It’s been two long years since I saw you. Since that time, I
never gave thought to your fate. Where are you breasts? Do you lie sectioned
and frozen in a laboratory freezer somewhere? Were you sliced and diced for
medical students to look at you under a powerful microscope? Were you stained
and smeared on a slide? Were you shaved into microscopically thin pieces and
dipped into solutions only to be resting in Petri dishes on a cold hard counter?
Were you examined and studied, talked about behind my back? Where are you
breasts? Or, after being used and abused were you casually discarded in a red
Biohazard container? Did you rot among other tissue samples in a landfill far
away? I can’t help but wonder what happened to you. I didn’t even get to tell
you goodbye. If I’d thought about it, I could have made a plaster cast to
memorialize you or I could have taken beautiful photographs of you.
I didn’t think one day I’d miss you but today, when I woke
up, you were the first thing on my mind. My hand traveled across my chest to
touch you and you were gone. That’s when I remembered. Could you have been
saved? Did I speak too hastily when asked my preference by the surgeon? Should
I have taken another route? Should I have opted for a lumpectomy and chemo
instead of mastectomy and radiation? But if I had, would we still be here today
but in a much more painful and prolonged way? Would we have started out small,
a tiny incision and chemicals that poisoned you only to eventually have you
lopped off anyway? Should I have endured countless mammograms and months of testing
in an effort to keep your mutilated form? Or did I do the right thing in taking
the second choice presented, to completely remove you, to discard you and
pretend you never existed? Should I have let the surgeon cut you out and leave
empty folds of skin to hold tissue expanders and later silicone replacements?
Should I have allowed the fat deposits on my stomach or back to be carved into
makeshift breasts to give me an illusion of normalcy? Could I have dealt with
reconstructed breasts, mounds of flesh sewn into place devoid of nipples and
feeling? Or was I right to just agree to completely remove you?
Where have you gone breasts? Do you lie in a pile joined by
others just like you, some of them larger and some vastly smaller, all shapes
and colors? Do you wonder why you were tortured? Why abandoned and forgotten
after all your years of service? I watched you grow from tiny breast buds at
puberty into full, voluptuous friends that fed my children and satisfied my
husband and now you’re gone, missing in action, decimated, mutilated, and all
but forgotten, but I can’t forget you. I still remember you. You were important
to me. Where are you breasts?
In your place lie two imposters, silicone forms devoid of
nerve endings, blood flow, or feeling. They have no semblance to you. They are
smooth gel filled pinkish blobs with tiny raised nipple-like impressions. They
are much heavier than you. They require washing and drying but only after removal
from a mastectomy bra which holds them securely against my chest. When I walk,
they don’t gently bounce up and down as you once did. They are firm and
stationary. Some days I choose not to wear them. I leave them lying in their
storage containers. I don’t want to look at them and be reminded they’ve taken
your place…poor substitutes for what God gave me. Am I bitter? To a degree, yes.
Do I feel betrayed? Yes! I wish I’d known exactly what the future held so I
could have made a more informed decision about surgery and treatment, but
doctors don’t give you all the details. They don’t talk about the emotional trauma
that comes with breast cancer. They don’t talk about those difficult days when
your breasts are gone and it feels like the world has stopped spinning and you’re
left standing alone stripped naked and bare. They don’t talk about the
devastation, loss of femininity, and lifelong changes that will occur. They
keep it hush hush, a secret hidden in the dark. But we find out. And some of us
do quite well with the change. Some of us make do and move on. Others struggle.
Some days are good and some days are bad. But all of us wonder, where are you
breasts and why did you have to go? Why? Why? Why….
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