back to "Normal"??

Wednesday is my "all-cancer" day. My Support Group meets in the morning. Then the Mind-Body Medicine class has been meeting Wednesday evenings. As I write I'm in between my radiation treatment and my last Mind-Body class. Although I have learned some very important things in this class (ten sessions), I will be glad to have my Wednesday evenings back. I am still reading books about cancer (or rather about dealing with cancer), but I am beginning to feel like devoting less time to being a cancer patient. I want to get back to “normal life” – not to the extent I was before, but I do want to pick up some important projects.

What Do We Feel About Our Bodies? My Humble Opinion
Today in my support group, someone observed "I never knew how many breast-less women there were out there until I got cancer myself." Once you start telling people about your own diagnosis, they come out of the wood-work. But I keep thinking they shouldn’t be “in the woodwork.” They should be “Out.” It's the artist/activist Matuschka who feels that hiding the fact that we have had surgery keeps cancer patients isolated from one another. I realized I had never seen another scar apart from my own -- which is amazing considering the health clubs that I've belonged to in the past. These women are hiding themselves. Knowing that there are so many women out there who have gone through this would lessen the shock of the initial diagnosis. It would make the disease less mysterious, less confusing. Also the feeling of the need to pursue an imposed perfection -- through reconstruction or prosthesis -- keeps women from being able to appreciate their own bodies, as they are, post-surgery. If one in seven women get breast cancer, having a scar should be normal, not something to be corrected. Well, my humble opinion.