Say Hello, Say Goodbye

I think we’re done, here. How’s that for an ambivalent ending?

I hate endings. I hate saying, “Good bye”.

I am back at work, and my mind has been relentlessly elsewhere than on breast cancer. I had thought that by changing the name of the blog, from “Big Grrls DO Cry” to “Adventures in Deconstruction”, that I could shift the emphasis of the blog from cancer, to the politics of everyday life as a breast cancer survivor. And who knows, I may do that some day. But for now, I think that I need, definitively, to step away from cancer as a site of cultural production and analysis.

I want to thank you, for being here. And I want to encourage anyone who stops by, and wants more info, to please message me, by Commenting. If I know something that might be helpful, I will gladly pass it on. That function has been just one of the joys of maintaining this blog. What can I say? I am compulsively attached to some kind of idea of the Internet as a viral knowledge network that really does make a critical difference to lives where agency is imperiled. And sure as donuts at Tim Hortons, breast cancer and its attendant social/medical institutions, imperil one’s core sense of freedom, identity, value and viability.

If you feel like it, say “Hello”, or say “Goodbye”, by Commenting.

Presence. It’s all we are, and all we have.

 

Mary’s Christmas Queer

I had an amazing Christmas yesterday, and you helped to make it so utterly memorable. It wasn’t about the gifts. Janice and I decided to skip that part of Christmas this year. There wasn’t any overwhelming reason. It wasn’t about anything worthy or principled. We just didn’t feel like piles of presents. What we felt like, was celebration. The very fact that enough psychic space has been cleared in my life so as to permit celebration is attributable directly to the support and overwhelmingly generous love and social connection that so many of you have shared with me. No one knows what to do in the face of cancer. I didn’t have a f*cking clue. And you somehow, against all odds, found the courage and the insight to step into the void, beside me.

So last night, on Christmas, celebrate, we did. Lots of people who I love came to our house for “A Little Christmas Queer”. And please don’t think ‘queer’ is about the sex/gender of who folks cozy up to. It’s just about affirming a principle of kinship that is other than blood ties. And of course, many people who I really wanted to celebrate with DID have family things happening that were good and wonderful, and so couldn’t be celebrating with us last night. So it was far from the whole queer family. But maybe that’s all there ever is anyway — that particular queer family, that night, in that place, and f*ck the idea that there is ever a “whole” anything. What I do know for sure is that there was a lot of love in our house last evening and also, that all my research into how to cook the perfect turkey sure did pay off. Some things should not be an ‘adventure in deconstruction’ and a turkey, perhaps, is one such entity. Although even this claim seems quite suspect.

Yesterday, the bag of breast cancer books that has been a fixture in the living room finally got moved to the back room. It’s almost out the door. I haven’t consulted one of those books for weeks, and the last of the stray volumes that were, up until recently, strewn about the house, was collected up and deposited in the bag.

Loki the super-dog cozied up to everyone, and saved a very special kiss for one of her (many) one-true-loves. Somehow, she manages to find space on the couch for the great dane self, even when there isn’t any. If ever there was a postmodern mathematician with a very post-structural theory of space, it would be Loki.

I started this blog with a story about queer love, a tattoo, and a poster on Ange’s wall that inspired me so many years ago. Last night, P, who knew Ange for many years, brought me that very poster - the very poster of the Deena Metzger photograph that I had spent so many hours staring at on Ange’s wall. After Ange died, P had been guardian of the Metzger poster. P’s generosity in passing on the poster to me is extraordinary. Ange’s poster now sits on my kitchen table, leaning against the wall. I had forgotten that there is a verse of Metzger’s poem on the poster. I was inspired by Metzger’s beauty and courage back then, as I saw it embodied by Ange in her own struggles with cancer. And now, it reanimates my own life. As you do.

Thank you so very much for walking with me, this year, in the most ghastly places that we have had to inhabit. Your courage and kindness have inspired me, and kept me company. I will leave the last word to Metzger.

I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the amazon, the one who shoots arrows.
There was a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart.
Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears.
What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing.
I have relinquished some of the scars.
I have designed my chest with the care given to an illuminated manuscript.
I am no longer ashamed to make love. Love is a battle I can win. I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound.
On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree.

