Before and After

I don't know about you but I'm an absolute sucker for anything 'before and after' - make overs (after not always being the most flattering photos sometimes featuring over made-up women with unnatural looking hair), weight loss pictures, my eyes hoover up home decoration photos or D&Co everything changes in a week (which make me very jealous, making me long to be part of that programme), jewelry cleaning products photos with the dull and the shiny juxtaposed.  Even those features selling roof waterproofing products - before green mossy roof, after bright shiny water off a duck's back photo.  We all like a transformation, don't we?

And yes, paradoxically, I used to enjoy looking at cosmetic procedure photos - saggy bosoms, crooked noses, flabby tums, sausage looking legs, bingo wings, crepey looking eyelids - everything can be fixed and made beautiful, so they say.

But the before and after that I wasn't prepared for and am having problems with is my very own.  Not that it would ever make a TV show or a magazine feature.

When we got our first dishwasher 11 yrs ago, my friend said that my life would be divided into before dishwasher and after.  Yes, she was right, I couldn't live without it now, especially with a family's dirty dishes multiplying as the day goes on.  Now I find myself dividing my life into another sort of before and after - BBC and ABC - before breast cancer and after.

The change in me, not only physically, but mentally, is so profound and deep that I can only remember my 'before' life as something very much in the past.  And, despite that it was not perfect, I long for it.  I regret its passing and I grieve for the (relatively) carefree person I once was.  The lovely girls on the private Facebook group that I belong to call it a 'loss of innocence'.  And indeed it does feel just like that.

I feel that fate has thrown me one of my worst fears and made it come true.  And now, the gloves are off - fate is running havoc and I fear for what it might do now as a second act and the encore scares me to death.  There are moments when this before and after comes into sharp focus like a knife running through me or a punch in the stomach that takes my breath away.  My friend and I were looking at some photos from last year and I said, without thinking 'oh that's when I had breasts' and my shoulders slumped as I remembered it all - life wasn't always full of these fears and fright and discomfort and revulsion at my appearance.  Last night was another of those moments.

I went out last night and there was champagne and friendship and loving and dinner and dancing.  All of this in a beautiful central Paris location.  So why did I find myself having to leave the dancefloor and turn away to look through the oversize windows out on the beautiful adjacent historic church and try to stem the tears flooding down my face?  It was a song that set me off.  We had a wonderful holiday in July - same old haunts in Brittany - but this time two whole weeks bathed in glorious sunshine and warmth - the sort of holiday that fills your soul with happiness and makes golden memories for ever, the sort of holiday where you actually get a tan and actually relax.  My sons love pop music and we played this song over and over when the car winged its way down green country roads, windows open, the breeze hitting our faces singing at the tops of our voices with our hands up in the air 'like the ceiling can't hold us', laughing as we went.  Such wonderful moments of carefree silliness.

This video captures the joy

And bam, back in Paris and finding a lump in my breast, and you know the rest.

I want to feel carefree again, I don't want to feel tainted and changed, but that comes with the territory, part of the deal.  I know I have to accept it but it makes me so sad deep inside.

A wise and kind friend stood by me last night with her hand lightly draped over my shoulder.  She said nothing but she stayed still, swaying slightly to the music, her presence comforting me as we both watched the city below in silence, tears streaming and my heart breaking again.