Two years ago, I made an intensely personal decision, a decision that I knew would test my self-image every time I looked down at my chest, stood in front of a mirror, or passed my reflection in a window. I was a large-breasted woman facing mastectomy.
Did I want reconstruction? Along with my concern about the safety of silicone implants and the worry that reconstruction might inhibit detection of future problems, I struggled with body image questions.
"You have choices," my doctor said, "and you have time to make them. You are fortunate." Easy for him to say, I thought as I looked at my breasts in the mirror.
In the bathtub, I caressed the biopsy incision, knowing it would heal and then my breasts, with all their embedded memories and emotions, would be removed. In front of the mirror, I tried to cover them and imagine what I would look like without them, how my clothes would look.
I looked at my rounded stomach. The surgeon said he could use it to make new breasts. A tummy tuck was appealing, but I didn't want more surgery or another patch of numb skin.
My friend said, "Come to my house, I'll show you my reconstruction." I went. She took me into her bedroom and unbuttoned her blouse. "One side is better than the other," she said, "the recurrance side was done at the same time as the mastectomy, it's better." She pressed on her breasts to show me how the implants moved around.
On her bed, she had pictures of her breasts before the mastectomies. They were beautiful. The new ones were practical, but not beautiful. I hugged her, thanked her, and left.
A few weeks later, one of my daughter's teachers contacted me. I drove to San Francisco to talk with her. We sat on a couch in an office. She told me about her mastectomy. "Do you want to see it?" she asked. I nodded. She took me into a bathroom, removed her blouse, and then her bra. She handed me her prosthetic. It was warm and filled with a gel-like fluid. I looked at the side of her chest with the scar. She took my hand. "Here touch it," she said.
"It's not so bad," I said with relief. Her breast was gone, but her skin was warm, healthy, and alive... simply a chest with no breast.
My own emotional reaction to these two images weighed heavily in my decision. I realized that I didn't want to see someone else's version of my breasts molded onto my chest. I wanted a blank canvas where my thoughts could retrace the contours of my own graceful breasts, drawn from the image that would remain faithfully stored in my mind's eye.
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