M/N-obility

In my ever-more-inked-up appointment book, you now find the jotting "PT."
I will have ongoing physical therapy for my right arm and shoulder. Because of the surgery, the removal of lymph nodes and the reconstruction, my upper body is about as stiff as I figured I'd be at 90. I often continue to feel a deep ache that stretches from my chest wall into my very center. Nerves and muscles were altered or cut by the surgeon's scalpel and my innards, as we hicks say, have been disrupted.
To add insult to this injury, I now have a bona fide Jiggly Grandma Upper Arm. (Let me quickly add only one of them--the right arm--has gone all old lady on me.)
The good news is that with some focused attention, it should all go back like it used to be.
Essentially, it won't be any worse than it ever was.
So that I will continue to be able to lift my clean dishes out of the dishwasher and onto the top shelf of the cupboard, I now do a series of exercises several times a day and will have multiple sessions with a physical therapist.
Before my first PT appointment, I filled out the several pages of a health questionairre. One query asked, "What is your goal in coming here?"
And then I wrote something that would have been a typo if I would have been typing. (Er, excuse me. Don't want a Grandma vocabulary to go with that arm. I should have said...not 'typing'...but 'keyboarding.'
(BTW--how come today's typos aren't called keyboardos?)
(Sorry for the digression.)
(And all the parentheses.)
Back to the my goal for physical therapy.
I meant to write that my goal was "Mobility."
Instead I wrote that my goal was "Nobility."
And as I smiled ruefully to myself and scratched out a correction, my mind seized onto that word...nobility...and I immediately thought of my Grandma Shock.
(Yep, that was her real name. My mother's maiden name was Shock.)
(Are parentheses on sale or something?)
Now I'm going to digress about my grandmother for a bit, so here is an illustration to break up the text and make the blog somewhat visually stimulating and also to provide you a mental picture of her.
This is a photograph of me (circa 1989) with my beloved grandmothers. This is the back porch of the house I grew up in in Jackson, Ohio, where my parents still live.



From left to right: Dorothy Shock, my maternal grandmother. Jill Burger, my mother. Auguste Burger, my paternal grandmother. And that's me with the five-footer when she was a two-footer. (She had just gotten up and I can almost smell that hot-baby-post-nap scent in that sweet fold in her neck!)
(In most pictures of me that were taken in this era, I sport a heinous perm and wear black acid washed jeans. No kidding. And the saddest part is, I thought it looked bitchin!)


I come from good peasant stock as perhaps the faces in this picture reveal. On both sides I am descended from a hard working, plain speaking, decent lot. We have no airs or pedigrees or strings of numbers behind our names...and we admit to a bit of suspicion of those who do.
That said, I now know that I am descended from nobility. Yeah, me, the gym teacher's daughter from the sticks: I am of noble birth.
At the time this picture was taken, my Grandma Shock was a 26 year breast cancer survivor.
She was diagnosed in 1963. She once told me that when she found the lump, my own grandfather told her to ignore it.
She did not. She was not the Ignore It type.
In 1963, there were no pink ribbons, no races, no support groups. No special cancer clinics, no reconstruction surgery, no hopeful clinical trials. Women were called 'victims' not 'survivors.' Furthermore, The words "breast" or "cancer" were seldom spoken aloud and never in tandem. Well bred people and newspaper obituaries didn't even mention cancer when it was the cause of death; it was termed "a long illness."
Grandma Shock's surgery was what they called a radical mastectomy. From practically under her chin to her waist, from her sternum to her bicep, every corpuscle the scalpel could find was cut away. They took the tissue under her arm as well, including all of her lymph nodes.
That was followed by an intensive course of radiation.
Go back and look at the picture. Notice Grandma Shock's right hand.
She could wear the prosthesis in her bra and conceal her poor scarred chest, but she could not hide the ravages of the side effects of her disease. Because she had no lymph nodes, she lived with constant lymphedema. Her right hand and arm were always swollen. That word hardly describes it--her arm was bigger and heavier than her thigh. If she got a cold, it would be throb with fever. It was uncomfortable every day.
And embarrassing. I have very few pictures where you can see the swelling. She was quick to turn her body so that the offending arm was hidden or tucked behind her back.
Yet she was always fashion conscious and was proud to be a little bit vain. She had a difficult time finding clothes--long sleeves were often too tight to contain her arm and short sleeves revealed the unsightly condition. "Oh, this arm!" she would say in exasperation during a fruitless shopping expedition.
That was about as much complaining as I ever heard from her.
I wish I had more details of exactly what she experienced with her breast cancer. She wasn't afraid to talk about it, but she never brought it up. It was simply part of her life. I never heard her feel sorry for herself; she always seemed so grateful that she lived despite losing her breast. I think she found it a hard bargain but a fair trade.
I now contemplate the fear that must have been her daily companion. She had no chemotherapy to lengthen her odds for a long life, no regular scans to scout for a recurrence, not even a mammogram to provide proof that her other breast was not a time bomb. For a whole generation of breast cancer survivors, the high tech imaging tht we take for granted was the stuff of sci-fi, about as realistic as a robot maid.
Instead of medical reassurance, she had faith and grit. And she cultivated the ability to seek and find joy in the day...in a snapdragon, an excellent canasta hand, a visit with family.
My grandmother was a housewife feminist, who had a charter subscription to Ms. magazine. We had a summer--I think it was the year I was 9--where we played miniature golf every time we were together. She loved James Bond movies and gardening and the daily crossword puzzle in the newspaper.
She was not the Salty Old Dame kind of Grandma, the sort who would flip the falsie around like a Frisbee. With her well-modulated voice and shy smile, she had a kind of elegance, a dignity. She was instinctively what few women aspire to be today: she was a lady.
We were not much alike, but we were deeply devoted to one another. I have felt so close to her in the past few weeks. Her spirit hovers near me and frequently comforts me.
I was so lucky to be her grandchild. So lucky to still have her alive and vital in my memory bank. She lived 35 years after her diagnosis and mastectomy surgery. She did the crossword puzzle on the morning of the day she died, at age 93. It was not cancer that claimed her.
How I wish I had asked more direct questions about her experience. How did she bear it? How did she come to peace with it? How did she not become bitter or fearful or neurotic?
How did she remain so noble?
Honestly, I would give anything I own...everything I own...for fifteen minutes in her presence, to hold her dear inflated hand and have a woman-to-woman conversation with her.
But this is all impractical yearning and neither of us, my Grandma Shock and I, are impractical women.
If I pause, comb my memory and really think about it, I know that even if I don't have the answers to my specific questions, she showed me what I need to know.
How I need to be.
I have her brave example. If she could face it in the unsympathetic early 60's, then I can certainly do it now.
She endured. I am of her line. I will too.



And here's one more photograph (circa 1990) to again break up the text. This time I have the six footer and the five footer with me. And, sadly, there is photographic evidence of my grave fashion errors of the previous decade. Why in the world am I smiling??