By Vida Adamczewski

Breaststrokes

Breastrokes, a piece written by poet and writer Vida Adamczewski about her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, the physical and emotional impact these life-altering surgeries had on her mother’s relationship with herself and her body, and the road to recovery through swimming that brought them closer together.

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Thanks to the NHS breast screening programme, the cancer in my mum’s breast was found early. It was a fast growing type, but it was identified before it had spread. My mum had always said if she found out she had cancer, she wouldn’t have treatment.

She was afraid of losing her hair, and of all the side effects of (critical, life extending) treatment that can be more painful than the cancer itself. She soon discovered that these kinds of calculations are a product of the healthy body’s imagination. The sick body has a different maths; the body’s tolerance for pain, deformation, embarrassment and exhaustion expands with illness.


She had a lumpectomy to remove her nipple and the cancerous tissue, leaving her with a white vertical scar that makes her breast a squashed heart shape. This was followed by several sessions of radiotherapy to ensure that no cancer cells remained. This treatment was harder than the surgery in many ways, with its accompanying choir of pins and needles, hard to place burning sensations, and a groggy and migrainous brain. Later in the year, when she was told that her cancer had been hormone sensitive, combined with the painful fibroids in her uterus, my mum opted to have a hysterectomy. 

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Over the course of that year, with its bed rest and brain fog and endless paperwork, my mum learnt how to be ill. I watched her learn to assert herself to clinicians, to ask for treatment options, to feel the frustration of a prescription that hadn’t been processed, or a day when the body was too sore and too tired to do anything but rest. These were experiences I recognised, that I knew intimately, as I had lived with chronic pain and fatigue for most of my life. She came to stay with me in the kingdom of the sick. And there, we slept, and we cried, and we swam a lot. 

One of the only effective sources of pain relief for me is swimming. I love the way the water takes the weight of my body. As my mum recovered from her surgeries and was finally allowed to get the wounds wet, we agreed to start swimming together every week. We have been swimming at Brockwell Lido ever since. The swimming slowly built back up my mum’s muscles, without risking overstraining or injury. We both swim breaststroke with our heads sticking out of the water, like gliding grebes. We always swim in the slow lane, and though we do not swim side by side, we exchange smiles and snippets of conversation as we pass one another going up or down.

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In the changing room, I notice the other women with scars or medical devices, or the women who move in the particular way that pain makes us move on land (stiffly and with our torsos crunched). In the changing room, bodies are allowed to sag and age and ache. Women twist their arms behind their backs to unclip their bras and scrape hair up into buns, swimming caps, woolly hats against the winter cold. I help untangle the soft bamboo of my mum’s bra (she no longer finds it comfortable to wear wired underwear), rolling the fabric over her back. I straighten the strap of her swimming costume. She helps dry my hair, offers me moisturiser for my face and oil for the little scars on my hands and back. Through these miniscule acts of care for one another, my mum and I are reencountering each other and changing the conversation between our bodies. 

Sometimes when I see the scar on her breast when she is changing into her swimming costume, the crystalline thought comes to me that there was cancer in the breast that I had fed from as a baby. At first I found this a troubling thought. I know that my mum also found this the hardest part about accepting her new, ill and scarred body.


Having coffee after swimming, we spoke a lot about how much her surgeries - the loss of a nipple, or her womb - made her feel less like a woman, less like a mother, like the scalpel had severed her from the story of having birthed and fed her children. No facts about how her womanhood is not biologically or physiologically determined could help here; my mum knows this. She just doesn’t feel it. Hers was not an intellectual problem, but a visceral grief for a previous body that had been transformed by illness. Once we had seen each other naked in the changing room, it was easier to talk about this transformation. 

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Rehabilitative swimming is not about getting in the water, nor how far you swim, or for how long, or whether you persist through the winter temperatures or not. It is about how you get out of the water. The real rehabilitation is in learning when your body is too tired to continue. It is about saving enough energy to complete the last length. My mum is not good at resting. Work gives my mum purpose. She is a television producer. Working on film sets requires endurance for the long hours and buckets of enthusiasm to gild the slog. From the off my mum’s cancer and her work were intertwined.

The same weekend she found out that her mammogram showed abnormal tissues in her breast, she also learnt a TV show she had produced was nominated for two International Emmys. She was in New York on a panel just days before her lumpectomy, and back on set making the second series when her scar had just healed. She kept trying to work throughout her treatment because it made the world keep turning, and it stopped her feeling like an ill person. But it wasn’t always possible. After radiotherapy and her hysterectomy, she had to learn to slow down, to take breaks and recuperate. Now, when she passes me in the water and says ‘I think this is the last one for me’, my heart sings. The hardest thing to learn as an ill person is how to stop, to rest, to forgive yourself for not swimming another length. 

 

After swimming, we get breakfast in Herne Hill, either at The Sicilian or at Bunhead Bakery (their salty bun with feta and za’atar satisfies that post swim hunger like nothing else). These breakfast chats are my most cherished times of the week. My mum and I talk about work, relationships, friends, books. We also talk about being ill and how one’s identity pivots to accommodate sickness. Though her body is technically better now, it has been permanently changed by cancer. In these moments, I have told my mum more about my own chronic illness than I have ever before. Since she has lived there, and knows the terrain, it is easier for her to come and visit me in the kingdom of the sick. She has a day pass. 

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My mum has been in remission for just under two years now. In that time several of my mum’s friends have been diagnosed with cancer. Some have been treated, some not. Some of them have recovered and some of them have died. We keep swimming. When we are in the water, swimming our slow breaststroke,  it is a celebration of our survival, our endurance through illness, disease and pain. But simultaneously, it is also a reminder that the body fails, all the time, over and over again. That her body will always be a body that has had cancer, a body that has been sick.


Cancer estranged my mum from her body. Swimming brought her back to it, and brought her closer to me. I will never get tired of the smell of chlorine on the back of her neck when we hug. It is the smell of us, together, being alive.

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