“Starting after the mastectomy, you will be numb across your chest, from your collarbone to the top of your rib cage. Unfortunately, this numbness usually doesn’t go away. You may get some feeling back over time, but it will never be the same as before surgery.”1
While it took me months to come to the decision to go flat after my mastectomy, I was clear from the moment I started thinking about this surgery that the real loss was always going to be the loss of sensation, not the boobs themselves. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had breasts to write home about; I’ve never enjoyed a proper cleavage moment. I’ve been rocking “barely-Bs” (that were really solid As) since I was a teenager. Sure, there were some early years of resentment about this underdeveloped feature of my body and there have been plenty of dresses I couldn’t choose because I couldn’t fill them, but more or less I made my peace with this long ago and have enjoyed the fact that, more or less, I can do my life bra-less. Going flat now is not going to be a dramatic shift in my silhouette which is why I can imagine myself without them. But the loss of sensation that accompanies the loss of my breasts is going to alter my sex life, and I’m BUMMED about that detail.
The thing is (and to get there we’re about to take a loooooong detour) the satisfaction my husband and I have found together in bed was hard won and we are of two minds about the wrench this surgery throws into our sex life:
This sucks.
This is an opportunity.
In order to understand #1 and to believe #2 you have to know the following:
John and I met through a Christian ministry in our freshman years on our college campus. It was a conservative religious organization that presented us a simple story that utterly wrecked me for years. The story was this: You’re innately sinful and the only way to avoid eternal damnation is to believe that Jesus’ death saved you from hell. The problem with this story (for the particular person that I am) is that underlining my innate sinfulness for four years left me largely incapable of trusting myself. The problem with having belief be the key to the lock hell had on me was that I didn’t know how to measure it. I could never be sure I believed enough or accurately what I was being told about the necessity and efficaciousness of Jesus’ death. While I could master the outer trappings of a good Christian life, I harbored secret doubts and normal college questions about my then-expanding worldview. Thus I constantly worried that my buzzing head was going to get me in trouble with the Lord.
I spent those years fretting about belief despite the weekly Bible studies and worship services and the accountability partners and the one-on-one mentoring I received from the leadership and the inordinate amount of “quiet time” I engaged in and the books on Christian living I devoured and the absolutely tortured prayers I scribbled in notebooks in which I begged God to perform what can only be described as a lobotomy on me that I might be replaced with someone less full to the brim with questions, someone who BELIEVED.
And that’s just what was going on with me!
What was going on with John and me together was that we were falling in love inside of and in spite of this community which was shaping us. The one lesson we were never confused about was what our Christian faith should mean for our sex lives: it meant we shouldn’t and so we didn’t. People who had sex were prayer requests. I chose outfits that wouldn’t make my brother in Christ stumble and the boys met to discuss the evils of pornography. We “saved ourselves” for marriage, which in reality meant we spent our dating years steeped in shame and guilt when it came to our bodies and confused at all times about whether or not how we related to each other physically counted as the kind of sex that would be alarming to Jesus and then —this is where I begin to loop back to my breasts— we spent the first years of our marriage realizing we were a mess when it came to sex and then more years trying to unravel those knots together.
Those are the years I begrudge, those tortured years when our married sex too often ended in bitter silence or tears because it turns out you cannot put a ring on it and automatically undo years of teachings that sexual bodies are suspect. It turns out you will carry shame and guilt into the bed that you waited until your wedding day to crawl into. We fought poorly about why we were flailing for a long time, and then we unlearned a lot things about faith and ultimately decided that maybe the Creator of the Universe wasn’t interested in our bedroom, Eventually, thankfully, we discovered all the freedom and fun we should have known all along. Eventually we stopped waiting for God’s wagging finger to show up and my body didn’t recoil in learned fear from my very best friend. In fact, it moved toward him.
Since then we have had some really good years in bed and we’re loathe to see that change. We worked really hard to get here, to be this loose and fun together. Also! This coming decade —our 40s —were going to be our golden years when we would be young enough to be capable and mature enough to be interesting. Boo on the loss of boob sensation!2 Boooooo(b)!
But this gets me to #2.
What hindsight, a Master of Divinity degree, the patience and care of several church communities, and therapy have shown me about my college years was that I was presented an overly simple story about a wildly complicated matter and I wasn’t made to feel that questioning the story was safe. The unlearning necessary for me to live fully was the embracing of my creativity and curiosity. I had to learn to try new things. John’s story is different in many key ways, but given that we became adults together, it’s also broadly the same. Our shared joy has become exploration and finding that we can figure things out together. It’s meant moving across the world, shifting careers, raising chickens, and discovering all the ways to enjoy sex.
All that confidence and anticipation that we were rolling into our 40s with is not lost time or effort. It was preparation. BRCA is one helluva detour, but we didn’t land in the mountains of NC in muck boots without some unplanned changes in our lives. This mastectomy is the most recent opportunity to try again together and I trust our marriage to adjust.
There was a time when I worried I’d never shake the parts of me that grew brittle with fear while I was in college. I worried that I’d always hear a God-shaped voice in my head that met my stunning life with the bummer of a warning to BE CAREFUL!
But I did it! I have figured out how to be wiggly with courage. A few months ago that looked like answering my breast surgeon’s intake form about religion with “it’s complicated.”3 Today that looks like writing about my private parts on the internet, professing that it sucks to be afraid of the Devil and it sucks to lose your boobs.
The sermon-y piece I am compelled to include is this: What should you believe? Hell if I know! But Jesus did seem to teach about being careful, just not in the way I thought in college. Be careful as in be full of care rather than apathy, self-indulgence, self importance or status protection. Be full of care for people and creatures, for soil and water and air. Be full of care that the freedom you experience is not at the expense of others but, in fact, invites others in, that it might expand by miraculous magnitudes to cover us all in something we lamely call God’s love.
These breasts, these boobs, jugs, puppies: they’re coming off and so is the risk they pose to me. I’ve lived what it means to shrug off fear before and it is glorious, dear reader.
Time to do it again.
Lame. Also citation: Susan G. Komen site: Breast Reconstruction After a Mastectomy
Full disclosure: Reconstructed boobs never felt like they were going to be a good substitute in bed. While I could have pursued nerve treatments that might have restored some feeling in my new boobs, no one could tell me it’d be the same and I was warned it might not be much at all. In my head this meant that I would have breasts that everyone could see and that John could feel, but I wouldn’t feel them, not like I do now. I tried to game this one out in my head, tried to imagine this being fun for me somehow, and I couldn’t get there. I crassly described it to a friend as having permanent strap-ons attached to my chest: fun for my partner; floppy and inconvenient for me.
Truly, I did not think anyone would actually look at that question. My surgeon did and he laughed out loud and said “I love it!” and I decided I liked him.
L, really well done.
All of this is complicated.
And yet you churn it into an Ann Patchett essay.
No, actually a Lauren Graeber essay🌱✍🏻🙌🏼