By Ashley Fenker
@ashleyfenkercreative

“Are you ready?” the plastic surgeon asks. Are we ever ready for pain?

“Yep.” I lie.

I’m blinded by flickering fluorescent lights overhead, my husband holding my hand as he watches over the operating table. I joke that not even a year ago, he watched a doctor who looked like my grandpa cut a six-pound human life out of me, so surely he can stomach a couple little moles excised from my body.

“There was a curtain,” my husband says.

I remember the curtain, but not its color. Was it blue? And I remember my husband by my head on the operating table in labor and delivery, holding my hand because that’s all he could do—that’s all dads can ever do.

That day in the labor and delivery room, they made me wear glasses, and my mouth was stained orange from the nurse sneaking me popsicles before she knew I was an hour away from an emergency C-section. Her name was Nana. She rubbed my back and comforted me like I imagine a Nana would. I felt embarrassed that my mouth was stained like a child in this big-girl moment when I was very much supposed to feel like an adult. Without my contacts in, I felt nothing like myself, stuck behind the fogged lenses of my glasses. And not to mention, I felt sick, very, very sick.

Today in the plastic surgeon’s office, the trauma is fresh, my son’s first birthday just a month away, so the scalpel pierces differently. The parallels are blinding.

“Take a deep breath … keep breathing for me … practice those childbirth breaths for me,” the surgeon says, as he stabs the numbing needle into my leg for the excision. I hear a little puff.

I told him our son is turning one, so he assumes I know pain. But he doesn’t know the whole story, how I never got the chance to do those deep breaths we practiced in child birthing class. How the preeclampsia hit so fast that I can’t tell you what a contraction feels like.

I might never know.

I can’t tell you the size of the needle that the plastic surgeon uses. If I look, surely I will faint. I worry about my husband the entire time. Are you okay? Please don’t watch. You can leave the room, I’m fine. Are you sure you’re okay? I worry about him more than my own pain.

Later he tells me that the needle made my leg balloon. That was the puff I heard.

“Then he flopped the piece of skin on the tray like a raw piece of chicken,” he says.

I felt nothing, just like that day eleven months ago when they cut through seven layers of tissue—my flesh—to rescue my helpless premature baby from my sick body. His lungs weren’t ready. I wasn’t ready. So many baby books were left untouched on my nightstand. When I scroll on my phone to the first picture taken moments after my son’s birth, I see my orange-stained lips, my droopy eyes hiding behind my foggy glasses, my son who I wouldn’t get to hold for days.

I’ve worn pants and long skirts all through the summer heat wave to hide the horseshoe scar—the sign of cancer. Cancer. Cancer. I have cancer. Had cancer? It was skin cancer, melanoma, so it feels like the kind of cancer you’re supposed to brush off and not make a big deal about. A couple weird moles, it will be fine, so many people deal with this brand of cancer.

I stopped using the C word and switched to calling it “my skin thing.” Felt less scary. For me? For everyone else? Who knows.

Of course, when I Google melanoma, I learn that it can become a very bad, life-threatening “skin thing” that actually turns into a whole-body thing. With just a few clicks, my perspective has taken a 180. I’m lucky to be alive. God bless the horseshoe.

As my C-section scar faded, there were so many days when I wondered, Did that really happen? Did nurse Nana really cool off my magnesium-overdosed, limp body with a rag she wrung in a bucket of icy water? When I told the story, my husband didn’t remember her doing this, but I can still feel the ice on my fiery neck. I can still feel Nana’s cool, soft hands.

A nurse held my son by my head before they whisked him away to the NICU to help him breathe. He looked blue.

I felt nothing.

Or at least that’s the story I told myself for a long time as I rubbed my scar on my belly that faded over time to a white line, razor thin.

***

Every three months, I strip down to my underwear and cover myself with a thin paper gown in the dermatologist’s office. I can never remember: is it the opening in the back or the front? I rip the gown at the seam and decide to wrap my body in the crinkly paper like a child playing mummy with a roll of toilet paper.

The dermatologist scans my whole body, as if she’s a detective with a magnifying glass. When she reaches my breast, she lifts it up to check underneath, a saggy hollowness my perky double Ds never knew before breastfeeding.

“All good under here,” she says. Then I hear the flop. I feel raw, exposed, like that poor raw piece of chicken.

I consider apologizing. For what? My doctor is a mom of two young girls. We’ve bonded over motherhood, swapping nap schedules and daycare options. I’ve debated asking for her phone number for play dates, scheming of ways to beg her to be my friend. But I don’t know how this whole patient-doctor thing works with someone who has held your floppy breasts, someone who has taken pictures of your tiny markings to watch how they change over time, someone who knows every inch of your naked body.

When she tells me she’s leaving for another practice, I consider bursting into tears. Where? Why? Can I come? I ask if I can follow her, or at least meet her at the library for story time.

We talk about where we live in vague terms, but we don’t exchange numbers or anything concrete. Who will scan my body in three months? Who will call me to give me the news? Who will watch me change over time?

***

My son doesn’t know I had cancer. Maybe he noticed something was different when Mama couldn’t lift him for two weeks, or how Mama couldn’t swim all summer when the lucky horseshoe got infected. Two weeks of no water submersion turned into months. I missed his first dunk in the lake at our family’s lake house in North Carolina.

I’ve fantasized my whole life about holding my baby as he’s squirming in a tiny life jacket, feeling the splash of the warm water for the first time in the same water I’ve swam in since I was born. Instead, my mom experienced that special first with my son while I watched from the dock.

Every three months I’ll debate, should I point out this weird mole? Has it changed over time?

I go back to look at pictures of myself: have I changed?

The only way to find out if the cancer has spread to another mole is to cut it off, and send the biopsy off for testing.

And then we wait.

We wait for results. We wait for next steps. What will we cut out next? What part of my body will I cover up? How many scars will hold my life’s stories?

***

I remember my mom telling me the story of her scars, like the emergency appendectomy she had while she was still pregnant with me. All the pain and worry.

“And then you kicked me right in the appendix,” she says every time she tells the story.

The scar on her neck from thyroid cancer when my brother and I were young.

“It looked like I had an Adam’s apple when I looked at myself in pictures,” she says, “We knew something wasn’t right.”

I remember (or do I?) staying home from school countless days of first grade, crawling into the waterbed in my princess pajamas with my tired, sick mom.

That’s the thing about memories and scars: they change over time.

The fresh and the faded tell different stories.

***

I imagine the day when my son can talk. We’re walking down the dock at our lake house, together, hand in hand. My leg is bare.

In my ideal fantasy of this scene, I have no moles. My skin is smooth and pale and flawless. There are no markings to watch change over time, there’s nothing left to worry about.

Only the faded horseshoe remains.

Ashley Fenker is a wife, cat mom, and new mom to a one-year-old boy who loves to eat cat litter and electrical cords. She lives in a quiet country house down a winding lane in Woodbine, Maryland. She is an essayist and freelance professional writer, with essays published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Upworthy, Fathom Magazine, Scary Mommy, and more. Ashley studied Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary. She recently launched a Substack called Stuff Moms Google to write about those frantic 2 a.m. Google searches of new motherhood.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.