A ten point update
What should my new boobs look like?
One: Well holy guacamole — can you believe we are almost at the end of this shit show? At the time of this writing, I am a little more than a week away from my breast reconstruction surgery, concluding my cancer treatment. Aside from a lingering cold, I feel really great. Like, really really great. I’ve returned to a more or less regular and consistent workout routine, working full days at the office, and even have the energy for socialization and shenanigans. I’m really looking forward to my next and final surgery, and am diligently working on the homework assigned to me by my plastic surgeon: Assembling a collage of boobs that embody what I want my new ones to look like.
As a nine, ten year old girl whose bust cup size already measured a D, breast implants were never on my radar. A breast lift — sure — but never implants. Mastectomies floated on my mind while I went through a period of gender exploration, but implants? Implants! Nor did I ever believe I’d have the cash for thigh contouring liposuction, but hey, now it’s covered by my insurance. And all because I got cancer. Which I also never expected.
I had always believed diabetes would be my illness, and I was working really hard to avoid developing the disease that runs in my family with daily early morning exercise and attention to my diet … rendering my cancer diagnosis even more startling. But that’s life — right? A bewildering collision of elements just outside our scope of control, and adulthood is really all about learning not to panic when shit goes sideways.
Shit is never right side up.
What I also never expected — and no one ever saw fit to inform me of — is my cool new titty party trick. I discovered it by accident while trying to use my phone’s flashlight feature to open a bottle of medication in the dark without waking Daniel. I tell ya — cancer is the gift that keeps on giving.
Two: I could not be happier to get these temporary implants out. While I don’t feel self conscious at all about my crinkled bag titties and all their weird ripples and angles and migrating parts, it will be nice to have breasts that actually look like breasts again. Maybe look even a little better than actual breasts.
I’m getting a breast lift, and liposuction for fat grafting purposes. Yeah, the lipo is a little wild, right? My surgeon will use some of the fat to help fill in my breasts, and while she’s in there harvesting my blubber, she’s gonna make a few … improvements, and insurance is footing the bill.
I’ve never been so excited for a consolation prize! If there’s one silver lining to cancer, it’s this, and I don’t know if I ought to be ashamed to say that in the darkest nights of this darkest storm, that silver lining compelled me forward like the star over Bethlehem.
In preparation for surgery, my plastic surgeon has asked that I collect images exemplifying features I want my new boobs to have. I don’t even know where to start.
Three: I do know I want my new boobs to look just a little “fake” because the societally constructed superiority of “natural” or “real” over surgically enhanced rankles me. Not to mention that that hierarchy of value is problematic as fuck, and perpetuates the narrow range of what is acceptable of women’s bodies.
Like, you can’t win, right? If you don’t “artificially” enhance your appearance (via makeup, hair dye, stylish outfits) then you’re a lazy, ugly woman, and if you spend too much time or money on your looks, you’re a vain bitch. Furthermore, we as women have no control over that scale, and can never predict where we will fall. So fuck “natural” versus “fake” — if all bodies are beautiful, then all bodies are truly beautiful.
Four: You know what they say: The pointier your nipples, the closer you are to god. Look — let’s just say that size, age, and fluctuating weight had their effects on my breasts, and if I don’t get new ones that point straight up like a satellite aimed for the broadcast of heaven, then what the fuck good is modern medicine anyway?
I’m being melodramatic about it, of course. But also — come on, really? I’m still pretty mad about being diagnosed with cancer at only thirty-one, so the least fate or karma or dumb luck can do is console me with a stellar new rack.
Think of it this way: Up until the seventies, when a woman developed a suspicious lesion, she went immediately to surgery, and she didn’t know if she’d wake up with not only the cancer gone, but her breast gone, all her lymph nodes, her muscle, and any hope of reconstruction. For all the women who had to endure that bullshit, my new body will be for you. We fucking deserve it after decades of biased medicine disregarding our need to be able to resume life as normal after cancer.
