I’m back to my childhood “surfboard” status.
Looking at my bruised, flat chest for the first time in the clinic mirror, my mind searches for a visual comparison. It no longer recognizes the body it’s attached to. I admire the tech and skill involved in the surgery, and I know I’ll get used to the altered body that I have the privilege of scuttling around in a while longer. But mirror, mirror, what am I looking at? Bleached McDonald’s McRib meat? The old man at the end of Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” video? Bruised beige Gumby after being run over by a Tonka dump truck? Sounds like a dark Toy Story.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, I was presented with the option to go flat or reconstruct with my own tissue. I had already decided. I wanted total breast deletion. I’ve thought of them as time bombs ever since I connected with my biological father when I was 32, and learned that he had male breast cancer and that his sister passed away from breast cancer at 27. Two of his uncles had male breast cancer as well. I made peace with the idea of a mastectomy at that moment.
My father told me he’d been worrying about me because of the rampant cancer diagnoses in his family and because my closed adoption had cut me off from developments in my biological family’s medical history. As soon as I told my doctor, she sent me for a mammogram and genetic testing. Both my dad and I tested negative for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations and all other known genetic markers for breast cancer. The geneticist said there might be an as-yet-unidentified marker responsible for the cancer in my family. But since I tested negative, a preventive mastectomy was viewed as overkill by surgeons at the time. Whoopsie.
When they started finding suspicious cysts in my breasts in 2023, I emotionally detached from them. I mentally cropped them out of my reflection. There were odd flashes of pain and sore lymph nodes that made me feel like they were expiring. Over the next year, I had three biopsies for cysts in my left side-boob. I asked for a surgical biopsy to get them out, but my surgeon said we should “wait and see.” I was given the all-clear at my 2025 mammogram, but a persistent armpit pain compelled me to ask for an ultrasound in March 2026 at age 47. In April, when my phone started ringing with news of a sneaky mammogram-dodging Stage 1 cancer, my breasts were already dead to me. No thoughts of resurrection. The surgeon who wanted to “wait and see” ended up performing the mastectomy.
I didn’t want any additional procedures, and wanted as little tissue left as possible so recurrence would be easier to detect. Every trip back to the hospital for expanders, implants, or complications could be a potential exposure to infection. For me, the point was to treat a deadly illness. I put it in writing to my surgeons, “I want total demolition of potential cancer sites.”
From a body image standpoint, I just don’t need people-pleasing shirt shapes for myself or anyone. I’ve never fed any children, so there’s no emotional attachment there. I know medical changes to the body can be a source of distress for people with intimate partners, but only medical providers see my body. I’m a modest lone wolf these days, so I don’t worry about anyone’s sensory experience of my torso. The way some of my exes made such a big deal out of cup size, I wonder if I would have ever attracted male attention with a smaller set. I want a chest with anti-allure now. I plan on dressing like Darkwing Duck, but with pants.
I consented to an Aesthetic Flat Closure performed by a plastic surgeon, not understanding why “aesthetic” was medically necessary for cancer removal. I just wanted the wound closed and the bad stuff out. I thought breast plastic surgery was just for augmentation or reduction, and if I didn’t want replacement breasts, the oncology surgeon could just close me up. But in my breast cancer peer groups, I learned that involving a plastic surgeon is good to ensure a “nice closure.” Even though this is an insurance privilege, I didn’t give a hooter about a nice closure. I wanted a cancer-free closure.
I wore a compression bandage until my first post-op appointment. I was stricken at the first sight of my incisions. I thought they’d reconstructed new B cups when I was expecting to be completely flat. But what I saw was actually normal post-surgical swelling underneath two anchor-shaped tapes (Ahoy there??) where I was expecting straight lines. I ended up with a surprise “Goldilocks” closure because the surgeon found my skin too stretchy and thin for a plain flat closure.
Not big implants, not concave, but a middle-ground mound created from spared skin and tissue to fill in the concavity. Otherwise, the chest can be left with divots and a xylophone of visible ribs. What freaks me out about this closure is the vertical scar that says, “There was a nipple here and now there’s not!” The scar style is growing on me, though, because every day I see it means I’m still here.
I like my new streamlined form. I feel closer to the sporty Artemisian spirit of my youth, like I could vampire run through a forest, scamper up a cliff face, or sink like a stone if I need to make a quick aquatic getaway. Treadmill time is much more comfortable now. I don’t think women realize how much of a pendulous pulling sensation breasts cause until they’re gone. I can finally properly display my favorite old band T-shirts without distorting the graphics.
I try to remember how 13-year-old me felt about growing boobs. Girls who developed early were ridiculed, with implications that they were “loose” just because boys were interested in them. Late bloomers like me were also ridiculed. In all matters of female bodyhood, it seems we’re always bodying wrong. I was a “surfboard” (a juvenile term for flat chest, at least in California) for longer than most girls. A future-felon boy I’d known since kindergarten took to feeling my back and announcing to my eighth grade health class that I only wore a sports bra and couldn’t fill an alphabet cup bra.
We were supposed to want boobs, but why? For whom? Most of us were not going to feed offspring for quite some time, some of us never. Was it so we’d be attractive to males? Look a certain way in clothes? Did bigger breasts mean someone was more thoroughly female? It meant being closer to womanhood like the adult women in our lives, but they seemed really stressed out.
It seems many people don’t even realize that going flat is an option. It seems unthinkable to some when reconstruction is possible. A fellow flattie had someone in her comments say they’d rather die than lose their boobs, and unfortunately, that happens to some patients. The scary thing is, going flat is not a guarantee against recurrence. But since my totally average C cup concealed two tumors, I want no cups.
In all the diabolical ‘90s body shaming weight control media torment, I was OK with my chest. It stayed in proportion to my weight fluctuations, and was exempt from my self body shaming. But breasts didn’t really contribute to my wellbeing the way my legs do for exercise or my arms and hands do for playing musical instruments and drawing. For me, I probably always had a boobless personality, so I don’t have the sense of loss that some people do. Losing an arm or hand…now that would be devastating in my particular hand-centric life.
My biological father, now a 16-year breast and lung cancer survivor, keeps telling me “perspective” before listing the good things in his life. No problem. I’m grateful for my insurance, my sparse but stellar social support, and medical staff with the gut fortitude to deal with our bodies’ betrayal. I’m grateful that I can step outside the clinic into a somewhat fresh-aired, mostly cooperative metropolis instead of a smoke-filled war zone. Statistically, about one in eight women in the U.S. will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. I despair for anyone coping with this illness, or any other, in regions with violence and inadequate resources.
Whatever my doctors did, they kept me alive through surgery, despite my fears. Is it possible to face general anesthesia without imagining not waking up? Surely everyone goes around the house on the eve of surgery, putting Emily Gilmore death Post-its on their things so their relatives know who to give their stuff to, right?
Well, I’m still here, and my incisions have settled smoothly with the help of silicone tape. The site looks decent compared with the many scars I’ve seen in peer-group photos and on informational sites. Going flat may not totally protect me against recurrence, but I have no regrets, apart from not doing it sooner.
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