Past Perfect: The Grammar of Healing

My husband is the math mind in the family; I’m the English nerd. But lately I’ve found myself thinking less about settings and symbolism, and more about symmetry and statistics.

Many years ago, I did an experiment where I held a small mirror up to the center of my face while looking in a second larger mirror, so I could see how I’d appear if my face were perfectly symmetrical. All of us are at least a little asymmetrical, so the trick quickly reveals the differences, large or small, in the two sides of one’s face: the right eye has a little more tilt than the left, maybe, or one cheek is a bit fuller than its counterpart. The altered reflection, for me, almost felt like looking at different person, perhaps a sibling of myself.

The process of bilateral breast reconstruction has a tendency to highlight other asymmetries. The first thing my reconstructive surgeon said to me when he looked at my pre-surgery chest was that my left rib cage sat a little more forward, was a tiny bit more prominent, than my right. I’d never noticed this particular (minor) anomaly, but it’s apparently just as common for there to be asymmetry in the rib cage as in the face. The difference in my bone structure became most noticeable immediately after surgery and during my early tissue expander fills; for a while the right expander lagged behind the left, making me look lopsided. I also discovered I have a pocket of fat on my right upper back, unmatched on the left, which appeared only when I didn’t have breasts to pull the skin forward and keep it flattened out.

Studies indicate we equate higher levels of symmetry with perception of beauty, so it’s only too easy to worry over our various anatomical irregularities. But there’s so much about our bodies that’s out of our control: the set of our features; our bone structure; height; the size and shape of breasts, booty, genitals, hands and feet. We can exercise and lift weights to affect our body composition—but the ability to bulk up muscle mass, and the places our fat cells are predisposed to distribute themselves? That’s pre-determined. Significant elements of our health are hardwired too: some suffer multiple allergies from birth, for example, while others are born with immune systems seemingly hewn from impenetrable stone.

Bodies are glitchy and unpredictable in surprising ways, for better and for worse. The fact my body grew a malignant mass is somewhat mysterious: I am, as best we can tell, the first person in my blood family on either side to develop cancer of any kind. My body’s responsiveness to treatment is, to my mind, equally mysterious, and awe-inspiring: I learned this week that only 20 to 30 percent of triple negative breast cancer patients have, as I did, a “complete pathologic response” to chemotherapy. I was thrilled when we got the pathology report stating they’d found no evidence of remaining cancer during surgery, but the news felt weirdly abstracted. Learning the actual statistical probability of achieving that response was sobering. It made me realize just how incredibly fortunate I am. Having a complete response lessens the chance of recurrence dramatically, dropping it from 35+ percent down to 5 percent. As my oncologist said, it’s cancer, so there are no guarantees. But short of never having developed it in the first place, the odds for long-term survival are the best they can be.

I’ve often felt lucky to be in the body I am. Aside from some cranky tonsils, a couple bouts of pneumonia, and one broken bone, I’ve been hale and hearty most of my forty-seven years, and I’ve managed to stay active and maintain a healthy, if not altogether svelte, weight into my middle age without Herculean effort. Excepting the sixth grade, when my legs had a sudden growth spurt separate from the rest of my body that briefly turned me into a sort of hybrid stork-human, my parts are mostly proportional, and my face, while perhaps not symmetrical enough for Hollywood’s standards, is reasonably attractive.

I did nothing (unless you count that bane of puberty, wearing braces) to “earn” any of these features of anatomy. They just are, like my cancer, like my cancer’s responsiveness to treatment. Why did my body grow malignant cells in the first place? I don’t know. Why were those cells especially sensitive to death-by-chemotherapy? I don’t know the answer to that either. I do know I’m extremely lucky and profoundly grateful to be in the relatively small percentage of survivors who have that experience.

I’m just vain enough to feel relieved that the obvious asymmetries that appeared in my chest and back are slowly evening out as reconstruction progresses. But I’m far more reassured by a different realization. As I walked into the dining room Tuesday night, preparing to sit down to dinner with my hubby, it suddenly occurred to me: I no longer have cancer. Granted, my treatment isn’t quite done–follow-up radiation is the standard-of-care for triple negative diagnoses, even with a complete response to chemo, and reconstruction will take a while longer. But the chemotherapy worked; the surgery confirmed it. No more need I say, I have cancer.  Now I can say, I had cancer.

My inner English nerd reappeared, rejoicing: the simple past tense has never sounded so beautiful.