I dreamt it!!!

First, I got Yoga Nidrasana, easily grabbing wrists. Then Supta Kurmasana.

It was a dream, yes, but if I didn't know I had it in me to do it, I don't think that I could have even processed how to do it in the dream.

I woke up feeling less grumpy, hopeful in fact. It is 5:18 a.m. at this very moment. And like most days in the past few weeks, I am not sleeping well. I attribute this to anxiety over my upcoming surgery, mostly. I feel vaguely pessimistic that any plastic surgeon can fix what is wrong with me cosmetically. How do you take a severely scarred-up, adhesion-laden flap of skin that is currently too small to comfortably hold a B-cup implant and de-scar it, de-adhesion it and prepare it to hold a new implant that is meant to be more squishy? It just doesn't seem possible. And yet my doctor says he can help me. At the very least, I won't have water balloons where my breasts should be. Instead, I will have gel-filled balloons, which should make a difference right there.

I fell asleep at about 2:15 a.m., watching South Park on the CW11, the new network (at least here in NY) that doesn't seem to care about swear-words past midnight (or perhaps their censors couldn't understand the accents to realize that there were multiple droppings of the f-bomb). I was lying on my stomach, trying to smoosh my breasts down as hard as I could. I read somewhere on the internet that adhesions could be broken up manually. And even though I am due to have my surgery on Wednesday, I felt this need to try to DIY a bit. I am, after all, a DIY kind of gal - I do my own hair color, I do my own manis and pedis (when on rare occasions I actually have nails that are worth mani-ing and pedi-ing), I even occasionally trim my own hair.

And as I lay there, kind of uncomfortable, but kind of charged with purpose, it occurred to me that I am pretty much of a trooper. Yeah. I don't think about it all that much. But I am damn brave and downright enlightened (there, I said it) about this whole thing. Think about it: I was diagnosed with a virulent form of breast cancer a bit more than four years ago. I was angry and misbehaved then, for sure. But now, and for quite a long time now, I am not filled with anger, nor am I acting out. At the present time, I don't feel particularly sorry for myself or spend a lot of time woe-is-me-ing. And this is despite the fact that every year since August of 2002, I have had to endure yet another surgery to try to fix the cosmetic damage to my body that the breast cancer wrought, directly or indirectly, mostly indirectly.

The first year, it was a busted saline implant. The next year it was lipo to my once flat stomach that had suddenly inflated due to chemo and chemo-induced menopause and turned my once well-proportioned figure into a menopausal apple-shape. The next year it was more lipo because the first one wasn't aggressive enough AND because my chemo stretched out for 15 months, continuing to change my 30-something body into the body of a woman in her 60's. The NEXT year, last year, was the tummy tuck that removed the excess skin left from the lipo and repaired muscle damage wrought by two pregnancies (can't blame breast cancer for that one) AND a very UNsuccessful scar revision on my breasts (um, yeah, I think we can safely say that that was related to the breast cancer).

After last year's surgery, I felt happy about my tummy, finally, but completely defeated about my breasts. And I moved on. That was that. They were never going to be good, and I accepted it and moved on with grace and dignity. The Husband, and as it turns out many of my friends, silently (at least for the most part) pretended that I looked just fine, although there were times that the Husband would say, "You should lift that part of your shirt higher on your chest so that the ridges in your chest don't show so much." I let it go. It didn't matter. I was past the need for good breasts.

But then the yoga seemed to be at issue. The breasts seemed to be getting in the way - during twists at first, and then when I found a way to get around that problem, literally, by manually moving my nearly unmovable mounds PAST the opposing leg in Mari C and Mari D (as well as Parivritta Parsvakona), during Supta K. My shoulders simply don't move in the right direction. The internal rotation of the bind for Supta K (as well as for Mari A and B) is complex. My shoulders rotate inward, true, but to a degree that creates near paralysis when it comes to wrapping my arms around my back. It's like my arms are stuck in a moving forward and inward position. Damn scars. Damn tight muscles wrapped tightly over too-tight saline implants.

It was Julie - Facing Inward, Julie - who helped me see this and prodded me to get to her doctor, who has promised me that he can make it at least somewhat better. I won't come out of it looking like Carmen Electra. But it will be "better".

I hope so. But for the past week or so, I haven't been sleeping, haven't been myself, because the game face that I have worn for so long is now starting to melt away. I can't have a game face about my breasts if I am going into surgery on Wednesday hoping to make them better. This has caused some dissonance for me. And as gracefully as I have taken my challenges up until now, I find myself suffering right now. Just a little bit. Just enough to throw me off.

It's now nearly six a.m., and I'm too tired to reread what I wrote. I hope it's coherent. I hope it makes sense. It's not the best thing I ever wrote. But it's real and it's true, and maybe having written it will help me to get some sleep.

YC