oncologist.  He is a funny guy, about my age.  He likes ice cream and doesn’t understand how in the hell I could just free paint bricks across a dinosaur.  He is the one that referred me to specialist when he tried to give me an exam and I shrank from his touch.  He said, “It’s that bad?”  And I said, “Yeah.  It’s like a ten if you touch it, but like a four if you don’t, so I just don’t touch it. You shouldn’t either.”

It took a while for me to get into a physical therapist who specializes in treating breast cancer patients.  Now I am sure other therapists could do what this woman does, but she works with breast cancer patients exclusively.  She commented on how nice my scars had healed–this is a weird thing that I’ve heard enough that I don’t find it weird anymore.  Just like the next thing that always follows–a conversation about getting a nipple tattoo.  That’s a thing that some women do.  Not this woman though.  I don’t have a problem with ink, and I have tattoos, but I got all my tattoos when I was super young and I would definitely reconsider that decision if I could rewind the clock.  And I had a tattoo on that breast.  It was my first–an iris that I’d drawn myself.  It was kinda small and discreet, but then some genius boy talked me into getting tribal marking around it and I hated it immediately.  It was big and gaudy and went from my collar bone to my nipple.  When mom offered to spring for getting it laser removed, I let her think I was doing her a favor, but I was pretty ecstatic to get it off.  And I’ve wondered a bunch if that tattoo gave me cancer.  There was evidence of the tattoo ink on the MRI report.  I have also wondered if the laser removal gave me cancer.  It’s impossible to know. And radiation brought the shadow of that tattoo back which is super bizarre.  Even the breast cancer doctor said she’d never seen that before.  Writing about this makes me realize how normal it has become for me to talk about my breasts.  Almost as normal as it is for me to take off my shirt and let people examine the carnage.

So after all that, the physical therapist completely felt all over my right side and told me that my problems stemmed from guarding my pain.  She said that often when people experience chronic pain, their bodies try to shield the area from more pain and then there is constant tension which can lead to frozen muscles.  She said she felt that she could get me back on track with some deep tissue massage and a few exercises.  She has a pretty cool arm bicycle and gave me a band for arm stretches.  I joked that it was sort of like Crossfit without the sweating and squats.  Then comes the massage table part.  I’ve spent SO much time lying on tables this year with people rubbing my breast.  And I still don’t know if I’m supposed to lie there with my eyes closed.  Or entertain the feeler with stories about how my fifth grade boys make penises with clay in art.  At least in this situation the decision is easier because I have to concentrate on relaxing through the pain because it hurts like hell.   But by the end, not so much.  And I can lift my arm over my head, and at night, I can roll over without waking myself up with pain, and I’m not holding my arm pit all the time because it’s on fire.  I wish I’d done this months ago.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the guarding my pain thing.  It’s become a pretty big metaphor for how I’ve survived the last few years.  Be cheerful.  Be optimistic.  Be busy.  Get out of bed.  You can do this.  I keep thinking about the day of my parents’ funeral and riding up front with the limo driver on the way to the cemetery.  She told me that she was on marriage number three and I made some joke about three times a charm and we laughed.  On the way to the cemetery with my parents’ urn.  I was laughing during one of the darkest moments of my life.  Sometimes my jokes are just bravado though.  It’s way easier for me to laugh, than cry.  But I am realizing that it’s okay to feel the pain.  And maybe working through the pain is the only way to find the peace.