 

Hair

“I should do that with my hair!” The 60-something woman emphasized SHOULD - like, “I SHOULD do that… But I wouldn’t.” I can’t tell you how many women have said those exact words to me. About hair. About my hair, and theirs. And what they mean is that they should cut their hair as short as mine. I have asked several of these commentators, “What stops you?” The answer invariably involves a reference to their husband’s displeasure.

Like fat, hair is a distinctly feminist issue. Frigga Haug,German sociologist, wrote brilliantly about this subject in Female Sexualization, where she reports on a fascinating project where participants narrate anecdotes concerning hair and gender identification.

I am on holiday, and I needed to get my hair cut yesterday. It’s a challenge. At home, Bill the barber cuts my hair. I have never seen a woman at the barber shop, but the guys cope. The barber shop I go to is downtown, where, in my imagination, people learn to accomodate difference more directly than folks in the suburbs (where I live). But on holiday, what’s a gal to do? You can’t just waltz into any old barber shop. The last time I tried that, the guy said, “Oh my g#d. I will have to pull the shades. What if my wife drives by and sees you?” I left. Any place with “Salon” in the name is out. They would balk at my directions — “Keep it short. Use the clippers.” Lady luck was smiling on me. I walked into a place where the woman who cuts hair used to live with a couple of dykes. I chose the place because the sign said, “Hair, Nails, Facials” - that’s it. Nothing fancy. “Very good.” she opined while we chatted about living arrangements - mine, and hers. “No men. Works better that way.”

I knew that eventually, I would have to confess. I enjoyed the feel of the razor sliding up my leg far too much. After a twenty-year moratorium, I shaved my legs. It felt glorious. I was stunned by the depth of guilt. I am not sure who I felt like I had betrayed, but it was tangible. I managed to hang on and ride the waves of repression until after dinner. Then I leaned over to my good friends P and J (who Janice and I met up with in Wailea) and in a whisper, spoke the ugly truth, one lapsed feminist to another. “I shaved my legs.” The aftermath was really fascinating. It turns out I was not alone. We have all been pretty committed feminists for about twenty years, and had all enthusiastically picked up and carried the “thou shalt not shave thy body hair” torch, and both P and I had shaved our legs for our Hawaii vacation. And we both felt guilty. And neither of us was sure about anything, except that something important had been set aside in this abandonment of the ban on shaving.

In the Survivor final episode post-party yesterday, the host, Jeff Probst, asked Denise, the lunch lady, her BIG question. It was about her hair. “What’s with the hair?” he inquired, as if we would all know what he meant. The audience laughed, knowingly. Can you imagine anyone ever under any circumstances asking a man that question? Denise’s answer was very telling. “I have to keep it short,” she shared with the audience, “because the children are always grabbing it. But I also want to feel like a woman.”

Frigga Haug, you were so right about hair.

 

Abreast in a Boat

Fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation. I see the practice of critique and in particular a critical relationship to community, as an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community

Whereas I had thought, recently, that being a drag king was a remote possibility, it looks as if PINK is going to be my new Spring colour, and sporting drag queen accessories, like a pink wig, glasses and feather boa is distinctly more likely as a possible reincarnation.

Last night, I attended the Novices meeting of Abreast in a Boat (ABIAB), which is a Dragon Boat paddling organization of, and for, women living with breast cancer. Back in June, in those horrendous pre-mastectomy days (and very long nights) that were awash with tears and chock-ablock with doctors appointments, tests and more tests, I insisted that Janice and Sz take me to the Alcan Dragon Boat Festival. This popular annual Vancouver event attracts many thousands of spectators who crowd the shoreline of False Creek to watch dragon boat paddlers compete. One of the highlights of the event is the race between boats paddled by breast cancer survivors. These paddlers create a moving panorama of courage and compassion on the water as they bring their boats into a special formation after their race, holding carnations high into the air, each one representing a woman who lost her life to breast cancer, and finally, dropping the flowers into the water.

Last June, the very same day that I got the “Mary, you have breast cancer.” call on my cellphone while standing in the Westjet line at the Edmonton airport, I was invited to a potluck where I met M - a fellow breast cancer survivor. When she talked about the dragon boat paddling “for survivors” I experienced such an intense moment of identification with her that it reminded me of when I was really young, and met honest-to-goodness queer folks for the first time. My diagnosis just hours old, I noticed that I was mesmerized by M. I sat beside her throughout the party, and finally screwed up the nerve to ask her for an email address with some really weak and unlikely explanation. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask M. I just needed to make a connection. I was awkward, unsure of what to say, or how to identify myself. What was the secret handshake? My need to create a network that was larger in size than the number 1 was palpable. I knew that I absolutely had to be present for the survivors’ dragon boat race a few weeks down the road, and in particular, for the moment of the carnations.

