Katie Brockie
Looking at myself in the mirror who is it,
Who is that lopsided stranger
Washing up and down the shore
Patricia Goedicke, from ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’
In 2023, I had a mastectomy. When I left the hospital, I was given a Dacron-stuffed soft fabric oval pad to use as a temporary prothesis for when I was able to wear bras again. It reminded me of the rolled-up pairs of socks that some girls used to stuff in their bras at high school – and of the other girls talking disparagingly about ‘falsies’. It was a few days until I was brave enough to look at myself in the mirror. When I did, it was an extraordinary feeling. A strip of surgical tape lay across the left side of my chest, which was now … empty. When I looked down, I could see my stomach sticking out. As many women also experience, it was hard enough to love my own body before I had surgery, but now I was wondering if I could love my asymmetrical body. Is it okay to love a scarred, one-breasted body, or should I book myself onto the waiting list for reconstructive surgery, ASAP?
When I need to process complicated and confusing thoughts and feelings, I read. In her 1980 book, The Cancer Journals, American poet Audre Lorde describes her tearful decision to not wear the temporary ‘falsie’ given to her at the hospital:
I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes. For not even the most skilful prosthesis in the world could undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself.
Claire Collison is a British writer and artist who decided not to have breast reconstruction surgery after having a mastectomy in 2014. She wrote and performed a monologue, Truth is Beauty, in which she talks about her decision while life modelling, bare-breasted.
Funny how the first thing I was asked to decide, on learning I had breast cancer, was whether I wanted breast reconstruction ‘sooner, or later?’: not if but when. Funny, not funny. So why was that? How come the most urgent concern presented to me was not about not dying but about how I would look not dead?
Like Lorde, Collison argues that we need to see and accept post-mastectomy bodies. As she says in an interview: ‘There is so little representation of difference in our society – and social media, with its proliferation of unfeasible and unachievable bodies, is only making matters worse’.
Since the late 1970s, many beautiful images of post-mastectomy nudes have been published. I find these women so brave. They make our asymmetry not so terrifying.
In the weeks following my surgery, the only people who saw my bare chest were nurses and doctors. Eventually I had a fitting for a more realistic prosthesis, paid for by the Ministry of Health, and I bared my chest to a stranger in a motel room. But meanwhile, I had grown quite fond of my Dacron-stuffed ‘falsie’. It did a fine job of fooling the world into thinking I have two breasts. Sometimes I forgot to wear it and had to resort to finding something (a pair of gloves, some wadded up tissues) to compensate. At home alone, though, I was gradually getting used to my new shape.
Months later I am, in a strange way, proud of my scar. Yet I don’t think I’ll ever have the courage to reveal it in public dressing rooms because I worry it might make other people feel uncomfortable. I wish I was brave enough to not care. At this stage, I don’t think I will have reconstruction surgery. I think I can come to terms with my new body, even grow to love it. Of course, Nature might have more nefarious plans in store for me, but I will deal with them if they arise. In the meantime, I am alive, I have people who love me, I have free top-notch 21st century healthcare, and I have plenty to read.
Katie Brockie is a (very) mature student. This piece is an extract from the response project that she wrote as part of her Humanities Programme internship with Corpus. In July 2024, Katie had her first post-surgery scan and, after an anxious wait, was relieved to learn it was all clear.
Works cited:
- Barratt, Matilda, #DrawnToLife Interview with Claire Collison. The Big Draw. 2019.
- Collison, Claire. Life Modelling Made Me Feel Complete. Breast Cancer Now. 2024.
- Goedicke, Patricia ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’. From Her Soul Beneath the Bone: Women’s Poetry on Breast Cancer. University of Illinois Press. 1988
- Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals (2nd ed.). Aunt Lute Books.1980.
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