preparing for breast surgery, again

Rewriting the body during a time of renewal.

My breast revision surgery* is on October 2. It is also the last day of the month of Elul, the last day of the year 5784 in the Hebrew calendar, Erev Rosh Hashanah. The end of a Very Difficult Year To Be Jewish** and the beginning of the month-long spiritual marathon known as the “High Holy Days.” A time of joy, and reckoning, and accounting in the Book of Life and the Book of Death.

Leaving my surgery, my body’s transformation, my family’s cancer trauma in one year and stepping into the next. (If only it were so simple!) I’m not one for signs from the universe, but if I were, this would surely be one.

From “Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation” by Liana Finck

So, here I find myself, moving through the changing season and preparing my cocoon for surgery, recovery, and a month-long medical leave. I have a stack of books to read, a bunch of yarn that needs knitting, and I even signed up for a quilting class (ambitious, yes, but I can’t wait!). I hope to do some writing, too.

A screenshot of my quilting Pinterest board.

Before and after my mastectomy, I wrote a Google doc resource guide with my list of tools to prepare for and recover from surgery. Here is the Cliff Notes’ version and what I know to be true:

1. Reduce stress, in any and every way possible.

2. Ask your friends to cook for you, prep meals if you must, but also stock your house with comfort food and snacks. I’m talking boxed mac and cheese, big bougie containers of pre-cut fruit salad, whatever will get you excited to eat.

3. The body wants to heal.

4. Recovery timelines are a bullshit, arbitrary, capitalist mechanism to get people to return to work faster. Don’t rush it and don’t let anyone (including yourself) tell you that you should be feeling “normal” “by now,” whatever that means.

5. Healing is hard. It is also deeply meaningful, personal, and transformative. This time is a gift.

*If you’re new here, I am BRCA1+ and had a preventative double mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction last year. Reflections on that experience on Substack here and more about my diagnosis on Instagram here. All about my “DIEP Phase 2” revision surgery can be found on the “DIEP phase 2” IG Story highlight on my Instagram.

**It is a difficult year to witness the deaths and abductions of October 7, 2023, the greatest mass atrocity against Jewish life since the Holocaust. It is a difficult year to witness, and share in the responsibility of, the genocide and murder of over 40,000 Palestinians since that date, as well as the atrocities against Palestinian life, safety, land, autonomy, and flourishing since the Nakba of 1948. It is a difficult year to be a lefty Jew, to be on the Board of a shul that has been actively protesting the genocide, and feel like the beauty and joys of being Jewish that I love have been appropriated and denigrated by the state of Israel, by Zionist extremists, by apologists, by the majority of my people. It is a difficult year to try to define what being “Jewish” means to me, anymore or at all.

What I’m reading

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin for Book Club, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Hum by Helen Phillips, and The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.

Picked up copies of Rachel Kushner’s buzzy new release, Creation Lake, and the just-released biography of Audre Lorde, Survival Is a Promise, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Adding this profile of Richard Powers, and his new book, Playground, to the list.

Listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Zadie Smith and the The Daily podcast’s profile of Jewish extremism, which brought up memories of my writing a paper about just this topic in college in 2009…

What I read

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (a 5 star winner, one of my favorite books of the year), A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, and these two pieces on Jewish Currents—one by Masha Gessen in the NYT and the other by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker.

A few helpful things

If you have Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and a history of cancer in your family—especially breast or ovarian cancer—talk to your doctor about genetic testing for the BRCA mutation.

If you are BRCA positive or are otherwise considering or preparing for a mastectomy, I’m sending you so much love! Here’s my Google doc resource guide.

A writing friend shared that a fountain pen can help keep the words flowing when journaling or otherwise writing by hand. I picked up this Kaweco Classic Sport fountain pen in bright red and writing with it is a delight.