My body tells me things, and I try to listen.
In the morning it whispers for me to lie down on the ground. While it talks, I press my right index and middle finger into the hollow between the clavicle and the trapezius on the left and circle the digits in the depression lightly, ten times. I next do the same in my armpit, and then along the line of my groin. Ten times I brush my fingers from my armpit over my latissimus dorsi down to my hip; ten times I press the tips of my fingers into the smallest spaces between my ribs along the sternum. Back to the left, I brush my fingers up, ten times, from the nipple to the collarbone, and then down as many times again from nipple to hip. Last, in ten exuberant, sweeping arcs, I brush with the full four fingers from armpit to crotch, and then I breathe, feeling my chest rise and fall with every audible exhalation.
I’m practicing lymphatic massage on myself, every morning, to try and alleviate the swelling in my left breast and underarm, still traumatized six months after surgery. Lymphedema is a common side effect of breast cancer surgery, or more precisely of the removal of axillary lymph nodes as part of diagnosis or treatment. The lymphatic system is part of the body’s maintenance crew, removing waste and circulating fluid through a network of pea-sized nodes spread from neck to knee. Less dramatic than the circulatory system, it functions quietly in the background until its function is disrupted; remove a node, you see, and the lymphatic fluid doesn’t know where to go. Confused, it backs up, stagnant, pooling any available tissue, causing it to swell. Once you have it, it’s a long and tedious process to alleviate, requiring this daily gentle caress. It’s choreography, of sorts: a series of movements performed in sequence to elicit a particular response. I only had two lymph nodes removed, was told I was low-risk for this condition, and yet every morning my body wakes up and murmurs, “Let’s dance.”
At other times it yells, and I struggle to understand its message, delivered as it is in a new second language: the cramp. Three, four, five times a day my calf, toe, or arch of foot will seize and distort – an excruciating, obliterating pain that screams, “Attention must be paid!” I have no choice but to drop everything and attend its call.
Lately my musculature has been trying to communicate in the dead of night, when my guard is down. I wake to its holler and creep out of bed, trying not to wake Paul. I massage sticky scoops of Tiger Balm into a shrieking tendon; roll the whimpering medial arch out on a tennis ball. After the third such episode I start sleeping on the couch. The cramps make their presence known even when my body is otherwise at ease. The soleus twitches and the fascia crackles, electric, just under my skin. The cramps move into my lats and solar plexus – leading me more than once to wonder if I was experiencing a cardiac event. I’m not drinking enough water, the cramps tell me, or eating enough bananas. I’m not taking enough magnesium – or maybe it’s that I’m taking the wrong kind. Is it a side effect of the tamoxifen? The cacophany is overwhelming.
The other day on her Substack Neko Case discussed the “semi-good hurt” that is the chronic state of her body on tour. Singing your lungs out and banging a tambourine on stage every night takes its toll, and while on the road she’s in a vigilant conversation with her body – stretching it, feeding it the right food, giving it enough sleep. But it’s worth it, she notes, for the joy that performing with her bandmates brings. “What do you do in your life that gives you these physical feelings that make a sore body worth it?” she asked, and I answered.
I’m moving more lately than I have in months, and my body finds it hard to be at rest. My muscles long to dance and row and stretch and climb. Trying to work my way back to where it was a year ago, every part of my body aches – and I love it, because it means I am alive and healthy. Every day that I can’t make time to move is a bad day, even if the flip side of the good aches are the cramping in my calves, the fluid in my arm. And every morning, when I do all my boring stretches and massage, I think about how we are conditioned not to listen to what our body wants and needs, to minimize its claims on our time in favor of more socially or materially rewarding pursuits.
I’ve heard it said that the main project of menopause is to make peace with yourself at puberty, and that tracks. It’s no accident that I’m finding the experience of returning to dance class so saturated with meaning: it is putting me in conversation with my younger self, before I stopped listening to my body, before I became careless about what I ate, or drank, or who I allowed to touch it. Thirteen years ago an unexpected pregnancy and miscarriage impelled what I see now as the first phase of a return to listening as my body sent up alarms that *all was not well.* I started running, got into triathlons, and eventually wandered into my first aerial class. Now cancer has brought me back to the practice that first taught me how to listen, and what I’m hearing is a goddamn joyful chorus.
But it is here now that I confess that I am burying the lede. That sometimes your body likes to tell you lies.
I’ve been in the grip of what’s known in cancer circles as “scanxiety” all week, as my six-month mammogram and ultrasound loomed. Every knot of scar tissue, every wayward cramp was asking the question: “What if it’s back?” So I appreciated it when Gina Jacobsen, who’s been writing about her experience with stage four colon cancer, made the point recently that scanxiety can be seen as a function of ego – it’s your mind’s way of protecting yourself from being wrong, from the disappointment of being so foolish as to think everything was actually going to be ok. I felt fine before I was diagnosed, runs the logic, and I’m feeling so good now, so surely this can’t be trusted.
I tried hard all week to keep a neutral mind – refusing to allow myself to speculate, assuming neither the worst nor the best. But I must have been doing a lousy job, as the mammogram tech gently noted my scrunched up shoulders and the death grip I had on the side of the machine.
Four hours later the results bounced into my chart: no suspicious masses; no evidence of disease. I’m clean – and as my body continues to talk, I’m going to try to take what it tells me at face value, shut up my anxious mind, and listen.
Speaking of listening! Paul was interviewed last week about his practice of nature sound recording by the wonderful folks who run the Boundary Waters Podcast, on Minnesota community-based public radio station WTIP. He has been recording the soundscape of the Boundary Waters for more than twenty years, and shares some of what he’s heard over the years. Listen in here and learn about acoustic ecology, the quiet parks movement, deep listening, and more.
And, speaking of the long arc from puberty to menopause, I was interviewed by my good friend Zoe Zolbrod for this Huffington Post piece on the legacy of Judy Blume’s Are You There God It’s Me Margaret. Not tired of hearing me talk about my boobs? You’re in luck!
We’re heading to the West Coast this week for some family stuff, and for a few days on the Washington coast, where we’re planning a visit to Gordon Hempton’s “One Square Inch of Silence,” which I wrote about here. Will report back soon.
My body just breathed a sigh of relief for yours. I am so happy about your news, and I so love the way you write about reclaiming your body. It's really beautiful to witness your journey and makes it easier to appreciate my own. Thanks, too, for the generous call-out; together, we can be the boss of scanxiety!
Martha. This is such beautiful writing of such important thoughts. Thank you.