Watching the ABIAB paddlers race at the Alcan Festival, and then bring together their boats and raise their carnations in memory of the women who lost their lives to breast cancer that year was poignant. The affect was riveting. I made a decision that day, just two weeks prior to my mastectomy, that I would be present on the water the following year. And I was resolute about the fact that next year, unlike that day in June of 2007, I would not be sobbing, and I would not be a spectator.

Abreast in a Boat has an interesting history that represents, in its essential elements, the key features of many breast cancer stories. University of British Columbia Sports Medicine physician and researcher, Dr. Don McKenzie, in 1996, founded a research program designed to challenge then prevalent knowledge and perspectives concerning the impact of upper body exercise and women living with frequently occurring impacts of breast cancer surgery and treatment, like lymphedema (painful swelling of the arms). At that time, it was widely believed that following breast cancer treatment, women should seriously restrict physical activity. Au contraire. McKenzie’s pioneering research showed that a systematic approach to the introduction and maintenance of upper body activity has a positive impact on the health and lives of women living with breast cancer. Just over a decade later, thousands of breast cancer survivors the world over are enthusiastic paddlers dispersed over more than a hundred organizations like ABIAB.

The meeting yesterday was awash in identity narratives profferred as a mode of community building and performativity. ABIAB members told stories about survival, camaraderie, emotional support and the sustenance provided by the company of women. There was, of course, a logic of inclusion and intelligibility that structured these identity organizing narratives. And where there is a grammar of inclusion, there is, of necessity, one of disidentification and estrangement. The stories were also about “being women” or “ladies”, wearing pink with pride, and telling one another stories that “can’t be told to husbands”. I felt the familiar sting of enforced feminization deep inside, and likewise, the alienation from stories about husbands, and other “men in our lives we can’t talk to”. This is, of course, the stuff of community where the logic of “in the singular, plural, and alike”, fails abysmally. How does this group that is predicated on a logic of community practice hospitality to strangers?

I’ll keep you posted.

 

The Politics of Aesthetics

When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. Judith Butler (2001). “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7 (4): 621-36.

Today I wore boxers. It felt transitively gender appropriate and maybe even, essential, since I was heading off to see the plastic surgeon about chest reconstruction. Recall, that this is the only plastic surgeon in British Columbia who does chest surgery for fTm trans folks AND who does breast reconstruction. This guy, I figured, would get my particularities. But still, I needed the performative insurance boxers might provide. After all, I would need to convince the surgeon that doing chest contouring would be, in my case, an genderqueerly appropriate form of post mastectomy/breast cancer “reconstruction surgery“.

Typically, chest, or “top surgery” is regarded by the medical professionals and the health care system in British Columbia as a form of fTm Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). The rules regarding SRS are archaic and extraordinarily discriminatory towards transgendered folks. They include proscriptive requirements, such as, for example, that a candidate for SRS “pass” successfully for a member of the “opposite sex” for a minimum period of two years PRIOR to approval for surgery and that this successful “passing” be observed and recorded by “qualified professionals”. It is also the case that candidates for SRS need to be interviewed and approved for surgery by two mental health professionals.

Step Two, if we are to think of Step One, as the deliberate selection of the Calvin Kleins, involved filling out copious forms. Dr. B wanted to know such a lot about me. There were 8 pages of questions about my sexual and gender identity in relation to temporality, as in, “Who were you when you were born?” (identification via biology), and “Who would you like to become?” (identification via surgery). I was asked to use the space inside of an empty circle to demarcate, with a single dividing line, just how much of ME was f or m at those two critical times - past and future - actual and virtual. All my circles were covered with lines going every which way, tartan-esque, and sported a lively mix of f and m. It was appropriately messy.

Complete these sentences: Gender Identity. I think of myself as a _____. Ideally, I would like to think of myself as a _____.

I experimented with playful answers, as in: How did others perceive your gender identity as a child? Answer: Simplistically. How do others perceive your gender identity now? Answer: Generously.

