The A-word that broke me

Waiting for a mastectomy is its own kind of heavy. I'd been through surgeries before and thought I had some idea of what to expect. I didn't. This episode covers the months leading up to the surgery, from a new surgeon who used a word that stopped me in my tracks, to the moments where I finally stopped holding it together.

There's a lot in this one about the people who showed up. A friend who sat with me in her garden while I fell apart and who didn't try to fix it. Tim cooking through the weekends to keep things moving. Ruby being clingy in the way kids are when they know something is wrong. And a ritual I created for myself before the surgery that was messy and raw and completely necessary.

I also talk about the PET scan waiting rooms, the worst-case thinking, the sleepless nights, and what I kept coming back to in the yoga texts when logic stopped working. By the night before surgery I hadn't slept and I was worn through. But something became clear in that exhaustion. This episode is about everything that happened before I found out what that was.

LINKS:

• Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ 
• Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/
• Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/
• Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:58] Monica: Welcome back. In the last episode, I told you about the book I threw in the bin, the decision to stop being strong, and the moment that I chose consciously and deliberately to fall apart. That was the beginning of my own surrender experiment. Today, I wanna take you into the months that followed, the horrible waiting, the preparing, the looming mastectomy, and the sleepless nights, and the very dark places the mind goes when you've got too much time on your hands and too much to lose.

[00:01:32] Now, before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together.

[00:01:36] The information I share in this podcast is my own personal experience. It's not medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional. My surgeon of 10 years had retired, and he referred me to one of his colleagues, a woman, to do the double [00:02:00] mastectomy, and I'd heard good things about her, so when I went to the first appointment, I wasn't particularly anxious about the change.

[00:02:07] I thought I knew what to expect. I didn't know what to expect. She had a completely different approach to my previous surgeon. Whereas he'd been clinical and efficient, she was present in a way that I hadn't experienced in a medical setting before. She took her time. She asked questions. There was a quality of care in the room that I wasn't prepared for.

[00:02:30] At the end of the appointment, she leaned in close. She took my hand. She looked me in the eye, lowered her voice and said, " You need to prepare yourself for an amputation. And then you need to know that it's a two to three-year recovery. Cancer has a very long tail."

[00:02:48] Up until that point, I'd held it together. I'd been composed through the whole appointment, asking questions, processing the information, but the word amputation, I don't know what it was about that word, but I had a visceral reaction to it. I'd known intellectually what a mastectomy was. I'd seen pictures of mastectomy scars.

[00:03:10] I knew I was losing my breast, but no one had ever called it that before. Amputation. It's the same word we use for a lost limb. It suddenly felt really real, and I couldn't hold it in anymore She didn't flinch. She held my hand and let me cry. She didn't try to rush me out of the office, she just let me be.

[00:03:31] And I left that appointment thinking, "I've got the right surgeon." A few days later, I went to visit my bestie. she'd just come out of hospital herself. She'd had a hysterectomy after discovering pre-cancerous cells, and she made the decision to just get it all out. She was at home recovering.

[00:03:49] I arrived with flowers and cake and planning to check in on her and be a good friend, offer whatever support that I could. We sat outside in her garden. It was one of those beautiful [00:04:00] winter mornings, warm and sunny, and the sky was that deep blue. And when she asked me how I was, I started howling, and I don't mean crying.

[00:04:09] It was something more primal. Something came up from somewhere deep. It just came out of me without warning. It was guttural and untamed. The sound a person makes when they've been holding something so big for such a long time that it finally gives way. I'd come here to support her, and she ended up holding me.

[00:04:29] I said, "I can't do it. It's too hard. I just can't do it."

[00:04:34] One of the great things about her, or one of the many great things, is that she doesn't offer platitudes or fill silences. She doesn't try to make you feel better. She doesn't tell you to look on the bright side, or at least you don't need chemotherapy. She just knows how to hold space. She knows how to sit with you in the middle of the hard thing without trying to move you out of it, and she let me be completely undone.

[00:04:58] And eventually, because this is what happens when you allow the feeling to fully arrive, the wave broke, and we could have a laugh about our missing bits. Well, it was more of a snort because there was so much snot from all the howling, but you get the picture. We were able to have a laugh, and I'm so grateful for her.

[00:05:17] In this season of people trying to help, she helped me most by doing nothing but staying. Now, somewhere in those waiting months, I had an idea. I wanted to create a ritual, a ceremony, a way of saying goodbye to my breasts. When you're about to have an amputation, I'm using that word deliberately now because it is the right word, it seems important to mark it, to acknowledge what's being lost, to not just move straight from before to after as though that transition doesn't matter So I ordered a plaster cast kit online, and that kit sat unopened for months as I dreaded doing it.

