The following is an essay I wrote years ago as I approached the beginning of a two year stretch of surgeries and recoveries. I’m so grateful for that season and the change in perspective it gave me.
I will be a bionic woman of sorts by year’s end. Though I won’t be able to run faster than a speeding car or karate chop a brick wall in half, I will have cleavage to show off when appropriate, and something to fill in the loose top half of most of my shirts. I’ll buy bras that actually have a cup size and my tummy won’t announce itself over the tops of my pants. I’ll be thin, finally. I will look pretty, more feminine, maybe even younger. And I could care less.
After a childhood of feeling fat, big and oafish, shortly after I married, I became ambivalent to my imperfections. I quit feeling so self-conscious about my cottage cheese thighs, my mushy tummy, my fat arms and my mosquito bite sized chest. It was liberating to release myself from that burden of shame. I no longer stared at myself, frowning back from the mirror, but instead wore things I liked, dressing in ways that made me smile, all along unaware that I was uglying myself up. Seeing a picture of myself on a vacation with my husband- the two of us a pair among five couples we sat with at dinner aboard a cruise- and I realized that though I wasn’t the least attractive woman in the group, the way I had dressed myself, styled my hair, the glasses I wore, all effectively masked the little bit of beauty I did possess. Thus began the process of de-uglying myself, getting back to the good. And here I am now, just recently starting to feel happy about how I look, almost smiling when I catch myself in the mirror just out of the shower or in the midst of changing clothes. It took me a while to get this comfortable in my own skin.
For having had three babies (and the last behemoth weighing almost 11 pounds at birth) I like how I look; I don’t mind my mommy pooch.
My breasts are deflated water balloons, the little ones, and they’re ugly. They fed my younger three for a year each however, and for their service, for the role they played in helping me bond with them, I am grateful. I have a strong, relatively young, healthy body and I relish in its capabilities: I can walk/run a 5K without preparation, I can chase after three active kids all day long, I can swim, bike and hike with abandon. Despite this “coming home” of sorts that I’ve had with my image, I will be getting a tummy tuck and a new and improved set of “girls”. I’m doing this not because I’m tired of being a carpenter’s dream, not because I am weary of forever tucking in and camouflaging my muffin top, but because I love my family.
Early in 2007, I found out I have a genetic mutation that puts me at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer. My genetic counselor told me to have all the kids I wanted as soon as possible so that should I choose to have any prophylactic surgeries, I would be able to do so. With known fertility issues, we weren’t the kind of people who could wiggle our noses and get pregnant; we had been trying for baby number two for months. Consequently, I was more than a little shocked to see the plus sign on the pregnancy test just two days after that call with my genetic counselor. Once baby girl was born, she nursed for a year, was weaned on a Thursday and the following Monday I found out I was pregnant again. (So much for a fertility issue!) The youngest is 14 months old now; my role as milk mama and baby-incubator has ended. Our family is complete.
My Dad’s sister had breast cancer in her forties and when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in her fifties, her oncologists suggested she have some genetic testing done as those cancers are genetically linked. As it turned out, Aunt Cathey was BRCA 2+, along with all but one of the women in our family who have been tested. I saw her periodically in her final weeks. I watched the cancer steal the life from her eyes, quiet her laugh and wear her out. She was 55 when she died. When my younger daughter was born three months later, we changed the middle name we had chosen, Hope, to a shortened version of my aunt’s name, Cate.
As a BRCA2 carrier, I have an 84% chance of getting breast cancer in my small saggy boobs- not a guarantee I’ll be ill but if those were lottery odds, everyone would be buying a ticket.
Because I have this genetic mutation but do not as of yet have cancer, I am considered a previvor. That puts me in a class with other “not yet there” people- starving artists, aspiring musicians, freshmen in college. Unlike them however, I am in no hurry to “get there” and am in fact quite content to remain a previvor indefinitely, rolling around in that lucky 16%. As it turns out there are a whole lot of people in no hurry to become survivors. Sue Friedman is one of them and she coined the term “previvor.” She’s another BRCA+ carrier who started a website and support system when she realized there wasn’t one for previvors- www.facingourrisk.org. There are few places I know that are filled with as many inspiring, strong, fearless people as the ones I have met on her website.
When they first heard of my choice to have this drastic surgery, some of my family, most of my friends, looked at me like I was mentally unhinged. If I’m so at home in my own skin, how could I choose to have this surgery, incubate in the hospital for a week after, come home with enough tubes running out of my body to have my own science lab, wait weeks for the hip-to-hip incision to heal before I can lift my youngest for a snuggle? How could I view something as invasive and altering as a mastectomy as a preventive surgery, a choice, something I’d want to do?
I hear our oldest son sounding out words as he’s learning to read, watch him ride his bike without training wheels with a smile so big it could crack his face. I marvel at our daughter’s ability to animate the simplest things from the straps on her booster seat at the kitchen table, to the orange sections she’s eating from the plate in front of her. I watch our youngest as he stands on his own, struggling in a Frankenstein-ish way to take his first steps. I laugh while all three kids wrestle with Daddy on the playroom floor and I CANNOT IMAGINE not being here to see these things.
How could they go to school, be a Scout, learn to drive, graduate from high school, go to college, start a career, without me?
I can’t be sick and I can’t die; these precious children need me. I have too much work to do to be ill or be gone. And suddenly a mastectomy is a small thing, a way to help improve my, as of now, seriously crummy odds.
My surgery date is looming and I am preparing logistically for the trauma: who will watch the kids, who will handle the preschool shuffle, who will clean the toilets and wash the socks. It is manageable in this way. I cannot prepare myself emotionally for the new me that will emerge after this surgery, after the drains are removed and the scars are healed. I imagine it will take me a while to like her, to feel good about the new girls sitting on my chest, ones that are normal-shaped and not likely to kill me. Hopefully I will come home to this new me sooner than I did the old me, the consolation prizes of this genetic mutation hiding in a smaller belly and bigger boobs. Only time will tell.
I am so grateful for my aunt, for the courage she had during and despite her illness, for the thoughtfulness she had for the rest of us when she was tested, for her perseverance in sharing that information with us. I’m sure she never thought she’d succumb to cancer at 55, that the daughter of her niece would be named after her, that a picture of her would be on my fridge, reminding me daily that her death saved my life. It is because of her that I am here, that my chances of being here a good while yet are greatly increased. And so, on October 13, I will have a prophylactic double mastectomy with reconstruction using the fat reserves in my tummy. I never saw myself altering my physical appearance, becoming a bionic woman, with plastic surgery, but now I can’t imagine not doing it. It just might save my life.