In my last post, Orange Alert, I wrote about another chapter in my complicated relationship with orange. Chapter one involved my unsuccessful attempt color my own gray roots before my mastectomy, since I had to cancel my salon appointment due to my surgery. Some how I thought that having cute hair would buffer the negative impact of losing a breast. Perhaps I was right but since my hair turned out a decidedly not cute Oompa Loompa orange, I will never know.

The second chapter involved two surgeries, the first last September (Wonky Wonka Boob) and the second (Orange River Grafting) in October. As I wrote a couple of days ago, As the orange in question was betadine, which was used as an antiseptic to prepare my skin for surgery.

I was mostly jesting about my fear of orange prior to last weekend when my husband swabbed out ground floor deck with a very orange stain. It was a trauma cue for me and hit me out of the blue.

As a psychologist I know that one of the best ways to keep a trauma cue powerful is to avoid it. (Now, sometimes there are little baby steps and skill building that need to be accomplished before facing a trauma cue head on, but this was not the case for this particular situation.) The deck continues to be orange and I look at it every day. This has helped quite a bit.

I was also thinking about betadine and yes, those orange stains on my skin happened in the course of breast cancer. And breast cancer is bad and scary. And yes, they happened during a period of time during which I was feeling particularly low.

Then I realized that one of the advantages of using an antiseptic that stained my skin is that the OR nurse knew that she had swabbed all of the areas she needed because she could see exactly what she had done.

So the orange in the betadine helped protect me from infection. My orange roots gave me a huge laugh and buffered me from some of the fear of having a breast removed. I loved writing that Willy Wonka post.

So orange, you can stay.

This is the phoenix in my garden. The artist made it out of an old pink flamingo. This is a good kind of orange, the orange of transformation.

This is the phoenix in my garden. The artist made it out of an old pink flamingo. This is a good kind of orange, the orange of rebirth and transformation.