Body Talk

My bra’s underwire had been pinching into my skin all morning, delivering a sharp jolt each time I moved to help my daughter with her medication lines or reached for a bedpan to hold under her head. In the larger scope of the challenges I faced during her two years of leukemia treatment, a rogue underwire during an inpatient stay was low on the list. Still, while my daughter was changing clothes in the bathroom, I stood in the middle of her hospital room with my hand down my shirt, trying to dig out the offending wire.

I tugged and twisted until it came free in one smooth sweep, along with me. My bra cup had folded down, leaving my chest exposed, which wouldn’t have mattered — we had a private room — except that, at that moment, one of the oncology residents walked in to ask for my signature on some paperwork.

He was gracious, turning towards the door to wait while I tried to explain what I was doing, waving the loose underwire around like a magic wand as if I was trying to cast a spell to reverse time. My daughter called to me from behind the heavy bathroom door, and I yanked my shirt up to my neck. At the same time, I went to help, wheeling her pole with all its tangled lines behind her while she asked what I was apologizing for, and I said Nothing! over and over and over.

Later that afternoon, I sat beside the hospital’s grab-and-go coffee stand in the lobby. I couldn’t stop crying. I was exhausted from the hospital stay and terrified about the outcome of my daughter’s treatment. I was plagued by thoughts of will she be here next year? I wiped my tears as fast as they came, surrendering and letting them soak into the top of my mask.

I was also mortified. I felt like I was always getting something wrong. I was still working full-time to maintain our insurance, but I was showing up late to meetings and missing deadlines while I tried to juggle working from the hospital. I was exhausted on nights when I went home to my son, who couldn’t wait for me to stay up late eating pizza and playing video games.

Someone in blue scrubs slid onto the seat opposite mine. I looked up and saw the oncology resident. I didn’t know what to say. I felt the words bubbling up in a rush and held them back. The last thing this guy needed was to listen to me blabber on about fears about a situation he’d watched play out a hundred times. I was also mortified, both from the morning’s bra incident and because I was still sobbing into my mask.

Living in a room on the oncology floor for weeks is hard. 

I nodded. I’d spent months searching for a better way to say it, but there wasn’t one. It was just so hard, in ways I couldn’t articulate- you just had to know it. You had to be there, as they say, though I knew no one wanted to be where we were.

Are you okay? he asked. He was a young guy, maybe a few years younger than me. I hoped we weren’t about to ask me out. A man had asked me out in the elevator a few weeks earlier, and when I’d explained that I was in the hospital with my daughter, who was inpatient for cancer treatment, he’d doubled down: Sounds like you really need a break. Seriously, let me buy you a coffee.

I’d stared at him, thinking that some people really do just have the audacity. I left the elevator on the second floor without responding and ducked into the pharmacy, hoping I wouldn’t run into him later at the coffee hut.

Now this resident was sitting next to me, giving me a considering look after seeing my left boob hanging out of my shirt, and I braced myself.

Listen, a body is a body, he said. Seen one, seen them all. And if we appreciated them more, we’d shame them less. 

I didn’t know what to say to this. I didn’t have the capacity to discuss it. I was tired in ways I didn’t know I could be. I’d been sleeping on pull-out chairs next to my daughter’s hospital bed and spending my days tied in knots over what might happen to her, whether she’d come out of it all. I wanted to apologize to him, but the words stuck in my throat. I tried to swallow them down, and more tears gushed down my cheeks. My mask felt hot and damp over my mouth. I suddenly wanted him gone. I had nothing thoughtful to say to him, no way to respond to what he was trying to tell me. I nodded again, looking at the table, and he seemed to clock my discomfort.

Your heart beats around 100,000 times a day, he said, moving to stand. And each one is a small miracle.

For most of my daughter’s cancer treatment, I only saw her body for its pitfalls- the leukemia that had grown inside her blood and bones, her thin frame that refused to gain weight. I dealt only with drawbacks: the throwing up, rashes, infections, all of her body’s responses to the intensive treatment it was weathering. 

I couldn’t see the leukemia cells dropping, huge swaths cut down with every chemo round. I couldn’t see her immune system building itself up with an army of reinforcements delivered via immunotherapy. All I saw was her slow spin on the edge of whatever abyss we were trying to save her from.

I realized how often I saw my own body only for its inconveniences—the pain of labour, the deep lines carving paths across my forehead, and how my calves always felt too big for my jeans. I spent years of my life steeped in regret about the one body I’d been given, never considering that I was lucky to have it.

I never saw the resident again. We were discharged the day after he sat next to me in the lobby, and by the time we returned for another stay, he’d been replaced by another resident doctor trying to learn how to save my daughter’s life. 

I’ve thought about what he’d said to me often in the years since, each time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and defaulted to anxiety or regret. Now, when I become aware of my heartbeat, I take a moment to count the small miracles of it. When my arms jiggle as I reach for something on the top shelf in the kitchen, instead of letting a bubble of derision rise through me, I consider every part of myself in that moment- the balls of my feet on the cool hardwood, the muscles of my arms pulling a jar down from a high shelf. If we appreciated them more, we’d shame them less. 

It would be impossible to thank my body for every minute it keeps me thinking, feeling, and parenting my children, but I’ve given myself permission to criticize it for its every betrayal. In focusing on my own body’s failures, so too did I focus on my daughter’s.

Cancer stripped everything to its bones and left us to rebuild. Part of that rebuilding has been examining what we’ve taken for granted. I am not a silver-linings person, but I can’t shake the idea that, in the last moments of my life, it won’t be the size of my thighs that I’ll be thinking about. 

A few nights ago, I checked on my daughter and found her asleep in her bed, airpods and phone scattered over the blankets in a true teenager move. Her hair has grown out into a bob- no one would know she’d lost it twice. Her skin was smooth, her whole body warm and alive. I felt flush with the twin flames of gratitude and grief- a thankfulness that she is here and grief for our interminable cancer years. I put my left hand on her chest and my right hand on my own. I caught a handful of our 100,000 heartbeats- each of us alive by the grace of these small miracles.

Elizabeth Austin has an MFA in writing.