Not Damaged Goods

This is what my abdomen looks like 5 months post-op. When I was told it would be a laparoscopic procedure, I envisioned tiny incisions, and tiny scars. What I wound up with is five divots in my abdomen. I often stick my fingers in the deepest ones and marvel at their depth.

I am still terrified of my body. When I look at my abdomen in the mirror, it's with a horrified fascination. These scars are not getting smaller. They remind me daily of what cervical cancer took from me, and what it continues to take from me.

I am a stranger here, to myself. I want so much to disassociate, to be outside myself. I want to avoid the bodily twinges that mean nothing until you've have a terminal illness lurking silently inside your body. I have never really taken the time to get to know my body, to acknowledge it beyond the most superficial of ways. And now that I know it, I don't like it.

Full disclosure: there's a lot of superficiality here. In a bikini or naked, these scars seem to shout very loudly that I have defects. And I really hate that. I don't want anyone to see this. Why would anyone look at this without at least questions, if not outright disgust?

There is a huge part of me that would love to view cancer strictly in the rearview, but these five daily reminders mean I can't. Will they fade in time? Maybe, who knows? Perhaps I'll always have divots on my abdomen that scream out "I had major surgery on my abdomen!!!!"

The thing I tell myself is this: I am NOT damaged goods. These are battle scars, a battle I fought against cancer, a battle that I won. No, they are not beautiful, but they are part of a beautiful story. Five scars makes me lucky, not disfigured.

I'm scared of my body, and angry at it too, because my body let me down. It harbored a fugitive, one intent on killing me. But that fugitive, that cancer, lost in the end. And I won. I AM STILL HERE. I am still me, just a slightly different version, both inside and out. Divots and all.