Step Three was the live interview with Dr. B, who was intelligent, informative and kind. Dr. B is a really stunning example of ethical medical sensibilities. He was emphatic about wanting to use respectful language in asking me about “personal aspects” of my life, and encouraged me to correct him if he went astray. Dr. B didn’t read my answers on the forms. That impressed me. He just chatted away and asked lots of questions. Medical protocol requires doctors to establish that patients seeking any form of SRS actually, seriously want surgery based on what is called, in transgender health discourse, the test of Real Life Experience (RLE). And so the performative criterion becomes, Can I establish that I have a stable and longstanding record of making successful choices in the world that are recognizable and public actions which would pass as Otherly gendered?

I knew that many of the queries were quite important to get right, no matter how casual they may have appeared, like, “Would your ideal gender identity include male genitalia?” If I sounded like I love being a woman “just the way I am,” including all my womanly parts, I would fail the necessary performance of some stable elements of gender dysphoria that would make wanting a male chest something other than totally pathological. Fortunately, “bottom surgery” (as we trannies call it) is a pretty risky biz, so I made some kind of blisteringly ironic statement about preferring a dick I could slam in a drawer to one that might whither away and drop off my body. It seemed persuasive. And I meant well. “Have you told your parents?” This was a tough question, on all kinds of levels, not the least of which is, “What’s to tell?”. Once again, humour was my friend. Most of the time, I was able to assert my stubborn attachment to a transitive relation to gender — a moving project with no fixed address. I insisted on standing in the space of gender queer, and of living a life that is about playful complexity, rather than having ever inhabited something as apparently simple as a tick box on a form.

We moved on to Step Four, because I passed Step Three. OMG. Who was born of this moment - this institutionalized accomplishment of intelligibility?

Dr. B told me enthusiastically that he would not require me to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, because it seemed like I “had a really stable and healthy identity in relation to my complex gender”. And so I learned about the various options for my chest reconstruction, which include several variations, from fixing the problems residual to the bilateral mastectomy, to a full chest contouring operation. I have lots to think about. At the end of today, I was fixated on two thoughts:

If I had been talking about using reconstruction to get a 36DD chest, I would not have been required to disclose whether I felt like I had been born, secretly, as Dolly Parton, and now needed surgery to correct a lack of fit between the inside feeling and the outward appearance.

Maybe everyone should have to read Foucault as a right of passage into adulthood, and yearly thereafter. There might even have to be a test.

I am left with enormous respect for a doctor who has learned so very much about how to care under conditions of institutionalization, uncertainty and risk. I am, also, so very proud that I found within myself the courage to insist on speaking truth to power about a kind of complexity of intelligibility for which there are so very many punishments, sanctions and harsh measures.

 

Re/Construction: How to Queer the Alchemy of Intelligibility

“Gender is always posthuman, always a sewing job which stiches identity into a body bag.” J. Halberstam

Yesterday I went to see one of the surgeons who operates in the local Breast Reconstruction program. Do you remember when my GP told me that she would sign me up for breast reconstruction because I was “in denial” when I declined reconstruction at the time of my bilateral mastectomy? Well sure enough, the surgeon’s office called me because they had a cancellation, and I went to see Dr. N because I thought I should explore all the options available to me. And yes, I have been rethinking this reconstruction business generally, and in particular, my strong resistance to the whole thing.

I learned two things yesterday. First, I am sad to say that I am so shallow, and so marked by cultural norms around fat phobia, that I was thrilled to hear that “you don’t have enough abdominal fat to make breasts”. Having grown up as a tormented fat child, this was my very first adult experience of being told that I wasn’t fat enough! <OMG that is SO sick> But seriously folks, I also knew for sure, feeling absolutely alienated by the various breast implants littering Dr. N’s desk, that I could no more voluntarily submit to attaching breasts to my body than to wear a dress. Not me.

As I have commented upon in previous blog posts, breast reconstruction is narrated entirely un-self-consciously as the reparation of a state of injury to restore a woman to a previously uncompromised state of femininity. There are many normative investments in this line of reasoning, including but not limited to a view of the female body as equivalent to the feminine body, and a view of the female body as being made up, symbolically, of essential parts, such as breasts. On this view, there is a whole which can be radically compromised by the subtraction of specific parts. And so most texts about breast reconstruction take for granted that the stigma of mastectomy will involve an injury to femininity that can be corrected surgically. The degree to which this is a symbolic restoration is underscored by the things that are left out of these accounts, like the fact that using the best of current techniques, breast reconstruction can not repair the nerves that provide sensation to the breast.