[00:05:58] But as the weeks drew closer, [00:06:00] I knew it was something I needed to do. I did it when Tim was away and when Ruby was at kindy. It made a huge mess in the bathroom with plaster everywhere, and it was just as emotional as I'd dreaded. There was so much grief and despair and fear and loss and pain and shame and guilt and anger and disappointment.

[00:06:22] Everything came up that day, and as I stood half naked in front of the mirror, the tears were just streaming down my face. It took me quite some time to recover from that day, but I'm really happy with how my breast cast turned out. I'm really glad I did it. And there was something right about doing it alone.

[00:06:41] There was a real deep intimacy to it, kinda like a last portrait, a last record of what was. And the grief that came up was enormous. Grief for losing a part of my womanhood and whatever you believe about the relationship between breasts and femininity, and I hold those beliefs loosely because it's complicated and personal, but there's still a loss.

[00:07:04] Something that was part of how I'd moved through the world for decades, part of my body's story was gonna be gone. And then there was the grief for the 10 years that I'd spent trying to save them. Two diagnoses. At this point, I think I'd had six surgeries, 50 rounds of radiation, all the biopsies and MRIs, and the monitoring and the decisions, a decade of managing this threat, and here we were anyway, the mastectomy I'd tried so hard to avoid, and the grief for everything that my body had been through.

[00:07:38] She'd been so patient. She had endured so much and just kept going and carrying me through life, and we were about to do it all again. So I sat with the cast when it was done and just cried. It was one of the most important things I did in that month. And if you're ever facing a loss of any kind, I wanna encourage you to find your version of this, [00:08:00] a ritual, a ceremony, something to mark the occasion, something that says this mattered

[00:08:07] Now around this time, I had a PET scan, and a PET scan checks whether cancer has spread to other parts of the body, the organs, the lymph nodes, the bones. It's standard before a major surgery like a mastectomy. Now, at the same time, my auntie, my mum's sister, had had metastatic cancer at this time, metastatic breast cancer, and hers had spread to her, her bones.

[00:08:31] And I had these niggles in my back. It was probably nothing, but when you're waiting for a PET scan and your aunt's cancer is in her bones and your back has been aching, the logical part of your mind goes quiet and the amygdala takes over. And I went all the way down. I started thinking about my funeral, not passively, but practically, how I'd like it to go, the music, who would speak, what I'd want people to know.

[00:08:57] I called an old school friend and told her I wanted her to give my eulogy. And to her enormous credit, she didn't panic. She said, "Okay, but that's not gonna happen, but yes, of course, I'll speak at your funeral."

[00:09:09] And she just sat there with me in it. She indulged me, and I mean that with complete affection. She let me go all the way down to say the terrible things out loud, the things that I couldn't say to Tim or Mum because it would frighten them and make them question my sanity. But these things were there, and they needed to be witnessed.

[00:09:28] And sometimes that's just what we need, not to be talked out of a dark place, not to be redirected towards the positive, but be allowed to go all the way in, to say the fears, to speak the worst case out loud, to look at it directly, and from that low point, find our way back up again. Because the thing is, if you push those dark thoughts away, they don't leave.

[00:09:51] They just circle around, and they come back at 3:00 AM when your defenses are down. But if you can say them out loud to someone who can hear them without flinching, [00:10:00] if you let yourself go all the way down, there's a bottom to it. And once you've hit that bottom and found that you're still there, still breathing, still yourself, there's only one direction you can go, and she gave me that.

[00:10:12] On the day of the PET scan, I had to drive across town to Taringa and peak hour traffic. I got there with time to spare, which felt like a little win, but my heart was racing from the weight of what the scan might show, but I was there on time. I went to open my car door, and the handle snapped off in my hand, just snapped right off And I sat there with the handle in my hand, just completely befuddled.

[00:10:37] I was like in a daze and I couldn't think. I looked in the car. My back seat had all this stuff from Bunnings that I hadn't unloaded, and also had Ruby's car seat. I couldn't get out that way. And while the front passenger seat was clear, I was parked really close to a pole. I had to squeeze myself out of the passenger side like one of those mime artists between two panes of glass.

[00:10:59] Part of the PET scan is where they inject you with radioactive dye, and then you have to lie still in a dark room for an hour. So I spent an hour staring at the ceiling, trying not to move, with no way to escape my thoughts. When it came time to go into the machine, I had tears streaming down my face again, assuming the worst, that cancer had spread.

