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by Ingrid Schorr After all the surgery, the six months of chemo, the six months of having my skin stretched over the implant, the year of depression, I finally feel like I've achieved something on my own. Last month I got a tattoo on my new breast, where my nipple used to be. If flesh has a memory, explain that to my right breast. My former right breast? The place where my right breast used to live, used to rise and fall when I stretched my arm above my head? Or is it still my right breast, this new immobile shape, nippleless like a Cezanne nude, rounded like a Cezanne pear? The breast mound, so called by the surgeon who sewed it in place. The implant, so called by me when it hurts and stretches the muscle that covers it. Is it even a breast?Losing a breast is difficult enough. Choosing among the options available for reconfiguring your shape is another dilemma altogether. You can leave it alone and wear a falsie (or not wear a falsie). You can have a saline-filled implant, like I did. Or you can have the newer, more complicated surgery in which fat from your butt or stomach is shoved up into your chest area. My plastic surgeon could have built me a fake nipple from a skin graft and a tattooed areola. I didn't want that at all. I had just lost a part of my body that I was quite fond of and I didn't want to replace it with a fake Barbie nipple. Breasts are defined by enclosure, by styling and silhouette, presentation and perception. Society approves when they spill over our clothing, but the nipple says STOP, turning bosom into breast, enticement into nursing device, cleavage into something naughtier. My breast-place, clothed, looks acceptable, but bare, it lacks focus because it lacks nipple. I'm not sure it's even flesh.I liked the idea of my own original tattoo, though. But what kind of tattoo? I didn't want anything archetypally sexual or feminine. (My friend Katie suggested the phrase "Shit Happens.") I didn't even want to think about it too hard. After all, I'd pondered my way through my cancer treatment. This was my chance to be impulsive. As I told the tattoo guy (at Erno Tattoo in San Francisco), it was as if I had bought a tract house and I wasn't completely happy with it. I wanted to redecorate. The tattoo guy nodded and went back to preparing the transfer for the design I had picked, a jagged black and white spiral the size of a quarter. He drew the black privacy curtain, separating us from the people in the waiting area. Two and a half years ago, my plastic surgeon had drawn the white privacy curtain in the pre-op waiting area and used a thick marker to draw on my breast where she would cut later, while I slept. I pulled my shirt over my head, unhooked my bra, and draped them both over a chair. The tattoo guy and I stood in front of a mirror. In the noonday sun, my chest looked sad and scrawny; naked, not nude. (My scar is almost invisible, but the nakedness of a nippleless breast is too sad to describe.) My tattoo guy had me stand so he could transfer the inked tattoo design, just as my plastic surgeon had me stand while she marked the cuts, so she could keep them in line with gravity's pull. He was very sweet, adjusting the transfer twice so that it was in line with the nipple on my other breast. He was the first non-medical man to see me topless since the surgery. I lay down on a padded bench and he got to work. The heat of the lamp felt good, and so did the vibration of the tattoo gun and the pressure of his hand. But I couldn't feel the needle piercing my skin. If flesh has a memory, my right breast has amnesia. Its memory of touch, of dry cotton shirts, of sucking nylon bathing suits, of brushing lips, has been shut down. That flesh has no more nerve endings. Its last touch was by a steel scalpel, like a hot knife through butter, floss through cheesecake. But you can still touch it. If you didn't know, you might even grab it, give it a rude paw — and I wouldn't feel your hand, only the unfamiliar liquid jiggle of the saline-filled pouch."I can't feel the needle at all," I told him. I was talking a lot, nervous about showing my breast, about telling a stranger I had had cancer. "The surgery took care of the nerve endings." He didn't say anything. He probably can't wait to get rid of me, I thought. Then, without looking up, he said, "I was in the hospital for six months in Czechoslovakia." What? I thought he was talking about being in the army. "I had testicular cancer. I lost my right nut. I can't feel anything there either." It turned out we had gone through treatment at the same time. We traded a few chemo stories, of weird smell hallucinations and metal mouth, marathon craps and crushing fatigue. But mostly we talked about Boston, where I live, and about tattoos (he had just gotten a glow-in-the-dark one). It wasn't a time to dwell on cancer or how it seemed like everyone had it. The warmth of the light, the buzz of the tattoo gun, and the firm pressure of his hand continued to calm me. When he was done I paid him fifty bucks, and we wished each other well. I like my tattoo. With surgical reconstruction, you get a plastic surgeon's idea of what you should look like. But now my new breast is as much my creation as the plastic surgeon's. I have a swirly spiral where my nipple used to be. I don't feel asymmetrical anymore. I'm redecorating. I'm a work in progress. Do you have a survival story to tell? Did you lose a breast? Did you redecorate, too? If not, what helped you to go on with your life? Join in the conversation, in the Women's Zone Conference. Ingrid Schorr lives in Boston, where she is an editor at a publishing company and is completing a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. |
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