However, for me (and many others) the fundamental problem with what I will call, the Restoration Story, is that it incorrectly identifies my gender identification in general, and in particular, the role of breasts in my gender identification. And so a refusal of, or resistance to, “breast reconstruction” is, in fact, often not a desire to refuse a reparation to the damage of surgery, but rather, a refusal of the notion that there ever existed a normative relationship with breasts. How do you reconstruct what was never there? It’s one thing to co-exist with breasts that never felt like they belonged on my body. But how could I ever choose to undergo surgery in order to “restore” what never was — which I could simply define as a state of normative femininity?

I have been thinking about my options. I know that they don’t include the recreation of breasts. However, I also know that I am pretty sure that I don’t want to live out the rest of my life with a chest that is entirely unintelligible as a chest. Or at least, I am drawn to the notion that “body alchemy” involving a potent mix of feminine and masculine identifications creates a kind of “gender trouble” with which I feel a deep and familiar affinity. So now what? Well one of the options that I have been thinking about is the form of body modification that f>m transgendered folks call, Top Surgery. Loren Cameron’s gorgeous book of photographs, including his own self-portraits, document this Body Alchemy as practiced by f>m trans folks, wherein breasts become a chest.

I didn’t feel like I could talk about this with Dr. N, whose desk was covered with an array of breast implants and nice diagrams of busty beaming women. There is a plastic surgeon in town who does most of the f>m top surgeries. I have to wait a year to see him, but maybe I can just hunker down and be patient. It is SO not my best trick, but it may be the only trick in my book. It wouldn’t be something to undergo without a lot of thought, in any case. All very interesting to contemplate. I wonder what our public health plan will say to f>m chest surgery in lieu of breast reconstruction. Or in my case, chest surgery as the only genderqueerly-intelligible form of reconstruction. Think the logic will work with the billing bureaucrats?

 

Welcome back, Welcome forward

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

— Søren Aaby Kierkegaard

It’s a good thing, you see, that the clocks went back this weekend. There has been a kind of temporal shift in my life since the 2nd opinion visit with the oncology team last week. Getting such a definitive “All Clear!” prognosis has blown a lot of anxiety out of my life and left, in its place, something like excitement, clarity and momentum.

Cancer stopped time in my life. Or to put it more specifically, It had the impact of waving a strong magnet over a compass. All the persistent and reliable frames of reference in my life imploded, right there, in the moment of a singular articulation {CANCER} in the phone call by my GP while I sat in the Edmonton airport, trying to come home.

It’s very symbolic, of course, to have a major course deviation while trying to “come home”. But really, since April, I have been trying to move forward in a universe where what had previously seemed solid melted into an unhelpful fluidity and internally, what had felt reliable was then rather universally unhinged. And time was a central marker of this newfound and extremely unpleasant altered state.

Trauma theorists have written extensively about the impact of trauma on temporality. One of the most consistent observations in this exciting and profound academic domain, is that within the space of trauma, experience is not attached to temporality in somatically or ontologically familiar ways. In the “after” space of trauma, time seems impenetrable. It is as if time has been frozen, or happening someplace else. And so people do things like, revisit the “scene of the crime” in order to attempt, once again, from a different vantage point, to pry open the arrested time of a traumatic experience so as to re-enter the space of trauma and make it somehow narratologically accessible, manipulable, finally.

For a week now, I have felt elated and oddly, familiar to myself again while being absolutely confident that nothing is the same. After about six months of profound insomnia, I am sleeping like a baby. I have just spent five long languorous days that were fun, and without much planning, lists or purpose. If you know me, you will know that the absence of lists and organization is a rather extraordinary developmental shift. And this is not, I must emphasize, an “I learned an important lesson from cancer” feel-good story. All I know is that I am, once again, moving. And I know that my points of reference once again, make sense. Like time.

Something is profoundly altered in my universe. For one thing, I am taking chances that I would never have ventured before. This is especially true in the social realm. A few days ago, I stood in a friend’s kitchen and told her exactly what were the fears that had placed such a stringent limitation on our relationship. At a party this weekend, I walked straight up to a rather daunting woman who I didn’t know, and engaged her in conversation. I am excited about life. I am engaged with life. I am in love, again, with life itself!