[00:11:19] Thinking about my funeral and poor Ruby growing up without a mum. I got the news that afternoon. The PET scan came back clear, the cancer hadn't spread. I exhaled in deep relief. That night I told Tim what happened. He's a logical engineer and looked at me with a perplexed expression and said, "Why didn't you just open the window, reach your arm out and open the door from the outside?"

[00:11:42] And I just looked at him, and it hadn't occurred to me, not for one second. And here's the thing. It hadn't occurred to me because of what stress does to the brain. When we're in prolonged fight or flight, the stress hormones flooding the body have a specific effect on our brain. The prefrontal [00:12:00] cortex, that's the part responsible for logical reasoning and clear thinking.

[00:12:04] Stress just takes that part of the brain offline, and the amygdala, the brain's fear center, takes charge. And the amygdala is very good at identifying danger, but it's terrible at logic and reasoning. Basically, stress makes us stupid. Not permanently, but in the moment and over time it degrades our cognitive function, the thing we need most when things go wrong.

[00:12:28] We had a good laugh about it, about me having the dumb, but underneath that laugh was something real. I could sense my brain wasn't working very well. my attention span was microscopic. I couldn't think things through. I was in a confused fog. After the PET scan, I tackled the other things I was dreading.

[00:12:46] I needed to get my legal business and financial affairs in order. I updated my will. I updated my power of attorney. I put together a business continuity plan for the studio. And I wanna say something about this because we often avoid it for the wrong reasons We often avoid it because it feels like inviting the outcome, like planning for your death makes it more likely.

[00:13:09] I understand that, and I felt that, but getting your affairs in order isn't giving up on life. It's actually taking care of the people you love. It's an act of love, and I didn't wanna leave a mess for Tim to figure out while also trying to grieve. None of it was pleasant to do. Going through a will and thinking carefully about what happens to your daughter, your business, your assets if you don't come home, it's very uncomfortable.

[00:13:34] Once it was done, I felt lighter. I felt like I'd achieved peak adulthood. That fear of the unknown had been partly the fear of leaving things unresolved. Resolving them was one less thing to carry.

[00:13:48] Now, at this time, Ruby was really struggling at kindy. She was crying at drop-off, not wanting to go, very clingy, not sleeping through the night. We never used the word cancer with [00:14:00] her, just that mommy had sore boobies. We tried to keep things as normal as possible for her, but I think deep down she knew something wasn't okay.

[00:14:09] Kids know these things. They can't name it, they can't articulate it, but they can feel the shift in the air. She could feel the tension in my body. She was three years old, and she couldn't tell me what she was sensing, but her body was telling me in its own way with the clinginess, the tears, the interrupted sleep.

[00:14:29] She felt it. So in the middle of everything else, I was also trying to support her, arranging playdates with the other kids from kindy, trying to build her friendship group, helping her feel more settled when I wasn't there. And what this meant was making small talk with the other parents in the playground.

[00:14:48] And if you know me, I'm not a big fan of small talk, so this was painful in and of itself. Discussing the challenges of parenting three-year-olds and sleep problems and all those sorts of toddler tantrums, all while quietly carrying breast cancer and the looming mastectomy and the grief I didn't have words for.

[00:15:11] Of course, none of the other moms knew. I didn't wanna burden them with that.

[00:15:15] And the distance between what I was saying and what was happening inside me was staggering, but I kept going. And Ruby not sleeping through the night, I wanna say something about this because it sounds like it was a real burden, but in some ways it wasn't. When she woke multiple times in the night and called out for me, I would willingly go to her ' Cause it gave me something to do other than lie in bed with my thoughts.

[00:15:39] I wasn't sleeping anyway. I would lie in bed with her until she fell asleep again. And she didn't know it, but she was soothing me. Tim would fly out on Monday at 6:00 a.m. and come home Friday, 6:00 p.m., and the weekends were hard for us. We tried our best to keep things normal for Ruby. He was exhausted from working a [00:16:00] full week.

[00:16:00] I was exhausted from not sleeping. But every weekend he was home, Tim would do batch cooking. He'd spend most of Sunday in the kitchen making food for the week, things that I could just heat up, meals that were done and waiting, so I had one less thing to think about during the week when I couldn't sleep, and that pit of dread was sitting permanently in my stomach.

[00:16:22] He never made a big deal of it, he just did it, and he always did the washing up after. I think about that a lot, and how love at its most useful often looks like those small things. When Ruby was at kindy, I walked. didn't know what else to do with myself. I couldn't concentrate enough to work. I couldn't sit still.

