Part of protecting your lymphatic system against lymphedema is to maintain well-moisturised skin. After enlivening mine I did the does my bum look big in this side to side, glancing in the bathroom mirror. I was 163 centimetres tall and weighed 52 kilograms, and my hair was short and thick-wavy like Mia Farrow’s in her Sinatra days. I might’ve been 35, but the image before me was of a tall 11-year-old boy. I was pre-adolescent again. Flat on the back and front. My shoulders were broad; when I was a girl, T-shirts used to hang down before breasts interrupted the curtain look and made a woman out of me. The renewed flat-chestedness was familiar. I’d lived through the emergence of womanly bits before. I was a changeling. Though this time my form would be female but my fertility would not.
When my plastic surgeon took my dressing off, I glimpsed my chest, but I wasn’t prepared for a full-frontal investigation. I remembered too well my mother’s left breastplate after her mastectomy: concave with an angry red-purple dash across it like the Joker’s smile. I didn’t want to see mine. On the other hand the pain was less than I imagined and I only required Panadol for a week to control the discomfort.
I had my breasts removed around the time of Mum’s birthday. It was a strange day. I sat up in my hospital bed knowing that what killed her was hopefully behind me. I’d written to the surgeon who’d performed her mastectomy, asking for the details of her treatment as he knew it. I received the answer on what would’ve been her 61st birthday. It told me of the decisions I knew about, like no to chemotherapy, no to radiation, yes … eventually, to mastectomy and close monitoring. The dates were the important part for me. Like some kind of medical bookkeeper I wanted to match up my recall of events with dates and my mother’s progression towards the grim reaper.
The terms and medical reality of breast cancer were part of my language now. But at 22, when I’d held my mother’s hand, reassuring her that the lumpectomy scar wasn’t that bad, I was sure her fate wasn’t my own. Wrong.
I found myself leaping back and forth between her experience and my own. For breakfast in hospital I’d ritually open the lid of my morning prunes and dump them in my rolled oats. Of course this meal assisted the ‘opening of my bowels’, something that became quite dire for Mum.
A thought shot over the bow of time to what I saw of her life during breast cancer. A ray of guilt zapped me when one day in the last fortnight of my mother’s life I walked into her hospital room and found her asleep with her meal untouched in front of her. No nurse had attempted to assist her to eat. Even in my mother’s awake, semi-conscious state, she couldn’t pick the spoon up and bring it to her mouth. I did this for her.
Tess (my aunt-in-kind) raised her camera to take a photograph in the last week when Mum would only take food if I fed it to her. I stopped her, knowing Mum wouldn’t have liked an eternal recording of the indignity of the situation.
I left hospital after four days. Two weeks after the procedure I saw my plastic surgeon. My chest area was hypersensitive; it was a strange, disembodied feeling. I explained the sensation to Dr Theile:
Imagine wearing a fat suit over your body after a severe car accident left you bruised and lacerated.
He was above me, staring down with clasped hands and a focussed but bemused expression. I was topless on his examination table. I lifted my head to peer at my chest. I was a flat plain. No breast mounds obscured my view of my stomach. I was more adolescent male than female with defined stomach muscles and broad shoulders, apart from the red, healing cuts. Like this, I could get away with wearing swimming trunks only on the beach. If I touched near the incision points my un-inflated saline implants crinkled like cellophane.
I continued my disembodied story to Dr Theile. An old friend comes to wish you luck and pats you on your fat suit – because you look funny – right over the area where your ribs connected with the steering wheel.
Dr Theile grimaced and swayed. The fluorescent light behind him made me squint.
You see him touch the fat suit, but can’t feel the contact. What you feel is the pressure of his finger directly over the wounded area. The disconnect between sensations is deeply disturbing.
Dr Theile then touched my chest and I almost jumped off the examination table.
I’ll start inflating you in one week, he said, snapping off his gloves.
Three weeks after my mastectomy I was back in the examination room, topless again. Dr Theile had a nurse who was also his secretary perform the saline injections into the tissue expander if he was busy. On my expander was a valve shaped like a pincushion, the size of a 50-cent piece. Inside it was a magnet. She put a divining gadget the size of a mobile phone over my breast mounds to align magnet to magnet. I saw worry in her widened eyes. I haven’t done this before, she said.
I became frightened and focussed on steadying my breathing. I knew that if she missed, a shooting pain would go up into my armpit. She found the magnets and inserted a needle through the skin and muscle into the valve. Clunk. She’d missed. Pain shot into my right armpit. She got it second go. Sixty millilitres would be injected into each expander every week until I was the desired size.
Medical anthropologist Professor Lenore Manderson has written about people’s experiences of their bodies after catastrophic change. I
