My last summer with breasts

Most days I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself sideways. Sometimes naked, out of the shower, sometimes clothed. I look at my wide shoulders, the butt someone told me to be embarrassed about but has always attracted people, my stomach that bulges since my abdominal surgery. People ask me how far along I am. Naked, sideways, that’s the part of my body that doesn’t look to me like the way a body is supposed to be.

But what is a body?

Every time I get a medical test they ask me if I have foreign objects in my body. I don’t. I try to think about what that would be like. To have something in my heart, in my head, in my hips. My stomach has natural invaders that don’t feel normal, scar tissue fills it up and makes it sensitive. It’s like I have a scar tissue baby that I’ll never birth.

I get asked if I could possibly be pregnant every time I go to the hospital. When you say no to that question, they usually follow up to ask how you are sure. They have to be certain of your certainty, before they do anything invasive like give you drugs that could kill a child.

When I used to have a uterus, I would weigh my options: do I say I could not possibly be pregnant because I haven’t had sex with a man in years?

Depending on the way I hold myself, whether I look them in the eye, and how I hold their gaze, they may just assume I don’t have sex. I can play the dowdy girl. Sometimes that’s an easier place to be.

How do I hold my body?

They asked me if I wanted to keep my ovaries, and I honestly did not see the point. I was warned that the loss of my ovaries would bring on menopause and I thought, really … let’s get on with it.

A doctor recently told me that pain in women is hard to diagnose. Our conversation had already gone downhill — I wanted to spray him with a squirt gun when he asked if I’d considered self-care. The pain comment, I felt like that one might require a pie in the face.

Just to check myself, I asked my surgeon if this was true: is it harder to diagnose pain in women?

He laughed nervously. He doesn’t like to criticize other doctors, but he’s also committed to complete medical information. He said no, it’s not harder. Women just have different systems. You have to know the system.

My system is a broken one or a dented one. My surgeon and I know each other well, and he has sat with me for several hours, explaining in detail what will happen when I get my bilateral mastectomy. The mastectomy has been in the plan for some time — the plan that was written by my genes.

I’m not doing reconstruction. I’m not getting fake breasts. It’s not because I don’t want anything fake inside me. It’s because my surgeon sat and talked to me about it, telling me all of the details of reconstructive surgery so that I could consider it. It’s not just one surgery, actually, it is a minimum of two surgeries. One of which is ten hours. Women have to come back and have their breasts adjusted, fixed, cleared of infection. Women complain that their reconstructed breasts don’t feel like part of their bodies.

As a person who has had large tumor taken out of my leg, an exploded appendix, a tumor removed from my skull, nasal surgery, a hysterectomy and considers it a win when I less than ten polyps removed during yearly colonoscopies I cannot imagine why I would do this to myself.

And that leads me back to the mirror, where I stand and look at myself, imagining my life without breasts.

It seems ridiculous that after all of this, the loss of my breasts would be a hard thing to accept. But I can’t see it, feel it or understand it.

How will I hold my body?

The summer is beginning, and the sun has started to become regular, and I have committed to having a mastectomy in September. This is my last summer without breasts, the summer where I’ll try, at least, to understand why I don’t understand it.