But I'm Here Bitch
Another bitch in the title, how groundbreaking. But also it’s me so you know what you came for. I am currently 4 days post my third surgery and this one is far more painful and the recovery is far harder than the previous ones. It’s stripping me down emotionally and removing whatever tiny bit of pride I had remaining surrounding my care. Please know that I’m still quite prideful in all other areas of life so you won’t be able to piss on me and call it rain. However, when you’re 29 years old and your mom has to pull your panties down so you can pee, whether you still had a mountain of pride or just a sliver, it’ll all be decimated by that act. And I have needed that so much my mom decided to just put a big shirt on me and no panties like a potty training child.
Recovering from surgery is hard. Surgery itself is hard. In fact, surgery has broken me down way more than chemo ever did. I went to chemo, came home, stayed in bed for 3 days then bounced back. I may have felt like absolute crap but I could still dress myself and go to the bathroom by myself. With surgery, I’m not supposed to use the right side of my body. I’m not supposed to use my chest muscles. I’m not supposed to use my right arm. Although explaining all of that is for naught anyway because any movement, no matter how slight sends shockwaves of pain throughout the ride side of my body. For me to even get from a laying to a sitting position, I have to call my mom and dad to physically push me up.
However, every single time that I have wanted to tweet through my surgery recovery, it ends up being a tweet and delete. I so badly want to muse about my feelings and just get it out there so I don’t have to dwell on it. I want to release my feelings into the atmosphere and people just scroll on by. I know people say journal and I do that too but sometimes you just want to let out a dark humor tweet about your mommy having to pull down your panties and how despite the fact that hundreds of people have seen your boobs it’s a new low. However, ever since I became public with my diagnosis, I have noticed that hundreds of people (and generally the same set of people) will like the tweet no matter what the tweet is. I could tweet I love my nurses or I shit myself and boom likes coming out the woodwork, and quite frankly, ine into that. It’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling. I don’t tweet about my cancer for sympathy of for platitudes, I do it because I always want to be my most authentic self and that’s a part of me. I also do it to release the feelings. And sometimes I do it because who is going to make tasteless jokes about my current circumstance if not me?
Fighting cancer is hard. Tweeting about how hard it is and having hundreds of people who don’t interact with your tweets otherwise is sometimes equally as hard. It makes me more uncomfortable than nurses telling me to take off everything about the wait. Tweeting about it is already so open and raw and vulnerable. Things that I really don’t display publicly, so to have people interact with something I wanted to say and let go exposes that openness and rawness and vulnerability. Sometimes I don’t even want to put out my feel it on the first content because I just don’t want people disingenuously interacting with it and that’s something I don’t even care about because it has nothing to do with me. But sometimes I just feel like people are interacting with those types of tweets because it satisfies their need for trauma porn. I have been having a rough couple of days. I have literally cried because I really had to pee and my mommy was taking a nap so she couldn’t hear my calling her to lift me to the toilet and damnit if you can’t make self deprecating jokes about that without people liking it because cancer then what the hell can you do?
Yesterday someone asked on twitter what would this portion of your memoir be called and my response was “But I’m here bitch” because this is hard stuff, but even when it might get me down, I don’t stay down. I cried literally a few hours ago because I was in so much pain but now I’m up typing this. I might be in pain. I might cry sometimes. I might be mad as hell that I can’t tweet what I want, when I want, how I want. Hell, I might even pee the bed if someone doesn’t come to lift me quick enough. But I’m here bitch.
