Just as my forced menopause springboarded me into considering older women in society and how they felt about socially desired bodies, breast removal realigned my view of my own femininity. As a changeling going through a kind of puberty again, I was aware that part of the social construction of femininity is around women’s breasts: having them, showing them, milking them. Yet I now chose exactly what size and shape of breast I had and showed to society. They didn’t require a bra and would appear perfect in clothes until I died and they were cremated alongside the flesh I was born with. (It’s not necessarily a one-off operation. Silicone implants do need checking to see if replacement is required from rupture, capsular contracture or scar tissue. Every ten years I’ll return to my plastic surgeon to have them checked.) When I caught a man’s lingering look, I smiled to myself with the thought, I’m fooling you, aren’t I?
The ever-present scarring across my chest stood for the disease and the surgery. Manderson researched many women’s responses to their post-surgical bodies. In her findings the scar also represented the breast, femininity and sexuality. My scars didn’t bother me, psychically, like they did my mother. She once asked, Don’t you mind me like this? Referring to her bald head from chemotherapy and her one-breasted chest.
Mum, I couldn’t care less what your appearance is. You’re beautiful and I love you. Your lack of hair and one breast mean absolutely nothing to me, I replied.
And it appeared that, for B, the same was true. At night, with our son asleep, he turned to me – with my bald head, half breasts and emaciated body.
Cancer etiquette: does cancer change you?
But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
It was 5.40 a.m. the day after my 36th birthday, and I was on my way to Mater Private. Floor lights were on in the office buildings. There was little activity in the street. Dawn was an hour away. It could have been any time of night.
We make so many laws we become lawless, said the tattooed, middle-aged taxi driver. A man the other day got unintentional death for killing a man at a taxi rank. He thought a guy pushed in so he king-hit him. At first it was murder, then manslaughter, then unintentional death and now off on a good behaviour bond. A man can divorce a woman over the internet and she’s left without a leg to stand on … Sometimes I want to divorce the world, he concluded.
Okay, thanks, I said and shut the taxi door.
In front of me were the sliding doors to the entrance. The day had come. My new breasts lay somewhere within this building.
When I was suited up in the familiar truckers’ undies, stockings, back-to-front dress and flannel dressing gown I sat down in the plush area for patients awaiting procedures. The noise of the TV intruded into the silence: there was news of a nurse whose throat was cut by a former patient. I jerked as if slapped. I tried to calm myself down by focussing on the exhalation through my nose. I took two Phenergan to relax me, which I now knew assisted the post-anaesthesia nausea. By the time I was on the trolley ready to go in I was tranquillised cool.
What are you having done? the anaesthetic technician asked. Everyone, from admitting nurses to surgeons, had to check I knew what was about to happen.
Changing my saline inserts for silicone ones – new boobs today. I smiled up at him with a goofy I’ve taken drugs expression. My breast expanders acted like a water-bed and the pitter-pat rhythm of my heart sent waves through the saline solution. I watched my heart beating its watery song for a second.
The technician had the well-rounded vowels of a good education, and a light touch. He joked and was sensitive to my situation; I was a woman about to have breast surgery for the third time. Once I was under the bright alien lights of the operating theatre he busied himself attaching my scuds (leg pumps), arranging me and teaching a trainee technician.
The trainee put sticky monitors on my back and went to put a blood pressure cuff on my right arm – the arm that had had nine lymph nodes removed from its armpit. After a sentinel node biopsy the arm cannot be used to take blood pressure, as a precaution against lymphedema.
Not there, on the calf, said my anaesthetist. He was slapping a vein on the back of my left hand to get an access point. It hurt.
The trainee didn’t understand him properly.
Her calf! Do you know what a calf is?
The main technician jumped in and showed his underling the ropes. I saw the shame and suppressed annoyance in the trainee’s eyes. The man appeared of Sri Lankan or Indian origin. I felt for him. He had a lovely, humane smile.
I found out after this operation that once you’re under a general they often put tape over your eyes. I roused from the general with purple shading under both of mine from an allergic reaction to the tape. The head nurse told me that they tape eyelids if they are flickering or remain open(ish).
I summoned the image of standing next to a person you were about to operate on. I would find the flickering-eye thing distracting too. After they’ve taped your eyelids shut, they intubate you – insert a tube into your throat to take over your breathing. The thought always made me breathe in deeply like my throat was constricting.
The comfort