[00:16:42] That rajas energy had nowhere to go, so I walked sometimes for hours until my legs were tired.

[00:16:49] I knew that I wanted to tend to my nervous system as much as I could so that when I got to the other side of all of this, I didn't have to deal with a nervous system that was stuck in freeze or worse, complete collapse. When the nervous system activates fight or flight, it sends a surge of energy to our muscles, and in flight, in particular, it's the legs, because the biological purpose of the flight response is to run, to flee, to get away from yourself and the threat.

[00:17:17] I was in full flight mode. My legs knew it even when my brain was trying to stay rational. Every cell of my being wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere where this wasn't happening. And because I couldn't escape from what I was going through, I walked. And walking was what my body really needed to do with that energy, and it was probably one of the most honest things I did in those months, listening to what my body needed instead of overriding it with my mind.

[00:17:44] The surrender experiment, it turned out, wasn't about sitting still and breathing and being serene. It was about trusting the body's intelligence, even when that intelligence looked like an unhinged woman pounding the pavement day in, day out. I wasn't sleeping. [00:18:00] I tried everything, podcasts, audiobooks There's a whole genre of audiobooks designed for insomniacs, stories about nothing much happening, deliberately boring, designed to give your mind just enough to follow that it stops generating its own thoughts and drifts off.

[00:18:17] I tried them, and they didn't work. What helped, not perfectly, but more than anything else, was going back to my roots. Some of the older yoga texts, the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras, texts I'd studied years ago that took on a completely different quality when I was reading them at 2:00 AM with a mastectomy on the calendar.

[00:18:40] The Yoga Sutras identify the causes of human suffering, and there's five of them, and the key one, or the one that was affecting me, was aversion, the suffering we create by resisting what is, by not liking our circumstances, by wishing things were different than how they are. I was suffering. That was undeniable.

[00:19:04] But the sutras were pointing at something specific. Some of my suffering was the cancer, and some of my suffering was my resistance to the cancer. Some of it was the situation, but most of it was me pressing down on the situation with my own hands. I'd heard this before. I'd taught this before. But there's a real difference between understanding something intellectually and embodying it at 2:00 AM when your mind is running a worst case scenario.

[00:19:32] The teaching became real in a different way, not because I suddenly stopped suffering, but because I could start to see its shape. I could distinguish between the suffering that was part of my situation and the suffering I was creating, and slowly and imperfectly, I started to put down that second suffering, the one that I was creating.

[00:19:53] In hindsight, the waiting for the mastectomy was too long, but I had good reasons for it. Tim's work [00:20:00] schedule, the logistics of organizing all the surgeons needed for the combined mastectomy and reconstruction, the time I needed to sort out wills and plans and all the practical things, all of it was real and necessary.

[00:20:12] But the dread that built over those months was enormous. I felt sick in my stomach most of the time, the nausea of anticipatory dread, that low level persistent gnawing nausea that doesn't respond to peppermint tea or ginger tea. It just sits there reminding you of what's coming. I would wake up with the dread.

[00:20:34] I would fall asleep with the dread, if I fell asleep at all. It just became the part of my texture. It became the part of the texture of those months as a constant and It became part of the texture of those months, a constant reminder of what was coming. The insomnia got worse closer to the time. There were nights I didn't sleep at all.

[00:20:54] I'd just lay there in the dark listening to audiobooks. And if I had someone else to look after Ruby during those nights, I probably would've walked all night too. I'd made the decision to accept this as if I'd chosen it, and I was trying, genuinely trying to live that decision. But there's a big difference between making a decision and the nervous system catching up to it.

[00:21:15] The mind can choose to surrender, but the body has its own timeline.

[00:21:19] Now, the morning of the mastectomy, I was already months deep into sleep deprivation. I was already depleted, already hollowed out by the waiting, the dread, that anticipation. It was genuinely the most miserable I've ever been in my life, and it was also, even though I couldn't see it at the time, exactly the place I needed to be.

[00:21:42] Sometimes you have to go all the way to the bottom before you find what's waiting there.

[00:21:46] In the next episode, we go into part two, "Rock Bottom." I'll take you into the hospital, what the mastectomy was actually like, what happened the days after, when the surrender experiment [00:22:00] met its most serious test, and the stuff that happened quietly at home that I haven't talked about publicly before. But for now, remember this: eventually everything changes, and beneath the narrative, the fear, the anxiety is the light of awareness, and that light of awareness is always, always on your side.

[00:22:21] Until next time, my friend.