Pillows in Breast Cancer

Pillows in Breast Cancer

Pillows are decidedly decadent. Nothing evokes sybaritic pleasures like the sight of a luxury
hotel advertising its dreamy beds with a fluffy cloud of pillows. A pile of soft marshmallows
that you just want to dive into and that can’t possibly be good for you, can it?

Pillows date back to ancient Egypt. They’ve been found in tombs buried with the dead.

They were decorative works of art. In ancient China they were made of hard materials like
porcelain, jade, and wood, each a solid block with a half-moon cut out at the top where
you could rest your neck but keep your head off the floor. Their usage has spread over the
millennia, though in Tudor England they were thought to be good only for weak men and
women bearing children. I’ve had lots of fights about pillows with my husband—how many
do we really need on the bed if we can’t use them all? What’s a decorative pillow? Do you
really need a pillow when we go camping? What’s wrong with stuffing your clothes in a
stuff sack and using that as a pillow?

Well, who knew that my cancer treatment would allow me to enter guilt-free pillow
indulgence? In fact, therapeutic pillow indulgence was exactly what I needed and I didn’t
even know it.

Breast removal is a brutal assault on your body (see “M Is for Mastectomy”). I imagined
it would hurt, but it really hurts. Try this exercise. Raise your arm to your mouth, fingers
clenched like you are holding a toothbrush. That uses pectoral muscles. Hold down a loaf
of bread with one hand and try to grip a knife and slice the bread with the other. Same
muscles. Lie flat, then try to raise yourself without using your arms (I’m assuming you
don’t have abs of steel; I don’t). Raise your arms and pull on a T-shirt, or take off a T-shirt
for that matter. This is the moment you discover how important those muscles across your
chest are, and as one of my doctors said, they “really do a number on those muscles” when
they remove the breast.

In the post-surgical haze of my recovery room, the first thing I was conscious of was the
fact that I felt so flattened you could probably have peeled me off the stretcher. Like
something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon or the children’s book character Flat Stanley,
whom you could put in an envelope and mail to someone. That figure of speech “being run
over by a bus” had real meaning for me now.

They did manage to peel me off the stretcher and transfer me to a hospital bed. But
those beds have buttons that allow you to recline or elevate. I realized pretty quickly that I
would need to be elevated all the time. Those pectoral muscles could not take lying flat.

Sadly, with no such contraption at home, this angle was not going to be easy to replicate.
But lo and behold, an amazing delivery. My friend Jennifer, herself a double-mastectomy
patient, delivered a giant foam wedge pillow. If you’ve seen fans of the Green Bay Packers
with their famous Cheesehead headgear, you’ll know what I mean when I say it is shaped
like a giant wedge of cheese. So when we came home, I was able to lie in bed with my
torso elevated at just the right angle. Really, in a million years I never would have known
this. It has been a lifesaver, the anchor pillow in a group of pillows that contributed to my
comfort during the worst periods after surgery and during recovery.

Another useful little pillow came courtesy of the American Cancer Society. A delivery
from them included an enormous amount of literature and this three-by-six-inch pillow.

What was I supposed to do with this? It might work for a big doll, but really? Well, turns
out it fit pretty snugly in my armpit, where the surgeons had been ferreting around checking
out my lymph nodes, and the pillow really eased the pain. The soft pillow my daughter
made as part of a sewing project? Very handy to place under my side where I no longer
had a breast but had plenty of pain and tenderness. Firm pillows, soft pillows, large pillows,
small pillows, wedge, circle, square. The architecture of my pillow arrangement was a vital
part of my treatment and recovery. I spent an inordinate amount of time in bed during my
period of surgery and treatment, and I would have been lost without my pillows. In a time
of enormous discomfort, pillows are an indulgence that you can afford, and they actually
make a huge difference. Who knew?