 

Go Vote

“Law Mom” is a student and blogger living with breast cancer medical bills, going through chemo, and one of twenty finalists chosen for a scholarship that will afford her a college scholarship. Go read her blog, and consider voting for her to win this scholarship. It’s just a mouse click. You can vote up to midnight, October 28th. It’s better than shopping for a cure.

 

Quality of Life and POV

“Are these realistic decisions or not?” asks Dr. Todd Tuttle, cancer surgery chief at the University of Minnesota, who led the study after more women sought the option in his own hospital. … “I’m afraid that women believe having their opposite breast removed is somehow going to improve their breast cancer survival. In fact, it probably will not affect their survival,” he said.” More Breast Cancer Patients Opt for Double Mastectomies

The Point of View (POV) concept is so crucial in thinking about cancer. One’s relation to cancer so significantly determines how the world of cancer is read, written and interpreted. But not all folks who exist in an intimate relationship with cancer articulate the significance of POV.

“More Breast Cancer Patients Opt for Double Mastectomies” reads a headline today from an article in the Wall Street Journal that reports research from the Journal of Clinical Oncology. In a nutshell, Dr. Tuttle and his colleagues report a 150% increase, since 1998, of women getting double mastectomy surgeries where one of the two breasts removed was apparently healthy. The study shows that women who opt for this surgery tend to be younger, and that the choice was not affected by the severity of the tumour itself.

My own choice for the immediate treatment of breast cancer was just like that reported by Tuttle’s project. It appeared that I had one healthy and one cancerous breast, and I opted to have both removed - one, prophylactically. This decision has, at times, been agonizing to live with. There’s lots of middle-of-the-night 20/20 hindsight. And then there are my social mirrors. Every time that I have to explain my scenario to a new doctor, as was the case last week with a gastroenterologist, there is the same reaction - passionate consternation. They get a look of extreme agitation, and invariably ask, immediately, “WHY the aggressive surgery?”.

It has been interesting to me to review my diagnostic reports as I prepare for my 2nd. opinion consultation next week. I had never, for example, seen my breast MRI report. It turns out that I had a large, secondary area of DCIS (cancer) in my right breast, close to the chest wall, that had not been identified by the gazillion mammograms I had prior to the MRI, which was done just days before my surgery. This area was never biopsied. If I had chosen the route of a lumpectomy, no one would have known about the other area of DCIS. The pathology report on my left breast showed significant areas of cellular abnormality — apocrine metaplasia — which is a precursor to the development of invasive cancer.

So, all things considered, and with the pattern in my familial history of bilateral invasive breast cancer, did I make the correct decision or was it “overly aggressive”?. I think it’s interesting that a cancer researcher, like Tuttle, could actually make the claim that women living with cancer are somehow deluded about how removal of the apparently healthy breast will “affect survival”. For Tuttle, there is no impact on survival. For this group of medical researchers, it’s about an empirical relationship between various surgical options, and years of life. In this project they don’t discriminate between ‘years of survival’ and ‘years of disease-free survival’. However, even in the case of his research, data clearly show that removal of the healthy breast reduces likelihood of a recurrence. So how could that not be a significant difference? Surely just the fact that I don’t have to worry ongoingly about a mammogram failing to identify cancer in the other breast “affects my survival”! And similarly about treatment options. For Tuttle, it is paradoxical that women would choose prophylactic breast removal to reduce recurrence, rather than tomoxifen, which would reduce recurrence hormonally, by blocking the uptake of estrogen. For me, that one is a no-brainer. Do I want to enter into immediate chemical menopause, or live without my left breast? Gosh. I wonder why it seems to clear to me, and so odd to the medical researchers. POV.

I am grateful to the activists from Breast Cancer Action (and others) who lobbied doctors and the medical establishment in order to steer them away from what used to be the standard of care for all breast cancers — radical mastectomy. However, an approach that aims to “save the breast” no matter what the effect on the quality of life for women living with breast cancer is also problematic.

 

 

Breast Cancer: New Thinking and New Therapies

I wouldn’t usually suggest that you “Go watch TV!”. But in this instance, Jacqueline, of Rebel1in8 blog fashionista fame, has participated in a really decent newsy documentary about breast cancer. Jac has the best line in the show - “I decided to look at my body as a different kind of architecture” - where she is talking about the decision to create a new line of clothing for a post-mastectomy and non-reconstruction body. Now that, is agency.