The other day I was in the waiting room at my plastic surgeon’s office. The appointment was just a quick check so that he could see how my skin was reacting to radiation toward the end of treatment.

While I waited, I flipped though a beauty magazine, lingering longingly over pages of young, scantily clad women with impossibly perky boobs. I was interrupted by three persons entering the waiting room, two women who vaguely resembled one another and a man.

They were joking around rather loudly and weren’t being very British so we easily struck up a conversation. Turns out one of the ladies was there to get her nipple tattoos as the final stage of her reconstruction, having been through double mastectomies, chemo and radiation. It was great to see another lady out the other side of it all. It had been about two years since it had all happened for her. She was chipper as could be.

The other lady was this woman’s sister, and the man, her sister’s husband. They had come along for moral support and to watch all the magic happen.

The lady said that when she was done with her treatment, she’d had an “end of shit” party. End of shit. Isn’t that the perfect way to describe it all? I think so. Now I don’t know if she coined a term there or if “end of shit” is a British thing. Maybe someone British can tell me. Meanwhile, either way I like it. I’ll have to have me an end of shit party too.

But now I am on break. Summer vacation.

I had my final radiation Friday at noon. One more time on Trilogy (see Meet Trilogy if you haven’t met her), my arms overhead, envisioning my super heroine with flowing cape and hair, standing hands on hips atop a hill and sending white-hot fire from her eyes into the enemy below.

That was what I usually conjured during treatments. That and I couldn’t help but think of the old Raid television commercial in which cockroaches spontaneously combusted with a “pow” and a cloud of smoke, after yelling: “RAI-AID?!!!”

In any event it was weird to have that last treatment. So much of my time has been devoted to getting through “the shit” and really it was sort of anticlimactic when it was all over. But nice nonetheless. Nice to be DONE.

I spent the rest of the day packing, or to be precise, overpacking for our summer trip to Cape Cod. I had trouble narrowing down the summer outfits because in London we have had so little summer that I wanted to cram in as many light and colourful ensembles as possible before we have to pull out the coats again.

When I’d finished with the clothes, I rifled through my four-inch thick medical file folder to find the ID cards for my expanders. I put them in my handbag along with our passports and a letter from my reconstructive surgeon just in case I set the metal detector off (see Things I Am Prepared to Say to Airport Security if this doesn’t ring a bell, so to speak).

Actually my doctor wrote two letters. The first one was to me:

Dear Emily

I do not think Style 133 metal base valves set off airport alarms. I do not want to see you wrestled to the ground, dragged off to custody, being forced to watch the Olympics from a prison cell. Nonetheless I am emailing in a second note a letter that could be produced if there were problems. Safe journey and lots of love.

Kind regards and best wishes

Yours sincerely

It’s definitely the best letter I have ever received from a doctor. And the only funny one. And I have a lot of letters from doctors, most of which I have amassed in the past seven months.

The second letter was a basic statement that I have been under his care and have these gizmos in me and that if there are any issues the airport folks can reach him on his cell.

Soon enough, Saturday morning was upon me and with it the moment of truth. I inched forward in the security line. Plunked my iPad and MacBook Air and plastic baggie of liquids and pastes into grey bins, removed my belt with chunky metal buckle and awaited my turn. The kids went through first. Nothing. Then me.

And of course my tits totally set it off.

“Step over here, madame,” said the security dude. “I need to tell you something,” I said. “I have these prosthetic devices… I have a letter,” I replied. He ignored this and just waved me toward his female associate for a pat down.

I assumed the position and again started to explain myself. But by the time I got to “I have a letter” she had completed her pat down and sent me on my way. So I never got to produce the letter. At least I have it for the way back just in case the folks in Boston are skeptical that I am an evil fembot bent on world destruction.

We had loads of time to kill at Heathrow because we had left an hour early in case the men’s cycling road race caused any traffic delays. So we enjoyed breakfast in the British Airways lounge, watched some Olympic coverage and browsed the shops.

The flight itself was uneventful. I accepted a glass of champagne before take-off to toast my end of shit.

For lunch I ordered the special “Olympic-inspired” fish pie and then had afternoon tea (sandwiches and scones) a couple hours later even though I wasn’t really still hungry. I have trouble turning away food, even on an airplane.

We breezed through customs and made it to my in-laws’ house in Wellesley, where we were to retrieve the Subaru wagon and drive to the Cape, relatively quickly.

After using the facilities, we were about to head out when our five-year-old, who was sitting in the front seat of the car while she waited for the rest of the family, announced that the rearview mirror had “fallen off.” My immediate reaction was that she probably pulled it right off while screwing around in there. My secondary reaction was that I didn’t fancy spending an hour in an auto body shop waiting for the damn thing to be repaired after a seven-hour transAtlantic flight and with a two-hour drive ahead.

I called my father-in-law at the Cape and asked if he kept any crazy-glue in the house. He admitted that the mirror had fallen off before (more than once) and that crazy glue wouldn’t work. At that point my husband emerged from the basement with a roll of duct tape.

So we duct taped the thing on and set off for the Cape. It wasn’t perfect but it held all right. And we made it.

It’s nice to be back in America in a cozy, familiar house with the ocean breeze and the outdoor shower. A welcome change of venue for my end of shit.

I suppose that technically there is more shit ahead since I have further reconstructive surgery, but that doesn’t really count as “shit” because it will be happy times to improve my rack so that I, too, can possess impossibly perky boobs.

Meanwhile, now that I have killed it I will have to find something else to do with my time. But one thing is certain. I am going to keep blogging. Because there is no end of shit about which to write.