If you had to, which part of your body could you live without?
The best car game…
Have you ever wondered if you could live without some of the bits on your body that you don’t really use? How about your belly button? A couple of toes? Maybe you don’t actually need your pinky finger?
I really don’t want to have my breasts cut off. But I guess I will, if I have to.
I don’t have to? Maybe I still will. No, wait…
This is basically the gist of how I feel about my double mastectomy. I have to go through with some sort of ‘choice’ when I’m about 60% ready for it.
I have breast cancer and, after having chemo to reduce the size of my tumour, the time has come to decide what sort of surgery I want. I could just have a lumpectomy. I could have just one breast removed. Or I can go for the most drastic measure and have both of my breasts removed (I could actually have nothing done but I’m not that sort of creature).
Just to be perfectly clear, having a double mastectomy doesn’t stop me getting breast cancer again as I can still get it (as much as a 5–10% chance, depending on who you ask) in the remaining breast tissue. The surgeons are good but they can’t remove every last cell of breast tissue. The odds are low, but so were the chances of me getting breast cancer at 31. Much lower actually. And I won that fiasco of a horror lottery.
And you never get to know if you made the right choice. I mean, in 3 years time, no alarm will go off on my phone that says “You would have had cancer again today if you still had your breasts”. I’ll never know if I could have just avoided all this and stayed healthy.
I think I underestimated how hard it would be to have this completely unnecessary (but not unreasonable, as one of my doctors explained) operation. After telling me that I don’t technically need the surgery, my surgeon asked “Why are you having it?” (there’s no right answer, they just want to look out for you and make sure you understand what’s going to happen). I broke down as I said “I just need it to be over”.
Openly and honestly, he reminded me that having a mastectomy won’t make it over. Nothing will. And I’ll still have to go through this operation to take away two chunks of flesh from my body. I’ve never had a big bust (pregnancy and post-birth porn0-boobs excluded) so I thought I wouldn’t mind. Or at least I didn’t think I’d mind so much. Once again though, it’s the logistics. I won’t be able to move my arms above my head for at least 3 weeks. I’ll be unable to pick up my daughter for 6 weeks. I won’t even be able to pick up a heavy cup for the first few days. And no cheating as it will hurt like mad to even try, and risks dislodging the reconstruction (which is a damn sight more than a lunch time boob job, I promise you).
I’m not having a boob job, you see. In a boob job, you get an implant to boost your natural assets. I’ll be having my breast tissue scraped away entirely and then they’ll try and use some manmade jelly to mimic it. It won’t be as warm as the rest of my body and I won’t really be able to feel it. Where a cosmetic implant usually sits on top of the chest muscle, for my reconstruction the surgeons will cut my chest muscle in half, peel it away from my chest wall, insert a boob-shaped implant, and then stretch my chest muscle back down over the new shape. Where they can’t make the muscle stretch, they’ll use animal tissue to fill the gap. It’ll take around 6 weeks to heal (not just the scar but the ruin of tissue under my skin) and then I’ll have radiotherapy which could ruin the whole thing by burning holes in my skin or cooking the muscle which holds the whole franken-boob in place.
So, yeah. It’s a pretty serious operation. It’ll interrupt the normal course of our lives, yet again. And I don’t really need it. So why am I having it? I’ve gone back and forth, I’ll be honest. But it goes like this:
I can’t face this again. My genes are awful and there’s a strong chance that I could get breast cancer on the other side and a fair chance I could get it on the same side again, if I keep my boobs. If it does come back, I will always wonder if I could have avoided it by having a mastectomy. Of course, I might have to go through this again anyway, but at least I’ll know that I did what I could (If I’d decided not to have a mastectomy, just to be clear, that would still be all that I could do. You can only do what you can do, if that doesn’t sound too much like something you’d see on a crappy inspirational mug).
I know that, one day, I will want a double mastectomy. It will always be painful and inconvenient and now, as I’ve yet to return to work from my infinite maternity leave, is probably the least inconvenient time to have it. Having a lumpectomy or single mastectomy and then the double, in years to come, just seems like extra hassle.
My relatives that died from breast cancer didn’t have mastectomies. My relative that survived had a mastectomy. It’s a pretty small survey, I grant you, but it’s all I have and these sort of things loom over the choices we make every day. Every one knows a chain smoker that’s all “My nan smoked 120 fags a day and she’s fine.”
My husband is taking time off work to look after me for the first two weeks, we’ve managed to get our daughter into a nursery for a few days a week and we’ll call in favours from family for the bits in between and after. It’ll be ok, I think.
Long term, I need to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never breastfeed again. But I might not be able to have another baby after all the chemo, so you sort of have to take each punch in the face one at a time. My body won’t ever look the same but pregnancy kind of made that a reality a couple of years back. It’s weird. I can’t really explain why it makes me sad to remove a part of my body that I suppose I don’t use. And it does make me sad. But less and less so as I think about it.
There’s a lot of preparation and choices to be made before the final surgery. One of them is ‘Do I want to to keep my nipples’. I mean, who thinks about this stuff…
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