Five: Possibly — if I can get insurance to cover it — I want nipples that shoot lasers.
Six: Jeezus, what a journey this has been.
Seven: Am I a bad feminist? Shouldn’t I be more focused on my internal experience of this illness? By yielding to conventional beauty standards, am I complicit in my own demise? Is my vanity really femme defiance? Or is it femme compliance?
I hated my body for a long, long time, reviling it like a dark memory of trauma or the feeling of wearing a wet swimsuit under your clothes. I’ve since come to learn how strong my body really is. I revel in physical movement and worship like a dedicated priestess at the altar of my earth vessel. I inhabit spaces with my full breadth.
They do not like strong, confident women out there. They have ideas about how much room I should be allowed to occupy and about just how loud my voice can be. They make excuses for accountability by thrusting their insecurities on me. But I deflect them with a shield forged over many years of battling mere sidewalks in the summer. My investment in my appearance is my right, and after many years of people trying to take that right from me, pretty has become political, and when I got my cancer diagnosis, the first thing I worried about was the disease’s impact on my beauty. As a femme, my looks are weaponized. Each stroke of mascara is a blade, my lips are painted in blood, and my hair is my wild, frizzy halo of glory.
Where does my feminism intersect all this? I’m still figuring it all out. And I’m also excited about my new boobs. Maybe adulthood is also realizing these contradictions never quite dispel themselves, and learning to live gracefully in the sway of contradictory tensions is the one true path to intentionality and happiness.
Eight: I thought that liposuction is just like, they stick a needle in ya, vacuum up some fat, sew ya up, and send you off on your Barbie doll way.
Hah! How naive of me! I should know by now that everything cancer related comes with a catch, and the catch of my insurance covered cosmetic surgery is that my doctor is recommending followup compression garments for three months post surgery.
In Cancer Time, three months is nothing, and I know it will be over before I know it. That doesn’t change the despair I felt when my visions of slow motion running on the beach like a sleek seventies babe drifted farther into the hazy future. I am taking solace in the fact that the months between June and September in San Francisco are generally gray, foggy, and not at all appropriate for bikinis.
I’ve wanted liposuction on my thighs ever since I can remember. Maybe that’s sinister, or maybe it’s my fucking body and I can do whatever I want with it. I understand I will never look like a Victoria’s Secret model, and I do want more diverse representations of beauty in media, but I’m also okay admitting my thighs have always felt like an ill-fitting puzzle piece. Even at my leanest, my thighs were big, and the way I perceive myself in my mind has always been at odds with the shapes of my legs. So now’s my chance to receive some contouring help, and I am going to take it.
It’s really difficult for me to internalize finally getting what I want. It feels undeserved even though I’ve just endured almost two years of treatment and sacrificed my breasts for my life.
It’s so difficult for me to accept I convinced myself that the effects of liposuction are only temporary, which led me to do some research and discover that once the fat cells are removed, they’re gone for good. You can still gain the weight back, but lipo isn’t ever about losing weight. It’s about finessing the body’s shape. Which means that at whatever weight, I’ll still have the same overall figure because those particular fat cells — the ones that collect girth at my hips and inner thighs — will have been removed.
So this really is for real, and I am allowed to enjoy it. Compression garments be damned.
Nine: I really just want boobs that will look good in a bikini. And as soon as I am well enough, I am going to buy a cute little two piece, and park my ass on a beach in Hawaii. I’ve never been and I want to go. No time like the future.
Ten: This surgery is going to be weird, and rough. My breast lift involves cutting out my nipple like a pepperoni, slicing out a keyhole shaped swath of skin, and then sewing it all back together — a little bit like sewing in a dart to make a shirt more tailored, the nipple reattached at the center, resulting in a “lollipop scar.” The liposuction will leave my legs bruised and sore, and it will take a few months until the post surgical swelling resolves and I can begin to really put my life back together.
