What I Found at the Ocean Once I Stopped Running From My Recovery

Six months after my last infusion, I packed a suitcase with a linen kaftan, three tubes of SPF 50+ from the chemists on Oxford Street, and a small leather notebook I had been carrying to every appointment for a year. I told almost no one I was going. I booked a little fibro cottage down near Byron Bay for a week, the kind with a slow ceiling fan and a verandah that looked out at frangipanis. I had not been on a holiday by myself since before I heard the word malignancy attached to my own body. I wanted to see if I could still travel alone, eat alone, sleep alone, wake up alone, and not feel like I was disappearing.

What I had not planned for were the tears. Not the one or two clean ones I had been letting fall when sad songs came on in the car. I mean two full days of crying that arrived like a weather system and did not move on. I cried into my pillow, into my coffee, into the salt water at Belongil Beach, into a bunch of grevilleas I bought from the Saturday market at Mullumbimby. I cried at a giant fig tree, at a pelican, at a stranger's toddler who waved at me from a banana seat. Somewhere around hour thirty, something quietly shifted, and the crying stopped being a leak and started being a kind of clearing. This is what happened.

The weird logistics of going anywhere alone after oncology

Packing for a trip after breast cancer treatment looks a bit different to packing for a normal holiday. My list had items my pre-cancer self would have rolled her eyes at. A soft front-closure bra for the drive up the Pacific Motorway in case the seatbelt rubbed across my scar. Small ice packs for the saline flushes I still did at home. A spare lymphedema sleeve rolled in a dry bag because the surgeons at Chris O'Brien Lifehouse had warned me about long-haul flights and, well, a three-hour drive was the closest I was willing to gamble. I packed my little kit the same way I had packed how to make a chemo bag that actually brings comfort during the worst of it, but quieter now, almost empty.

I also packed something I had never packed before: permission. I told my partner I would be off-grid for five days. I turned off the group chat. I left the MyHealth record alerts on silent. For the first time in ages, no one was checking on my bloods, my drain sites, my margins. I was not waiting on a six-monthly check-in or a PET scan or a referral to a plastic surgeon in Sydney. I was just a woman with a backpack heading up the coast, and that felt illicit. The medical-industrial part of cancer stays with you longer than people realise. You walk out of the last radiation fraction and you think the bell ringing at the end of the corridor is closure. It is not closure. It is a door held open by Medicare paperwork for years.

The first morning I sat with the tide

The first morning I walked down to the beach, the tide was so far out you could almost walk to the horizon. I took my shoes off at the dune line and put my feet into sand that was still cool from the night. A couple of kookaburras were going for it in the tea trees behind me. A willy-wagtail hopped around my toes. I looked out at the water and felt something I had not felt in a long time, which was curiosity. Not the searching, anxious kind I had during diagnosis. The other kind. The kind that wants to stay and see what happens next.

I sat on a piece of driftwood for over an hour. I watched a dad teach his little girl to bodyboard in the shallows. I watched an older bloke with zinc on his nose drag a surfski into the water like it weighed nothing. Two women walked past me in big sun hats, talking about how the bakery in Bangalow had sold out of the fig and fennel sourdough by nine. I realised I had been surviving on other people's rhythms for a year, and that morning, my own rhythm wanted to come back. That was the first clue that the crying was coming.

The two days that broke the dam

Day two, the crying started in earnest. I made a flat white from the little espresso machine on the verandah and sat down to write a postcard to my sister in Adelaide. The pen touched the card and something in my chest opened like a sluice gate. I cried so hard the cup of coffee went cold. I cried when I tried to read a magazine. I cried when I drove into Mullum to buy bread. I cried in the car park of the IGA when a Christmas song came on the radio. I cried when I rang Mum and asked about her garden. The tears lasted around forty hours in total.

It took me a while to realise I was not falling apart. I was draining. There is a difference. The body keeps the score during active treatment, and mine had been running a quiet ledger of every fear I had smiled through in waiting rooms at the Royal Prince Alfred, every joke I had told in chemo chairs, every night I had lain awake wondering if the Tamoxifen would finally agree with me. The ocean was the first quiet enough place I had been in where all of those invoices could be presented at once. I am grateful for that now, although I was not grateful for it at the time, when I was lying on the daybed with a wet flannel over my eyes wondering what on earth was happening to me.

I kept noticing small things that punched me in the sternum. A seagull landing on the railing outside my window. The smell of coconut sunscreen. A pair of thongs that someone had left behind on the path. My own handwriting on a notepad. Each one opened a small door in me and something older and softer walked out.

What the ocean actually did for me

By day four, the crying had thinned out into something gentler, almost more like shaking than sobbing. I started noticing my body again, not as a medical event but as a place I lived. I swam for the first time since surgery, very slowly, in a quiet stretch at Tallow Beach where locals had told me the rips were soft in the mornings. The salt water stung a little along the scar where the tissue expander had been. The current tugged at my hair. I floated on my back and looked up at a sky that was a colour I can only call generous.

I spent an afternoon talking to a woman at the Mullumbimby farmers market who had been through her own round of treatment ten years earlier and ran a little stall of homemade pawpaw balm. She swore by it for radiation burns. We stood there for half an hour while she told me about her daughter, her reintegration into work, her eventual decision to stop taking the hormone blocker she could not tolerate. I did not learn anything new from her. I learned that I was not the only one who had felt like a stranger in her own life after the bell stopped ringing. There is a real loneliness in survivorship that nobody warns you about because they assume you are too busy being grateful to feel lonely. You can be both. You will be both.

I also finally read properly again. I sat on a banana lounge under a pohutukawa tree that was flowering red and read three whole essays in a row without having to check my phone. I drove back from the lighthouse at Cape Byron with the windows down and listened to a podcast I had been saving called talking through recovery about reconstructive voice work after illness, and I cried again, but it was a different kind of crying, the kind that feels like relief finding somewhere to land. I also found myself going down a strange little rabbit hole one night, reading through herbal wellness research that I would normally have skipped past, the way you do when you are finally out of the acute phase and your brain starts wandering into topics that have nothing to do with survival margins.

Coming home without the costume

The drive back to Sydney went faster than I had expected. I had organised my own little ceremony on the way home, which was pulling over at a stop just south of Yamba and throwing away the bright pink Survivor t-shirt I had been given at the end of chemo. I had been wearing it around the house like an award, an identity tag, a costume I did not know how to take off. I read why I finally threw away my cancer survivor t-shirt again over a toasted sandwich at a roadhouse, and I nodded along, and I left the shirt in a bin near the amenities block, and I drove the rest of the way feeling slightly lighter than I had felt in twelve months.

I came back to a fridge full of meal prep my friends had quietly organised through a Meal Train link I had never asked for. I came back to a partner who had put fresh sheets on the bed. I came back to my dog, who sniffed me suspiciously because I smelled like sand and seaweed and other dogs. I came back to a life that was identical in every visible detail but felt subtly differently shaped inside me, like a glove that had finally been worn in.

If you are reading this while sitting in a waiting room at a BreastScreen clinic or a private oncology suite in a capital city, or in some regional hospital that flies you in for appointments, please hear this. Crying for two days is not a sign that you are not coping. It is a sign your nervous system has finally been given somewhere safe enough to put down everything it was carrying. The beach gave me that. A quiet cabin gave me that. A kookaburra gave me that. Somewhere, it will give you that too.

I write more of this kind of honest, messy recovery writing over at My Fabulous Boobies, if you ever want to come and read along. There is no rush on any of it. The tears know what they are doing.