Watching my wife’s beautiful, battered body
Nakedness and sex through her cancer treatment
She stood naked in front of me, and caught my eye. “Are you looking at me?” I was lying in bed while she got dressed, and of course I was looking at her. Her cancer treatment ends soon, and we’re coming to terms with the body that remains. The body I was looking at now.
There’s much to see. She’s slim, pale-skinned, and… appealing. My hands, and lips, have found every part of her body over the many years of our relationship. I see her hips, her slight tummy, reminding me that hers is the body that brought our two precious children into being. She has a constellation of moles on her back and arms. They make her unique, but of course, they hint at other risks. The French health service has made a map of these moles, their size and location, and we both keep watch, but unless and until they turn on her, these moles are part of her considerable sex appeal. Every woman finds reason to be unhappy in front of the mirror, and my wife has never liked her body. And yet, most women would love to be shaped as she is, and I feel lucky to share my bed with this woman.
Last year, not long before her cancer diagnosis, I dropped her off at a local gym, then drove out of the car park on my way home. On my left, on the sidewalk and walking away from me, a woman caught my eye. She had a shapely silhouette, and in the moment before my brain engaged I felt a gentle wave of sexual attraction. A moment later, as my conscious mind joined my Freudian ‘id’, I recognised, yes, my own wife.
Now her body has changed, and the way she shows her body to me has changed with it.
She opted for a “fast” mastectomy of her right breast, rather than waiting in line for breast reconstruction during the same surgery. The surgery is brutal, utilitarian, and as I said at the time:
There’s a painful simplicity to a mastectomy. What did I expect? Her right breast is gone, sliced away by the surgeon’s knife, leaving nothing but a thick, diagonal scar from her armpit to the center of her chest. It’s exactly as you’re picturing it.
I’m getting used to her naked body, with her perfect, small left breast and a huge scar on her right. People say that scars are “angry”, but hers is just… there. Cruel, perhaps, but not angry. Most of her hair fell out six weeks ago, and what remained was clippered away. Now she has a military buzz cut, and with her flat chest she can look like a slim teenage boy. Watching her while she dresses was an uncomplicated pleasure, until now. Sometimes she’s bold when getting dressed, shining herself right at me, with her body a mix of the new and the familiar. But more often now she hides. She’ll turn her back while removing her one-sided bra, wriggling into a sweater, or the t-shirt that she’ll sleep in. I used to enjoy those moments, admiring her body, complementing her, plotting ways to touch her. Perhaps we’d be intimate after that, perhaps not, but my attraction to her — one of the sources of energy powering our lives together — would take center stage, if only for a minute. Now those brief moments of (her) nakedness are sexless. She doesn’t think she’s sexy, and I’ve lost the easy love language that reminded her that I do.
She got her first tattoo recently, but it’s not what you think. An oncologist held the gun, scratching a crude ‘X where her right nipple used to be. This is the fixed target for her radiotherapy treatment. When she showed me this tattoo I got angry for the first time since the cancer diagnosis. It felt like the brutal branding we reserve for livestock, not priceless loved ones like my wife. But she’s almost through it: She’s done 12 of 15 radiotherapy treatments and it’s all over on Wednesday.
Late at night, in the stretching time between closing my eyes and the calm of sleep, I’ve been thinking about this radiotherapy. I picture a thin beam of electrons, each with just a whisper of energy, but unimaginable in number, fired at this tattooed ‘X’. Most of them pass straight through her body, through the surgical bed and deep into the earth, finally striking something solid in the earth’s crust, perhaps a mile down, where the earth is denser, hotter, and these electrons warm it still further, a microjoule at a time. Occasionally an electron hits something in her body, a healthy cell or a cancer cell, where it slices through DNA, the instruction manual telling this cell how to create copies of itself. Now my thoughts become more abstract: I picture a chaotic tangle of smashed DNA strands, an organic battlefield strewn with the fallen. Then sleep, or was I already sleeping?
We talk
Thankfully, most of the time, we can talk about these things. Last week we were in bed together, holding each other in absolute luxury, and we talked it all out. It was the sort of warm, and open conversation you can only have with someone you’ve loved for years, and in the certain knowledge they love you back. I’ll say it again because even writing these words is comforting: I love her and she loves me back. I know it. She told me how her libido has been through the floor since the instant-menopause, hormone-blocking medication kicked in. She wants to want sex, but doesn’t. I told her — truthfully — that I can be without sex for as long as need be, but I can’t be without intimacy. I need tight hugs in bed, to smell her skin, kisses where our noses slide together side-by-side, whispered ‘sweet nothings’ at midnight. These things have always felt more powerful to me than sex. Dear Reader, you’re nodding along I presume? I won’t pretend this is as straightforward as it appears on the page: the intimacy I’m describing has often led to sex, and now I need to adjust my expectations. But I hear her, I know I need to prioritize her needs, and I will.
In truth, things haven’t started well. The other night we were kissing and touching, then decided to try for penetrative sex (which my wife has taken to calling “PIV sex”). Even with lubricant and extra care she found it painful, so we stopped. Falling back on touching each other, even that was lost to us, because our 12-year-old daughter walked in on us, unable to sleep. Thankfully she walked in during a moment that looked like nothing more than a hug, from her doorway view…
Last night my wife told me she feels disconnected from her body, and this immediately made sense. Her right breast tried to kill her and was removed, and since then she’s waged war against her own torso, with surgery, chemo poison, radiation beams, and super-strong meds. After all that, her body feels dangerous. Alien. Of course, the playfulness of sexual intimacy is elusive against this background.
And I’m part of the problem too. Over the 9 months since the diagnosis I’ve comfort eaten, exercised less, and put weight on. The result is that I don’t like my body either. I’ve begun to hide myself when getting dressed in just the same way that she does. I began an exercise and dieting regime just today. I fear I’ll need results, and to lose some weight, before I can feel appealing once more.
So this is our challenge: To reconnect to our bodies and to rekindle the sexual connection that has always underpinned our relationship. Radiotherapy finishes in 3 days, then we have a lifetime, or as long as we’re given, to get this right.
