Body Language.

WAKING WITH THE DAWN, I LET MY DOGS OUT INTO THE COLD MORNING AIR, THEIR EAGER BREATHS ON THE WIND LIKE PRAYERS.  I brew coffee while I prepare their food.  I'm the only one awake and while no one else can see, I retreat upstairs into the bedroom onto the foot of the bed where I feel around my pelvis for anything amiss. Pressing first with fingers, then a rubber ball, I search for any sign of swelling lymph nodes:  That subtle rising asymmetry, my right side a touch above my left.  Those telltale zones of pressure.  Bursts of pain like depth charges under the skin; in between my legs, on either side of my groin, flanking the base of my penis.  Any disruption to the symmetry of my body I'm now reacquainting myself with as I look down thinning legs towards flat feet.  My breath rises and falls, the troughs between them shrinks, valley to crevasse.   I'm uncertain when this habit started, probably around the time radiation therapy ended and the delayed effects of 54 Gy–the epidermal havoc–unfolded.   

Even before the diagnosis, my cancer had long metastasized.  It invaded my lymphatic system with the tender mercies of a blitzkrieg.   I remember being on set, gobbling down painkillers in my ignorance.  I was in no immediate danger of having a clue.  I cursed my body for its interdictions, its frailty, its betrayal.  If any could sense my discomfort no one ever let on.  Running stedicam, lighting the shot, blocking the action, swinging lenses.  All that mattered was the job in front of me and fuck my body for not getting with the program.  At home, after fifteen hours on my  feet, I would study myself in the mirror attempting to parse the whispered internal distortions as they manifested on my flesh.  

Justine would tell me that I'd seemingly inexplicably lost weight, to which I would offer a noncommittal "hmph," keeping private that in the deepest repository of my self-disdain there was a fission bomb of excitement coursing through deadened nerves.  Unsettling, was the prospect that someone could be more attracted to me during a time when I felt repugnant, than at a time when I felt desirable.   It had always been hard for me to look at myself in the mirror, I can't recall a time when I liked the face and body staring back at me from that optical alternate universe.  From behind my eyes, a battery of olympic judges poured over every crevice, bone and follicle.  Face too round.  Trunk too short, too ectomorphic.  Legs comically long.  Flat feet.  Asthmatic garbage for lungs.  The poker deal collisions of Caucasian, African and Jewish DNA.  A phenotypic freakazoid, born straight into exile.  With no foot firmly in any tribe.   As an adolescent undergrad I would fast for days at a stretch, pump iron into the wee hours of the morning, or until Campus Security threw me out.  Hell bent on aligning what I saw in my daydreams with what reality presented.  This wasn't a dysmorphia borne of mere aesthetic concerns, or the self-doubt splash damage of too much Baywatch. This was the body as mechanism. A confluence of Darwin and Bladerunner.  I wanted to transfigure myself from Ungezeifer to Ubermench, to hone myself into an instrument, a sword exquisitely refined; conceived for a singular, deadly purpose.  To be like those Riefenstahlian simulacra of masculine power, the ultimate expression of symmetry, of unattainability.  To earn my rightful place amongst the adonis of the campus.   

Verboten in the post-Prozac Nation zeitgeist,  Body Dysmorphia was an exquisite torment off-limits to men.  To suggest that experience as my own, even as a tenuous first step towards getting help, was to threaten the female monopoly on body shame.  I could only offer myself up to a storm of invective from campus feminists. In a support group for eating-disorders I was suspect, meeting little more than scowls, accused of reactionary subversion and handed a face full of verbal buckshot from the pear-shaped blunderbuss of professional grievance.   I was always a quick study.  Best to keep quiet.  So, keep quiet I did.  Until now at 37, I look at myself in the mirror, missing the toned, lean physique I had before my diagnosis–the deadly underlying reasons be damned--at a loss for words.  I don't look bad.  I'm just not quite myself, not yet. By the time I started FOL-FOX, I had lost 99lbs—some of that muscle mass. The clichéd platitudes of “just love yourself, no matter what” feel hollow. I must be useful, capable, not a burden, able to handle myself in a crisis despite my condition. In any state of Darwinian selection that is the masculine role and burden. I solemnly accept it. How to realize it? Treatment purgatory limits my options for exercise.  I want to be lifting weights, but that's off limits on doctor's orders.  I have two active dogs, so I walk.  I attack hills twice a day, my feet numb from neuropathy, pushing through the post FOL-FOX shortness of breath (managed by nebulizer). Yoga helps, but I'm still waiting for my mind to be blown.   I'm not yet on good terms with my body.  I still feel like it betrayed me.  The body snatchers didn’t invade, they were already here. Epigenetic Quislings, awaiting their moment. Carcinoma is DNA mutation; evokes mutiny. Treating cancer is setting fire to the hull so the mutineers have nothing to sail, hoping the swabs will surrender before the whole ship goes up in flames.