Where did it go?

Hurt or numb.
Those are your choices after surgery. The scalpel-altered places on my body either rdiate pain or have no feeling whatsoever.
It's not just my body that seems stuck between these alternatives. If I feel it, it hurts. Even loving kindness. Pushing away and going numb to circumnavigate pain is hardly tempting. Being unable to feel at all is actually worse. Better to suffer than to be deadened.

* * * * *

The day before my surgery, I let my thoughts wander and then idly followed their path.
I found myself wondering where my breast would actually go.
Sure, parts of it would be excised and sliced and dyed and slipped on slides and checked cell by cell. Samples would go to the lab for that damned damning documentation.
But what of the rest of the breast? Where would it physically wind up?
It's mine, after all. But only when I actually posess it?
Then I wondered what had happened to my grandmother's breast, removed in 1963.
And what had happened to my daughter's bum kidney, removed when she was a baby? My son's tonsils, taken out just this past December? My little daughter's two front teeth? My father's hip bone, replaced by a titanium joint decades ago?
I realized that it doesn't matter.
We are the sum of our parts, but when they're no longer of us, they're, well, no longer of us. Living tissue is what matters. What is excised falls away with little mourning. We lose what we're better off without.
I imagined my tissue collected with the other lost parts from those I love. I imagined the cells comingling to form a sort of sandbar in the middle of the river. A place where I can bank my self while I heal.

* * * * *

I have lived in many houses in my life.
Sometimes when I can't sleep I try to mentally walk through one of the many old rental houses we lived in when I was a little girl, remembering the cedar scent from a walk in closet in one house or the graceful turn of the stairs on the landing in another.
Since becoming an adult, I have had my name on the mortgage of six different houses, including the home where I live now.
It's interesting how I mentally move out and disengage myself from houses that I no longer own. Sometimes I find myself in an old neighborhood and drive past one of my previous homes. I'll note that the trees have grown taller, or that shutters have been added, or that the place looks smaller than I remember. These are fairly nuetral observations about a place I once owned by now have little interest in, financial or otherwise.
It doesn't matter what new owners do to a place. It's not mine anymore.
And that is how I am starting to feel about this body.
I went to the doctor yesterday. (I have a lot of doctors now--general physician, surgeon, plastic surgeon, oncologist.) The plastic surgeon examined me, and pronounced me on target for healing.
I am cut and stitched back up. Not what I once was. No. And yet--fine. I am glad to say that I feel good about how it appears. ('It?' I guess I mean how I appear.) Again, not quite what it was, but it's close. I don't look at myself and recoil in horror; quite the reverse. I can learn to accept this. Uh, these. In fact, already I am accepting how I look. More to the point, in my new body I will regain my mobility and be able to wear what I want without fear or feeling self-conscious. I will soon be me again.
Not the old me.
Actually, I'm a bit, well, perkier, in that department, if you want to know the truth.
This is all a high price to pay for perkiness, but I won't complain.
I'm mentally unpacking in my body's new house. I'm already losing interest in the place where I no longer live. But it doesn't feel like home. Not yet.

* * * * *