Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
It’s hard to find words to express my gratitude for the incredible response to my video yesterday. The love and generosity that’s flowing towards me is filling me in ways that I didn’t know were possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
The timing is perfect, because this is when I really need a support network. Two months of thinking about and preparing for surgery, and now it’s here. The train has left the station.
I’m sitting in the hospital, waiting for the radioactive dye injected my left breast to make its way to my lymph nodes. When it does, I’ll have more imaging, and then return at 6 AM tomorrow. Surgery itself is at 9:50 AM and will last about 90 minutes.
I’ve had some big epiphanies in the last few days, thanks to deep conversations with good friends and colleagues. My most recent realization has fundamentally changed how I am approaching this surgery.
I realized that I’ve never felt a victim of cancer, nor have I ever really been afraid of it. What I have been afraid of is surgery, and I’ve had a kind of victim-y response to it. “Woe is me, they’re taking part of my breast.” “I’m so sad about how I will feel/look/be with a post-surgery breast.” “This is a terrible, scary thing, and I don’t want it to be happening to me.”
As I came to recognize this pattern, I also found a new, more empowering way to hold it. Rather than seeing this as something that is “being done to me,” I’m approaching tomorrow’s surgery as a sacrifice, one that I am making willingly. This new perspective changes everything.
I spoke in yesterday’s video about offerings, and about how the more of ourselves we give on behalf of a healing intention, the more powerful that ritual gesture is. Many years ago, Deena Metzger taught me about sacrifice, and about the power of sacrificing more than we think we are able to lose. This feels like more than I can do, and yet I am choosing, wholeheartedly, to do it.
First Nations People here in southern Alberta hold Sundance Rituals. They pierce their skin and dance for days in the hot sun without food or water. I imagine that must feel like sacrificing more than one is able to lose. It’s painful and scary, but it’s in service to healing. That’s the kind of energy I’m invoking in myself for tomorrow. I’m digging deep, and calling up a fierce, brave, and powerful version of myself. She is the one who will carry me through.
A sacrifice is a ritual. Tomorrow I will put myself in the hands of my surgeon, a high priestess of this healing tradition. I will lay down on the altar of the surgical table, and submit myself to her sacrificial knife. I will willingly give a piece of my flesh, on behalf of my life.