By Rachel Levey
As we age, and I believe especially as women, our relationship with our bodies changes. Hormonal shifts, physical changes, at each stage of life we have to re-learn our bodies and re-build the trusting, loving relationship we have with ourselves. In my late twenties, I felt like I was in a pretty good place with myself. I was far from fit but felt good overall and had left behind much of the self-consciousness and societal-beauty-standard baggage I had carried around as a teen and young adult. I was looking forward to my thirties, and figured that everything in my life would just keep falling into place. Then at 29, I was diagnosed with stage 3C breast cancer.
Along with the normal fear, anger, and sadness you would expect with a cancer diagnosis, I felt completely betrayed by my body. I had been living here in this body for 29 years, and somewhere along the line it started growing a tumor that was trying to literally kill me? Where did I go wrong? How could I have let this happen? Why didn’t I know something was wrong? By the time I finished my treatment a year later, I had grown and matured emotionally and had a better handle on the anger and sadness part, but I felt like a complete stranger inside my own skin. Every bump, bruise, twinge, or ache was surely a sign that the cancer had returned or moved to another part of my body, and my life was going to come crashing down once again. I also had changed physically with a new collection of scars and had to adapt to premature menopause brought on by my treatment. I figured I just needed to accept this new “me” and try to move on with my life, but my mind was always wandering the tunnels of “what-if” despite my attempts at distraction. A year later, Dragon Boating offered me the way forward that I didn’t even know I needed.
Since joining the team, I have become physically stronger than ever before, which gives me such a boost to both my mental and physical wellness. I have never been someone who liked exercise for its own sake, but now that I have something to prove and a team relying on me I feel like the day is wasted if I haven’t done at least one thing that was physical. I’ve come to crave the feeling of sore muscles, and my fiance catches me regularly flexing. I don’t notice the ever-present dull ache of my scar tissue, because my glutes are sore from doing lunges and my lats are sore from weight-lifting. I don’t worry that I could be short of breath from the radiation damaging my lungs, because each time I get in the boat or get on the rowing machine, I can push myself a little harder and breathe through it. Each time I am able to push myself a bit farther, my trust in my own body grows.
The key to all of this, I believe, is that at the end of practice I am tired, sore, and panting from something I chose to do, rather than something that was done to me. A cancer diagnosis takes over your body, your whole life, and no one tells you how difficult it is to reclaim your own autonomy after treatment. Coach Betsy often uses the phrase “challenge by choice” to tell us it’s ok to modify an exercise as needed, but these words have a different meaning for me. Dragon Boating is the Challenge I have Chosen for this phase of my life. I know I have a lot of work to do, and I may never be as whole or as confident as I was before cancer, but Dragon Boating has put me on the right path and I know my team will be with me every step of the way.
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