A splash of sunset is bleeding sandshell pink through the cabin windows and is staining the rear of the wing outside my window an unearthly shade of pale crimson. The massive jet engine has a perfect circle of copper burn ringing it’s inner edge and I idly wonder if that is the true colour of the metal underneath the plane’s knight-livery of logoed blue and white.
We’ve been in the air for around 2 hours now and power has become the most precious commodity onboard. Cruising at an altitude of 33 thousand feet, the monitors bolted to the ceiling of this behemoth 747 advise me that we have roughly just over 10 hours to travel before we reach San Francisco airport.
A fact I am less than enthused about.
It is taking all of my strength to keep my eyes open. They are lidded with gritty wedges of sandpaper and unpleasantly warm each time I blink. In an effort to leave my job behind for the 4 weeks of leave I am taking and just live I worked 10 hours straight last night, finishing at 4am in the morning with an empty inbox and a splitting headache.
Just live. I haven’t done that in more than a while. Part of me wonders how long it will take before my brain is able to shut off from the list making, resource management and organisation that is so much of a lynchpin in my day to day.
I give it until they wheel me into the operating room.
We’ve outpaced the sun and night sucks away the colour in a few short seconds. None of it is really real to me yet. I have no concept of what lies behind the hours between when we land and when we next take off. I know that there will be friends to meet in person after many years, adventures to be had and above all ‘THE OPERATION’ - but it all seems so very far away. Well over the edge of the clouds that carpet the skies beneath the belly of the iron beast I currently reside in.
8 years I’ve been staring on and off at Dr Brownstein’s website. 8 years of looking at results, wanting, wishing.. but not 8 years of ever thinking this would be something I’d ever actually achieve. It's all almost came as a surprise to me, engineered and made possible by a single man curious enough to ask questions and then fight for a pathway in which I could secure the funding necessary to make this life changing trip.
A distant part of me, again very far away, is terrified. Terrified of the needle, the scalpel, the pre-op sampling, the process it’s all be shoved aside into the same place I go when public speaking is demanded. I’m floating somewhere between the edges of my body and the core of my mind, and the numbness is a welcome wrap against the rising panic.
Logically my brain knows there is nothing physically wrong with my chest. It knows there is no cancer, no disease, no malfunction with the flesh that should cause me to have these breasts removed. Logically it’s the part of me going ‘What the fuck are you mutilating yourself for you idiot?! This is how you’re reconnecting with your body??’
The rest of me just wants to get to the other side of ‘THE OPERATION’. Wants to know what it’s like to have a chest that doesn’t feel like it was bought at a coin operated sideshow alley. Doesn’t feel like it hangs off me, foreign, painful, deceitful and a lie.
It’s a confusing mix of emotion that whips me back and forth like a flag on a blustery day.
Over the loudspeakers we’re advised of turbulence in the near future. I smile wryly at that one - I’m already experiencing it.
Buckle up kiddo, this ride is just beginning.
First blog post
8 years ago
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