Stages of Beach

My body doesn’t do ‘beach’

My body has never been what you’d call ‘beach ready’ but then, I’ve never cared. See the weight on my arms, the gut, the breasts. Roll up, roll up an see this unholy mess that I am.

At stage one, I was a round baby, both bouncing like a ball and shaped like one too. At least so I am told. I’ve never seen any evidence of course. My roundness lasted four years until I was in a grocery shop where a wasp stung the weight from me. That at least was what I believed because one afternoon, I received a painful injection of whatever venom wasps carry around in their stings and the next morning, I woke with a high fever and all the symptoms of dysentery.

I was sick for weeks and those weeks led on to and bled into stage two where I was dangerously thin. This was not anorexia. I ate the food I was given and did all the exercise a four year old boy is supposed to do. Whatever I did, I never put on either fat or muscle and so, whenever I was on the beach, or more likely at the side of the lido where my mother was manager, I covered up as much as I could because children are cruel and it’s hard to esteem oneself when others are saying ‘freak, freak, freak!’.

Stage two lasted around twenty years but began to end as soon as I left home. It seems I had been kept on a restricted diet throughout my childhood. As soon as I could eat as much I wanted, and drink down the booze I most definitely wanted, I began to grow larger and larger, the gut filling out, the bull neck and so on.

Having seen the nightmarish visions of my skeletal childhood, my mind refused to see my actual shape for the first twenty years of stage three, insisting that the face in the mirror was a gaunt caricature of starving humanity and not the fat man I saw in the photographs, eventually. In reality, I had ballooned up to around three hundred pounds until the cancer came along to usher in stage four.

Stage four began at age 53 and was a result of prostate cancer. I lost much of the weight but grew breasts as a result of the testosterone agonists I was given to starve the cancer and then, after radiation treatment. Strangely, I was hoping to see a feminine shape in the mirror because somehow, I had the idea that I was in the wrong body. I was also finding it hard to accept that I even had a prostate in the first place. Wrong equipment see?

Stage four lasted only three years. That was when I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I’ve had it since childhood but because it’s temporal lobe epilepsy and produces absence seizures rather than the tonic-clonic seizures that are the popular image of epilepsy, neither I nor anybody else had realised. The epilepsy meant I had to leave the clinical trial I was on, and so stopped taking the hormones that were treating the cancer that began stage four and then began to change me further.

Thus at age fifty six, nearly four years ago, I began stage five. I think I’m approaching a more ‘normal’ appearance, but I still have no intention of going anywhere near a beach.

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