What the Doctors Don't Tell You

A few weeks ago, I had an appointment with my cardiologist. I asked him when the tingling, sensitivity, and pain in my chest from the triple-bypass surgery in November would go away. He said, "Maybe never."

Why hadn't anyone ever told me this prior to surgery? I feel it's a pretty significant omission to refrain from telling a woman that from now on, her breasts are going to hurt every time they're touched.

Granted, no man has touched my breasts for almost three years, so maybe it's a mute point. I like to think that some day I'll meet a man who would like to touch them and that I'd like him to touch them. (See previous posts about how many men I've met in the past decade who are afraid of, uninterested in, or incapable of anything approaching sex.)

Is it that doctors are not trained to think of their patients as sexual beings? Are they so narrowly focused on the surgical outcomes and the risk factors and the mortality rates that they don't consider the sexual, emotional, and social aspects of medical intervention?

Add to this sensitivity the incision pain from the hip surgery and the stagnant regions of my right leg that are so painful they cannot be touched, which are the aftermath of harvesting veins from this leg for the bypass surgery.

The photo shown here approximates the extent of my bypass scar and the smaller scars that were exit sites for tubes during surgery. From an online search, I see that some people's scars in time blend in with the background skin and are no longer red. I would like that to happen for me too.

Once again, I would just like to be free of all of this. I would like my body back, stripped of gauze, tubing, tape, a catheter, and an insulin pump. I would like the scars gone too. Because, damn it, I have such a nice body, especially for someone my age. I'm probably in the upper 10 percent of bodies of American women in their early 50s. And yet that fact is obscured by all this medical stuff and all these surgical scars. It's just a real shame.