Reconstruction

Deconstructing My Breast Reconstruction
by Michele Forsten

I was what they called "a late bloomer," so when women were burning their bras in the sixties, I was buying padded ones to stop being called flatchested by the girls in my class. At 16, I was taller and skinnier than any of them, had unruly curly hair while other white girls wore theirs long and straight, and I wasn’t interested in boys. I didn’t need one more thing (no tits) to set me apart.

My mother, who filled a 36B cup, assured me that she didn’t "develop" until after she gave birth to me and my sister. She even showed me the "falsies" she used to wear. I ended up not having children, but found when I gained a few pounds around the time I turned 40 I began sporting a modest cleavage that was perfect for my small frame. I also liked the sensation of my breasts jiggling when I walked.

What I didn’t like about my breasts was that they produced tumors faster than they could be biopsied. All had been benign until February 2002, when at age 47 I was diagnosed with cancer in my right breast . Doctors recommended a skin-sparing double mastectomy, and there was no question in my mind that I would have immediate reconstruction. The memory of my mother’s chest after her mastectomy in 1972 was a big reason. Where the fullness and smoothness of her breast once was, there was flatness, broken by a thick angry scar that ran down her chest. The cancer metastasized, and four years later, she was dead.

When the poet/activist Audre Lorde was diagnosed in 1978 with cancer in her right breast, she had a single mastectomy and opted not to wear a prosthesis. In her classic Cancer Journals, she drew a connection between her fight to live and the Amazon warriors of Dahomey, who supposedly had their right breasts cut off to be more effective archers.

Picking up where Lorde left off, activists like poet Marilyn Hacker use their mastectomies to give visibility and a human face to breast cancer. Hacker even had her lover write the words Act Up above her mastectomy scar and Fight Back below it before posing for a photo that appeared in the 1996 "Lesbians Kissing" wall calendar and in a lesbian magazine.

I wanted my breast cancer experience to be as different from my mother’s as possible (and hopefully, the outcome would be different, too). Since the idea of implants was unappealing to me, I was happy to learn that the reconstruction could be done using tissue from my abdomen. "You’ll get a tummy tuck in the bargain," the plastic surgeon assured me. Cancer-free breasts? A flatter stomach? This option sounded pretty good to me.

In the weeks before the mastectomies and the reconstruction, I dealt with the anxiety in the way I do – through humor. The idea of part of my belly becoming my breasts naturally lent itself to puns. Some of the better ones my friend Stan and I came up with went like this:

When I laugh very hard, should I call it a bosom laugh?
If I lose money in the stock market, will I go tit up?
When I feel passionate about something, should I say I have a fire in my breasts?
Will you now be my abdominal buddy?

Little did I know how painful and debilitating the surgery would be. Fast forward to a year and a half later. The new breasts turned out quite smaller and have a less pleasing shape than the ones they replaced; it took cancer for me to discover what a size queen I really was. The biggest loss, however, is that my manufactured breasts don’t harden when I’m cold or have an orgasm—a constant reminder that they are just for show.

But I do take comfort in knowing that these breasts, however fake, sit on my chest and I know that I need that reassurance. So, I’m not like an Amazon warrior of Dahomey and I’m not going to bare my chest in public, though I respect those women who choose not to have reconstruction. I’m keeping my clothes on and co-chairing the New York City Lesbian Cancer Support Consortium, a collaborative effort by community-based organizations, healthcare agencies and individuals to establish and maintain an ongoing program of support for lbt women with cancer and those who love them. In my own way and on my own terms, I am a fighter, too.

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Michele Forsten is a writer living in New York City.