Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace, Grace is a girl who forgot to wash her face. Or so the saying went when I was nine.
It always kind of bothered me, why did Grace forget to wash her face? How do you forget to wash your face? Did she have to be someplace so urgently that she just left the house without noticing her big, dirty, grubby face?!
I came to the conclusion some time ago that essentially Grace was just a bit dirty, a dirty little stop out if you will. Literally.
I feel a bit like Grace. Not with the grubby face, god no, I am meticulous about the whole face cleaning business - there's a whole night time / day time ritual that bores even me.
But I'm definitely more of a go, go, go girl - again not in that way. Ok so in the PG version I just like things to move quickly. I like to skip ahead to the best bits - god there really is no way to write this without it sounds like blog porn?!
Essentially I want to fast forward the boring stuff and get straight to the exciting bits. I'm not one of these "Life is a journey" people. To me, life is a series of really brilliant things, with scatterings of shit times and whole chunks of just average, normal, day-to-day stuff. Which is fine, but I'm secretly just waiting for the next big exciting moment to come along.
But this month I've mostly been waiting. I've tried to distract myself with the house move and the new job but essentially I've been waiting...waiting for the next operation to come. Waiting to see if Leftie has "rested" enough, waiting to hear if I've been pumped up enough, waiting to see if the muscles have stretched enough. Waiting, waiting, waiting. (Sigh)
It's only the enforced waiting that's made me realise how quickly everything happened before. How I've effectively been on fast forward since that fateful day back in June. From the first time I heard the C-Bomb to the day of the mastectomy a total of eleven days passed, it felt like years, but it was just eleven days.
Then every day or week after something has happened. First the immediate recovery and adjustment, running away to the seaside, the weekly hospital appointments, watching little Lefty grow, finding the new flat, getting ready to start the new job - everything just seemed to fast forward at a rapid pace. Then someone hit pause, while everything else could move on the reconstruction had to wait, until Lefty had rested enough.
The job has been a great distraction. It's just what I needed, a fresh start, lots of new people, new challenges and I love it. But even this has come with it's own C-Monkey related issues.
Mainly the crisis every woman faces every single day, the thing that keeps us up at night, that occupies our thoughts in the shower, or when making that first cup of tea....what the hell am I going to wear today? This is a universal problem for women across the land, but what I have only just realised is that C-Monkey has gone through my entire wardrobe, tried on everything I once liked (he looked very fetching, if a little camp) and then destroyed it.
I have been living in pretty causal, comfy clothes for a while now; work wear really wasn't required in the hospital corridors. But now I've started the new job, I want to look super polished and PR fabulous and it's a bloody struggle. This wardrobe is no longer my own. C-Monkey has ransacked it. He has made previously pretty dresses fit in all the wrong ways, he has shrunk tops, taken zips in, removed buttons and don't even get me started on his attack of my bras. There are no wires left!
Quite simply my wardrobe has halved, scrap that, it's reduced down to a third. The only items I want to wear are loose, baggy, shapeless things that hide the 'under construction' Franken-boob from the public eye and the ever-expanding body beneath. Oh yes, C-Monkey may take away with one hand but he also gives with another, he gives you...wobble. Yes, wobble and chunk. And not the good kind.
The day C-Monkey arrived he bought a wheelbarrow of wobbly bits; he hid my gym kit and made a deal to swap my Lefty with the chunk in his (I want to say trunk...) wheelbarrow. Because exercise and me have parted ways, which was kind of expected and not something I've even worried about...but I do miss it. Accepting my new body, the extra wobbly bits and the not so wobbly bits (yes Lefty I'm talking about you) and the lack of control to do anything about it is actually really hard. Nothing fits, nothing feels like it use to, or hangs in the right way, my body is a bit of a stranger to me.
So now my morning routine involves a good hour of frantic hunting for anything, anything I can wear that still fits. That isn't too tight, or shows the difference in size between the two, or that flaunts Righty and his bouncy ways too much. Yes he's still showing off and bouncing about happily while Lefty stays rigid.
But not for much longer. The wait is finally over. This weekend the Franken-boob will finally be replaced by a proper, soft, life-like implant. Lefty will be reborn! No more pipe, no more weird hard wonky boob, no more pump up the jam sessions, no more wardrobe wars (ok so there might still be a few of those, the gym bunny is a little way off yet) ...but yes finally, finally, the time has come and I'm actually excited!
And maybe a little terrified.
I don't really like to think back to the last operation I had, the mastectomy. Those horrible dark, pain-filled days afterwards. I just can't face it. I don't want to remember. But it keeps sneaky up on me the closer I get to going in. I'm scarred it's going to be like that all over again. Waking up in recovery, the shock, the shaking, throwing up, the dizzy spells, that horrible drain, the pain...I can't concentrate for thinking about it.
I tell myself repeatedly that this isn't the same, it's a much simpler operation, effectively just popping one out and popping a new one in, done. But still I think about it.
I'm also worried about what it's going to look like, the new boob. In a weird way I've sort of been able to excuse Franken-boob and the way he looks because he's been 'under construction' - so if he looks a bit funny, or feels weird, that's to be expected. But after this next op, well he's supposed to be almost finished...almost perfect. But what if he's not, what if he never looks ok?
I say almost finished because the 'decorations' won't be done for another few months - maybe I'll get my 'baubles' done just in time for Christmas, how very festive! Apparently they like to leave the new implant to settle for a while, as it may shift slightly (more settling time, joy!). If they put the decoration on now and it shifts I might well end up with a nipple pointing sideways?! As funny as that might be for five minutes and potentially useful (handy key hook anyone?) I'm glad they're not taking that risk.
So here I am, it's nearly time. I definitely haven't learnt to be patient and I may not be feeling very brave but at least I'll always have a clean face and possibly a very nice, new bouncy Lefty. Here's hoping!