My Life As A One-Breasted Woman

thoughts during Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Perhaps some of you may take offense that I am including some humor in my breast cancer journey. But it happened over two decades ago so I consider myself a successful survivor.

At the time I was living in Kingston, New York, in a house we had bought to be closer to my Mum and her husband as we all worked to keep Mum home through her diagnosis at the time of “possible Alzheimer’s.” My then-husband was a nurse in the City, so he came up on weekends. I was able to transfer my title-searching skills honed in Connecticut to the different system in New York, and most afternoons I was available to take Mum for a ride in the lovely countryside.

Obviously as a busy post-menopausal woman of the early 2000’s, I didn’t take much time for self-reflection. But when I noticed a spot of blood in my bra it got my attention. Mercifully, the rest of this story has been somewhat dimmed. But I remember very clearly my first encounter with the medical establishment in Kingston. An older gentleman doctor examined my breasts (the right one was the source of the eruption), and he said he would order the necessary X-rays. He then literally patted me on the head and said, '“Now, don’t you worry about a thing. Whatever the results, I’ll take care of you.” For anyone who knows me, that was absolutely the wrong thing to say. I immediately began plotting my escape. Sure enough the X-rays indicated a need for further inquiry, and I knew that I wanted to head straight to New York City’s famous Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC or Sloan as we called it) as soon as I could become a patient. In fact, it happened quite seamlessly as I recall and not particularly because my husband was a nurse at a different City hospital. Anyone may contact these marvelous teaching hospitals for care.

Fortunately we had some great daily help with Mum by that time, and as soon as I got the radiology results transferred to Sloan, we were off and running. I had a complete mastectomy of the right breast in the summer of 2003, with an additional operation about a month later because they felt the sentinel node biopsy done during the initial operation required the removal of additional lymph nodes. My surgeon being Dr. Kimberly Van Zee, a fellow female, gave me an extra lift. I was later followed by oncologist Dr. Andrew Seidman; and both of these marvelous doctors have continued great careers in their fields. I continued to be followed scrupulously for the next five years, with annual mammograms at Sloan, even after I moved back to Connecticut once caregiving of Mum and her husband was done. By the way, Sloan has a wonderful lingerie boutique, and my husband found out that as a survivor I am eligible for lovely new bras to contain my prosthesis much more regularly than I would normally buy new underwear.

I opted to not have reconstruction because as I said at the time, I had nursed my born-in-the-seventies daughter for two years, and she didn’t need my breasts for food any more. And finally, my favorite saying from this experience is that personally my sex drive seems to have increased with the removal of that breast—all the sensual sensations associated with it have migrated farther south!