Spent by Kerry Cohen

Author:Kerry Cohen [Cohen, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781580055130
Publisher: Seal Press

SHOPPING FOR BREASTS

Wendy Staley Colbert

What size are you thinking?” the plastic surgeon asked.

I sat shirtless in the oversize, faux leather examining chair as he eyed the twin slits remaining on my chest four weeks after the mastectomy. I slipped a C-cup silicone breast prosthesis out of one side of the bra I’d worn into the office. “I used to be an A-cup. Can you match this?” He palmed the three-dimensional, triangular blob and then pressed it against one of my incisions, using the tips of his fingers to hold it in place. “I don’t see why not. You’re tall—you can carry any volume you want. Let’s go with a 350 cc.”

As a cancer patient, I felt a little sheepish asking for bigger breasts. I worried I was selling out to our society’s beauty standard. But another part of me wanted the fun, sexiness, and visual appeal of a larger bustline.

The doctor wheeled backward on his stool, opened a drawer, and pulled out a crescent-shaped expander. I had liked him immediately. He seemed practical, matter-of-fact in the face of my cancer, the way I hoped in my best moments to be. He explained the surgery would involve placing two of these, filled with saline, in my chest to begin stretching the skin and muscle to shape mounds that would eventually house the implants.

After being diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer at age forty-three, I viewed my choice to have a mastectomy and then reconstruct my breasts as a privilege. My grandmother died of metastasized cancer in her forties. My mom had a lumpectomy and radiation following her diagnosis of cancer in her forties. I realized many women with more advanced breast cancer didn’t have a choice of treatment options. Still, I wondered about the function my new breasts would serve. I no longer needed them for any practical purpose, such as breastfeeding. I would no longer derive the same sexual satisfaction from them, since they would be numb and my nipples were gone. Would they be purely cosmetic, as the title on my doctor’s business card implied? If so, what was the right size for me?

A couple of weeks earlier, right after I’d had my post-mastectomy drainage tubes removed, I’d visited Mary Catherine’s, a boutique in Seattle that specialized in mastectomy wear, to try on prostheses and bras.

A woman in her fifties in polyester pants and pink lipstick and bright white bouffant hair that flipped up in a curl once it passed her shoulders asked if she could assist me. I wondered if she was a breast cancer survivor herself. She led me to one of the changing rooms. I winced when a twinge of pain spiked across my chest as she helped me slip my shirt and camisole off. She asked me what size I’d like to try on. “Let’s start with a C,” I said.

As I waited, I glanced in the mirror and saw the two strips of surgical tape that remained over the horizontal incisions on my chest, and the tan lines from my pre-surgery trip to Hawaii that started at my shoulders and led to nowhere.

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