The scars don’t both me. The loss of sensation in my breasts doesn’t even really bother me. Recovery will be painful, but I will get better and better everyday. I have to hand it to my body for its almost infinite ability to adapt and recover. Bodies can be so frail and yet so resilient. If bodies can create something as dark and as powerful as cancer, then they certainly must also be capable of tremendous feats of brilliance.
It’s been getting to be a long time since my initial diagnosis, and the accompanying onslaught of assistive fervor. I notice the donations to my medical fund have slowed to a stop, and it’s with serene understanding that I know it’s because we are all moving on.
I am moving on.
I am excited and a little bit anxious about my next surgery. I am told it is the more challenging of the two because for the first one, you’re so consumed with just trying to live that many things are easier to overlook. The cancer is now out of my body — hopefully for good — and all that’s left is the finishing touches. Picking out the tile for the backsplash kinda thing.
Part of survival is forgetfulness. As cancer recedes into the distance, it’s easier to turn my attention to the horizon. In the throes of illness, the horizon was only as far as the next day, sometimes only as far as the next hour. Now it’s a relief to find myself contemplating the next career move, how and where I can maybe fit a family into my life, what it might take to start saving up for a downpayment on a house.
Saltine crackers, which I snacked on obsessively — desperately — to stave off nausea during my time on the infusion floor, still make me sick just to think of, but the rest of the hardest bullshit has slipped into the vignetting of my cancer memories. I remember mostly my mother singing in the glow of my late night apartment, friends crowded close and waving lighters to Mariah Carey’s “Hero.” It was the first of my “chemo after parties” — a standing open invitation to any and everyone to come chill at my house once I got home from a long day at the hospital.
The trauma of my illness will always reside in my body somewhere, stored in my fat along with all the marijuana I’ve ever smoked, and maybe one day it will all come flooding back to me, incapacitating me. But hey — that’s what Ativan is for. For now, I am looking forward to surgery, acknowledging my moments of anxiety, and letting them pass into the greater stream of my consciousness.
In a lot of ways, I feel like cancer has given me license to be a little bit of a jerk. I intend to continue using it as an excuse whenever convenient. I earned that right. Just like I earned my new sexy body, which is how my plastic surgeon frames it.
Folks were right: I have experienced a profound shift in paradigms because cancer crystallized and illuminated what living means to me, and allowed me to stop giving a shit about the little things. I want the breast lift and I want the liposuction, and it doesn’t really matter how I arrived here, I am here and presented with an opportunity to achieve things I’ve always wanted. Body politics, femme identity, and feminism seem to be meeting at an impasse at this point in my personal narrative, and that’s all right. If it’s not cancer, I am not going to freak out about it. And even if it is cancer, I’ll cross the bridges as I come to them.
The bridge I’m trying to cross right now is which photos of celebrities’ boobs I want to send to my plastic surgeon, and if it’s weird to send her stills from porn. It will still be another few months before I can really indulge in my Baywatch slow-mo fantasy, but it will be here sooner than I know it, crowding out all the other memories of treatment until my life is just so full of new, vibrant visions that there simply is no room anymore for recollections of cold cap headaches, IV bruises, debilitating fatigue, and my face streaked with mascara. I mean, none of it will ever go away forever — cancer is the sort of thing that haunts you — but hey! The effects of liposuction are also for forever!
I am a queer Hispanic woman and trauma survivor who was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of thirty-one. Devoted to social justice and advocating for mental health understanding and resources, I was just six months into my new career as a backend software engineer trying to make space for marginalized people in tech when I was struck with Stage IIa Grade 3 triple negative metaplastic breast cancer. You can read more about my journey in my publication Never Tell Me the Odds.
If you enjoy my writing and you are able to, please consider donating to my medical expense crowdfunder. I’ve got a yearlong treatment plan ahead of me, and I need all the help I can get. Thank you so much for your generosity.
