Lumpectomy – The Penultimate Hump (conclusion)

As I sit at my desk this morning and try to revive the memories from lumpectomy day, the sun is gently beaming on the world outside my window after a storm and the light is helping me to recall. I remember the sun. The sun was so bright and gleaming on white sheets and hospital stainless and chrome, that it beckoned me back to this world. There was a nurse or attendant fussing about the recovery room, and I remembered her name, so I said, “Hi, Carol.” Carol told me to rest, and I did after I checked for my right breast as if I were a child making sure I still had the Teddybear I clutched the night before.

Otherwise, I have to search through my archives for the details or, rather, try to find a thread to lead me back through a dream. It’s strange that I’m struggling to surface my memories of the recovery room when the experience happened only sixteen months ago. I have very clear memories of waking after my eye operation forty-eight years ago when I was four. My eyes were bandaged so I couldn’t see but I could clearly hear my mother’s voice talking to me. She was describing how beautiful my new Barbie looked in her white wedding gown, adding that the groom, Ken, was quite handsome too, though all eyes were on Barbie as she walked up the aisle. My mom softly sang, “Here comes the bride…” and I could feel Barbie’s stiff body bound along the top of my bedclothes and stop near another stiff body. As my mom recited the wedding vows, I drifted off. The next thing I knew Barbie was heading off to Niagra Falls on her honeymoon dressed in a red velvet car coat with matching hat and shoes; and, although I listened to my mom talk about fashion, love & travel, I heard her undertones screaming, “WAKE UP.”

Four decades later, there’s a faint scent of a mix of chemicals and viscera and soap, there’s the faint sound of a mix of humans and man-made things – shoes on floors, people clanking and clinking equipment and murmuring about, the whir – and there’s the faint abrasiveness of synthetic bed sheets. My memories of the hospital environment are vague and dreamy, though I do clearly recall the smile on my husband’s face as he greeted me with the good news. He said, “Dr. Feldman said that the margins were clear. He only took the tumors and three lymph nodes.” And I can clearly see my mother, standing back a bit to defer to my husband’s right to be the one, with her stiff upper lip slightly quivering.

After hearing the good news, I know that I groped for my consciousness so that I could go home. Like Dorothy waking up again in Kansas – “Oh, Auntie Em. Zeke and Huck and Hickory, and To-To, you were there too” – I re-anchored in New York by greeting people by name. Hello, Kenny, my escort to nuclear medicine. Hi, Leila, another quiet but pleasant escort and caregiver. Hey, Jose, the entertaining male nurse who goofed up my IV though it didn’t matter because he was so campy and hilarious. Howdy, West, the young blue-eyed anesthesiologist; and Dr. Feldman, my hero. And, Lee, the man from Queens by way of Trinidad with a lot of grown-up children who helped me with the quarter in the locker thing at the start, and then pushed my wheelchair out of the labyrinth to meet my ride at the end.

With Reade at the wheel, my mother riding shotgun, and me lounging in the rear seat with an icepack on my breast, we drove back across the GW Bridge and marveled at how, despite the distance and magnitude of our travels that day, we were heading home before rush hour. I recall that I was joyful, groggy, relieved, and, though celebrating that moment, I was still hanging on to my seat. The clowns – the loud and the ubiquitous – had dispersed to wherever clowns go, and the Ringmaster was there to remind me that this was merely intermission. I had yet to receive the biopsies.

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