AFTER NEW YEARS WORE off (and that wears off pretty quickly), it was your typical long, cold winter. We started meeting with plastic surgeons again in January, and let me tell you, those guys are weirder than a four-dollar bill. I know this sounds unappreciative because these guys really do give empowerment back to women by helping rebuild their bodies and restore their femininity, but they are really odd guys. Creepy odd. They seem to look at people through a strange lens, almost as if they’re model cars they can improve rather human beings.
They were all routine meetings for the most part, but it was all somewhat routine at this point. It was just the natural progression of things. Eventually we settled on a new surgeon and we opted to have him reconstruct her breast with a saline implant. Actually, it was more Gina’s decision than anything. At this point I was going to the meetings but I had pretty much checked out mentally. It was wrong and I wish that I wouldn’t have. Had I stayed more in touch with it maybe I could have broken through with her. I might have been able to pull more out of her and connect with her on a deeper level, but as they say in sports, that was a missed opportunity on my part.
Our surgeon was good but he was ice cold in the way of bedside manner. It was kind of offsetting to me but I let it go. Like I said, I was looking at this as the light at the end of the tunnel, so if this was who Gina wanted, then that’s who we would go with.
She had her surgery in March and I was glad she was getting it done for a lot of reasons. I know this should have been the last thing on my mind, but there hadn’t been any intimacy between us to this point and there were a few reasons for that. For the most part it was due to the lingering effects from the chemo, but she also wasn’t feeling one hundred percent confident in herself since the mastectomy. She didn’t feel sexy and I could see that. She was never self-conscious to the point where she would hide from me, but you could tell she didn’t feel sexy or pretty when it came to initiating intimacy.
Through it all she had put some weight on, maybe thirty or forty pounds, so that created noise for me. Believe it or not, the breast thing didn’t bother me because like I’ve said, I’m not a ‘chest guy,’ but the extra pounds, as shallow as it may sound, was hard for me to ignore. I don’t feel like I have to defend it, it’s not like I’m saying that I loved her any less or that I was thinking about leaving her because she wasn’t attractive anymore. That wasn’t the case at all. In fact, I still thought she was a beautiful woman but when it came to sexual arousal, the extra weight really was hard for me to deal with.
I know some of you are going to think I’m an ass at this point, but that’s the point of this book, to point out the mistakes, and a big one is coming up right here. I started going out a little more at this point and I think it was because of that. The weight, the non-intimate bedroom, and the distance that had come between us; on a subconscious level it was eating away at me. Now I’m well aware that I’m not the chiseled hunk of man I once was either, but by playing basketball I keep in semi-decent shape. When I would go to the bar, I liked the attention I got. I didn’t act on it and it wasn’t going anywhere beyond harmless flirting and conversation, but it made me feel good.
I should probably come clean here on something pretty important. This book is intended to show everything that happened, even the mistakes I made and the parts I’m not proud of, and here’s a big one. During my time at the bar I stumbled into enjoying a hit of Ecstasy every so often, and that might have been what was making me feel so good. I can’t really tell. I’m sure it was a mixture of the two.
Today, I share the sentiments of any reader who might ask, “what the hell is that guy doing taking Ecstasy?” As a grown ass man, a father, a man whose wife was now a breast cancer survivor; what the hell was I thinking? To be honest, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. All I can say is that I was looking for some sense of an escape from the drama and the cloud of sickness that had hung over me for so long. The escape I had initially gone in search of turned into more than I bargained for.
What’s sad is that I not only masked it and kept it from her, I convinced myself I was doing it all in the name of business. I was doing pretty well at work and I convinced myself this was all just me staying loose and building relationships with my clients. I know it sounds ridiculous and it is, but just like anyone who starts dabbling in that crap, when you’re in the throws of it all almost anything can make sense if it gets you to your next time.
I know this sounds hypocritical but I was sensitive to Gina’s situation so I never vented to her nor did I ever tell her about my feelings about what was bothering me. The extra weight, the non-intimacy, I never approached any of that with her. I figured with everything she had just been through she had real issues to deal with. I mean really, would you say something like that to your wife? That you had a problem with the extra weight she had put on? If you would then you are not only a braver man than I am, but a much smarter one and you have a relationship and a stream of communication that I wish I had with Gina. Here I was always bitching about her not communicating with me and I was doing the same thing. It wasn’t the smartest choice I ever made and I’m sure it’s part of what pushed us into marriage counseling the next year.
I wasn’t alone though. Not that it makes it right but after our entire ordeal was over I was going through Gina’s things and I found some of her journals. One of them had an entry from a year later that said, point blank, she felt better about her physical appearance but that she didn’t feel we were as attached emotionally, which is exactly what I was feeling. Both the day I read that and the day you read this, I can’t even begin to tell you how ashamed I am of where my head was then.