Femininity...what's that?

Funny how losing my head hair---rather shaving my head before completely losing it--really didn't make me feel that much less like a female. Losing the rest of my hair however, particularly my eyelashes and eyebrows, started up the initial 'sub-human'/partial-alien' feelings, yet it wasn't really until the later parts of chemo that the absence of 'beauty' and femininity really crept in.

The more 'male-like' bathroom 'engagements' from all the fun gastro-intestinal side-effects. The onset of menopause symptoms...not to say that that's not a woman thing, but it does encompass all that is 'young woman', passed. My fingernails becoming discolored--that was, for some reason, just one more shred of girly-ness, gone. 

But the tip of the iceberg has to be the actual, spoken plans of chopping off 'the girls.'

Not to be too crass or offensive, but if I didn't know I still have a 'hoo-hoo' down there I think I might be experiencing downright gender-identity issues, ha! :-P

Really though. 

It's AMAZING to me the things we take for granted--mind you, they are of NO matter to God--but they are still things of this life that, in our flesh, help us define ourselves.

Once upon a time, I complained that my girls and gravity had finally met each other and the 'perk' of my twenties had officially passed go and not collected two-hundred. 

Once upon that same time, I scoffed at women who would ever consider fake breasts, if just for cosmetic reasons, but naively categorized such surgery into one judgmental 'insecure reasoning.' Yet yesterday, I spend the day discussing the very plans to give me such.

FAKE BOOBS.

Even one of my best girlfriends had a good laugh at the irony of a conversation we had in the not so distant past when I'd preached 'Implants? Oh, I'd never!'--ha. Thanks for that shoe-in-mouth, Lord. ;)

Of course, the emotions tied to the good, sweet memories of breast-feeding my children are there...but those are linked to the even deeper, nearly gut-wrenching emotion that I'm done having children anyway, so the breast-feeding becomes inapplicable.

The idea of having absolutely zero feeling in either is also a big bite to chew on. Not that any of you need a gross sex-ed lesson from this, but let's face it--that fact really does stink!

Just the surgeries to create them for this no-surgeries gal is a bit to digest when described in pure facts of incisions and scarring ...and possibilities, possibilities, possibilities galore!
OY.

ALL to 'recreate' some part of my femininity.

Huh.

Sorry, but for me it's hard to feel like someone stretching my skin and placing silicone-filled sacks under my peck muscles gives me back some of my woman-hood. For me, fake is fake, and what the originals did to help me function as a female was a lot more than sit on the front of my body, looking 'boob-y.' They produced the very hormones that got me into this mess--the female ones.

There's a shirt that read's 'Yes, they're fake... the real ones tried to kill me' and yes...I FULLY intend on purchasing that shirt... cause the fact of the matter is, my feminine hormones and my original set of girls really did try to cut my life short.
So, goodbye girls. It's been a trip... and though we really never had any fights before this, we can no longer be friends.

As far as those evil hormones, we were confirmed at this week's appointments that I will be infused with a chemo called Herceptin that is a target drug to kill off those hormone receptors every three weeks for the next year, as well as a take an oral hormone receptor BLOCKER for the next 5 to 10 years of my life.
Yes, so much for my thirties and any shred of child-bearing years I may of had left, haha.


But what's the trade for all this femininity?
MORE. LIFE.

Yep.
I'm selling it for more days of living.
And when I think of it that way, I can almost hear Howie Mandel's voice saying
'Hayley Ziebart...You made a good deal!'~