My last breast reconstruction was a seminar on circulation. Several times a day, the nurses would come in with dopplers and listen. My heartbeat sounds crisp, like someone biting into an apple. The venous pulse in my tissue flaps hit the same beat, but vaguely, a brush on the drums. The arterial pulse sounded like the wind circling the top of a hill. These are the sounds of everything going wrong. I went home flat chested. The four surgeries I had that week left me with surgical drains, a bag that dripped pain medication into my abdomen, anemia, and dramatic new scars.
I had already done two years as a breast cancer patient, and it wasn’t my first run at reconstruction. I knew that this surgery was going to be rough, but even knowing exactly how much I was going to suffer would not have caused me to draw back. The only thing that would have stopped me would have been knowing in advance that it would fail.
Every attempt I’ve made to replace my breasts has gone badly, and the resulting disasters have gotten progressively worse. I have had a defective implant, a post-op infection, capsular contracture, and three emergency surgeries. I refuse to try again, surgically.
There are two known routes through breast reconstruction: you want it, and you get what you want, or you don’t have it because you don’t want it. There are many kinds of surgical failures, but the assumption is that if you want surgery at all, you will keep having it until you reach satisfactory results. Plastic surgeons will take infinite pains to get you there. They do not admit in their promotional materials that all the pain is going to be yours.
Sometimes I tell myself I don’t have prostheses because I am afraid it would go wrong. When I try to put things on my body that approximate breasts, bad things happen. I would probably die in a car accident on the way to get prosthetics fitted. If I miraculously made it through the doors uninjured, the building would collapse. Everyone at the mall would be better off if I let it go.
Sometimes, I feel like prosthetics would be dishonest. I didn’t have this ethical issue when I decided to let a surgeon move and sculpt my belly flab, it’s a new thing. Artificial breasts of any kind shouldn’t be more troubling than any of the daily cosmetic deceptions I’ve signed on for, like concealer, or hair dye, or the non-stop effort of pretending I don’t grow leg hair.
Patients who forego reconstruction are described in books and brochures as brave, mature, and confident, which is great, until someone tries to tell me how much they respect me for the choice they assume I made. I tried to be cowardly, juvenile and insecure. It just didn’t work out.
All my life, I’ve been mistaken for my sister. Even now. My hair is short, shaved in back, and hers is shoulder length. She wears wire frame glasses, and I’ve got chunky plastic ones. She still has the breasts she started with. The people who confuse us for each other cannot possibly be looking at our faces, or our hair, or our bodies. Maybe our mother was right when she told us it was our insides that count. No one’s noticed I don’t have breasts anymore because the thing they actually see is that I have overdeveloped opinions about transubstantiation, Henry VIII, and the locavore movement.
The differences in my life before the failure and my life afterward are all me. I don’t talk to strangers much anymore. Anyone I’m intimately acquainted with is eventually going to see my chest, or ask me what happened, and those are bad things. I don’t develop new acquaintances. I talk to some of the people I know, and when I have to talk to deal with business. If I knew someone before the surgical disaster, and I’ve kept talking to them all along, I can talk to them still, but if I lost touch with someone a month or so before reconstruction, I don’t want to talk to them now. I don’t want to have to explain. No one has rejected me because I have rejected almost everyone.
I am told that breast reconstructions like the one I tried to have fail about 1% of the time. Some portion of women have breast cancer, some portion of those have mastectomies, some portion of those have autologous reconstruction with abdominal tissue, and 1% of those women know exactly what I’m going through. I can’t guess at the missing terms in that equation, but there must be a few dozen or a few hundred of us. I have yet to find even one of them. Not talking and not explaining appear to be popular choices.
There is no resolution to this story. I have no idea what happened to the rest of those dozens or hundreds of women. I guess each of us goes on alone into the same world that we’ve always lived in, as different people then we were before.
Tags: cancer, elizabeth abraham, health, surgery, the butter
I am very sorry the surgeries went so poorly for you.
I hope it is a consolation that out of a well-written article, this is particularly great: “No one’s noticed I don’t have breasts anymore because the thing they actually see is that I have overdeveloped opinions about transubstantiation, Henry VIII, and the locavore movement.”
Well, I mean, who doesn’t have overdeveloped opinions about Henry VIII?
My mom went through 5 years of reconstruction, and I was there for most of it. Infections, rejections, more infections, surgeons that don’t answer calls until they come from the ER, driving 1000 miles to find a surgeon willing/able to try just one more time…
I’m sorry that you fell into the same (not) elite group. Best wishes moving forward.
Best wishes to you, and thank you for sharing so honestly.
For trying, for living on, for writing, for acknowledging the lack of resolution…
For all these things you are incredibly brave and mature in my book even if (especially if) you don’t feel so.
…I wanted you to know.
There are so many things where people on the outside say “gosh, you’re so brave”, where, from the inside, we just want to scream “Don’t you understand, I didn’t have a fucking choice.” But you did choose to share your story, and regardless of whether it was brave or not (although, for the record, I think it was), I’m grateful to you for doing so.
Also, now, you have the option to just forward this link to new people. “All questions regarding my chest can be directed HERE, if your questions are not answered by that link, they will likely not get answered. All questions regarding transubstantiation, Henry VIII, and the locavore movement are encouraged.”
“If I knew someone before the surgical disaster, and I’ve kept talking to them all along, I can talk to them still, but if I lost touch with someone a month or so before reconstruction, I don’t want to talk to them now. I don’t want to have to explain. No one has rejected me because I have rejected almost everyone.”
Yup. This.
Thank you for sharing this …
Well, I mean, who doesn't have overdeveloped opinions about Henry VIII?
People are typically surprised to learn I’m a cancer survivor. I rarely talk about it. In short, it’s mostly because I don’t want anyone’s pity. (Expletives deleted.)
However, once in a while I do out myself, generally when I meet another survivor.
Welcome to the Unofficial Global Order of People Who Used To Have Cancer! Glad to have you with us.
People are typically surprised to learn I'm a cancer survivor. I rarely talk about it. In short, it's mostly because I don't want anyone's pity. (Expletives deleted.)
However, once in a while I do out myself, generally when I meet another survivor.
Welcome to the Unofficial Global Order of People Who Used To Have Cancer! Glad to have you with us.
Women aren’t supposed to show any evidence of their experience in their physical appearance: see any conversation or article about women and aging, women after childbirth, basically women after anything of significance happens to them. The way people look at or treat you (of the way you fear that they will) is just a more obvious and extreme example of what happens to the rest of us. I don’t have a solution, but on a purely practical note, if you haven’t already experienced the wonder of good-quality, fitted, men’s button-down shirts (you don’t have to pay a lot of money for them: I get mine secondhand) I highly recommend them: they feel wonderful and look good on a variety of bodies.