Sunday, July 1, 2007

Unexpected Feelings

I'm not talking great emotional tidal waves of heart wrenching angst or crushing depression. No, what I'm talking about are phantom feelings. "Strange" sensations. Sensations that made perfect sense when the breastages were still attached and hadn't even had any core samples or divots taken out. Things like that feeling that something is brushing against your breast right through your shirt/bra, or my personal favorite, the itchy nipple.

I ask you, how might you scratch an itchy nipple that is no longer there where you kept it tucked away for so many years? Because when you get cut on in a surgical way, the nerve pathways are disrupted, sometimes damaged, and forever changed. Things like an itch or a pain or a tingle don't respond the way they once did when attended to with a relieving scratch or other kind of physical contact. For me, even if I scratch where I think that pesky nerve is saying it's itchy, the scratch no longer satisfies because that nerve is sending me down a neural dead end. Literally, a dead end. Places where I could scratch with a garden tool and find no relief even as that mystery nerve continues firing the "hey, it's itchy here!" message.
Nowadays I have to literally beat my (faux) breast in order to send some distracting sensory signals along that messed up nerve pathway in order to get my mind off the itch.

So if in your travels on your life path, you come across a woman punching herself in a place that you wouldn't expect any rational woman to be punching, just know that you are witnessing one rational woman's response to a most irrational neuron.

1 comment:

Carny Asada said...

The itchy nipple! Yes!