By Lisa Miller
How do you dress for your mastectomy? The surgery itself is easy, actually. During the cutting, you’re wearing nothing at all, unconscious and strapped to a table in a martyr’s pose, arms out in a T, while an OR crew that looks like the cast of a reality show bustles around doing God knows what. But after. What do you wear when your body no longer resembles itself?
The mastectomy veterans who became my sister-guides universally recommended the Brobe for the immediate recovery. These advisers were invaluable in so many ways, but at the Brobe I felt I had to draw a line. If maternitywear is an indignity to style-conscious women, then mastectomywear is far, far worse, and within that realm the Brobe reigns supreme. Nothing more than a wraparound robe with a built-in bra, the Brobe — crucially — has deep interior pockets, the function of which is to hold the gross drainage tubes that protrude from your body after a mastectomy and dangle painfully and disgustingly at your side. If you have a mastectomy, you need some way to support and manage those tubes, and the manufacturers of the Brobe and its imitators have capitalized on this.
