I saw pictures of women’s breasts then too. I also stood in front of Dr Theile with my jeans undone and my top off so he could examine my caesar scar and stomach. After declaring, You don’t have enough fat for a TRAM flap procedure, he got up and stood behind me, regarding my breasts in the mirror: Arms up. Okay. Arms down.
As I watched Dr Theile examine me I floated a little away from the situation. Here I was with two sets of male eyes staring intensely at my breasts. I wasn’t sandwiched between two lusty but gentle Spanish beauties in some mega fantasy, but in a glowing white medical suite with a surgeon and my partner. It was as unsexy an experience as you could imagine.
Your breasts are small, he said.
And neat, thank you very much, I thought.
They haven’t dropped, and they’re firm. A good option would be silicone implants.
Err, thanks, I’ll be on my way then.
You could go bigger if you wanted, he added.
They shrank a bit after Celso, I said.
Just that some women choose to change their shape if they’re going with the silicone implant option.
I don’t want Dolly Parton boobs, but I might go slightly larger – to fill out my bra more.
He smiled.
I shrugged. And that was that: new breasts were on the menu.
If I were a chimp I wouldn’t have breasts unless I was lactating. We’re the only mammals to grow breasts from puberty. I learnt from Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History that the father of modern taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, named us mammals due to the female species having mammary glands. As Florence Williams wrote, Breasts are us.
I was still a relatively young woman, though the old automatic questions of How do I look? Am I attractive? were fading from importance in light of my diagnosis. Women can feel defined by how they present to men; in turn, how they present to themselves is defined by a man or by male desire. I hoped to rid myself of that concern. If there was one internal assessor I didn’t need, it was the ugly stick barometer.
Three weeks after I finished chemotherapy I walked back through the sliding doors of the day oncology unit. It can feel like a most useless place. The Waiting Place, as Dr Seuss said. There were four sections for different kinds of waiting – for different doctors and different types of treatment. I sat in the section for people waiting for their bloods to be taken, oncologist appointments and then chemotherapy sessions. We were a craggy, raddled bunch of women and men. I was the youngest. Again.
I handed a bag full of beautiful woollen balls to the ever-kind nurse at reception for volunteers to knit beanies, telling her, Here’s a bag donated care of my mother. This reception nurse would die three years later from heart complications brought on by her diabetes. I’d grabbed the wool from a box labelled Mum’s Stuff that morning. I’d been sorting and clearing. The boxes also held slides in pale cardboard cartons, each the size of an elegant cigarette packet from the 60s.
First year Humanities, Teaching: shape, function, feeling/form was written on one carton – from one of my mother’s first lecturing positions. She’d taken photo montages of Liverpool (the port the Titanic set sail from) and a Free School (one of the radical movements in the 70s towards democratic education, where schools were run as a collective without a headmaster dictating terms). The montage was part of what I imagined as a course on Marxism and the class struggle: kids rough-housing, industrial buildings, slum-like working conditions, nice parks, municipal libraries, uniform backyards with clotheslines, perfect squares for growing your own vegetables behind ugly red brick terraces. Mum had educated herself out of her working-class upbringing. She’d escaped.
A plummy English voice always made her wince. It was more than just prejudice against the upper classes: it was political. As if she felt the hand of the British class system and her fate as an adopted Londoner like a hand on her head holding her down, squashing her ambition.
Among the academic slides there was a shot taken by my mother’s adopted father, with whom she’d had an affinity. She was glum-faced, sitting in a striped deck chair, leaning away from her adoptive mother. Mum’s black hair hid most of her beautiful face – she was all red lips, long legs and hidden eyes. Her family of three were on their only holiday in Italy together. Mum was 14 and would meet a boy who would write letters to her for a year.
I flicked through every one of the 200 slides for a glimpse of my mother’s face, holding the miniature memory up to the light. I couldn’t throw away any picture of her. I had to keep any memory, even if not my own.
In the waiting room, magazines dating from 2005 to near recent lay in wonky piles on coffee tables. There was always a disparity in the quality of reading materials at private and public hospitals. The TV was pumping out inane crud to a few watchers with dull eyes and their minds willingly turned off. I wanted the brighter places promised by Dr Seuss in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Where were the Boom Bands playing?
The powerful cancer-busting drugs bubbled and boiled a few metres from us. The chemist, who was shaped like a matryoshka doll, spoke to patients through her protective glass window. How can I help you, darling? She was efficient, with high energy.
I arrived that Friday at 8.15 a.m. and at 11 a.m. I saw my oncologist for a review. My portacath was accessed, bloods taken, urine sample provided and weight recorded. My temperature and pulse were taken (fine), and details of the most recent side effects duly noted (not great) by a
