Titty tats
I thought I understood grief, at least as well as anyone could, but then 2025 happened and I was confronted with a new type of loss. A loss that I am only now beginning to process.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January, I wasn’t scared. Between the research I did on my own as well as the conversations with my doctor, I understood this type of cancer, this little lump in my boob, was not life threatening. I was going to benefit from decades of advocacy and research, and this would become just another part of my story. Albeit one that I would rather not have become familiar with.
Additionally, I am a rational and emotionally self-aware person. So, I believed that I could work through this next asteroid just as I had all the ones before. And I have… or I am, but that hasn’t stopped a nagging feeling of uncertainty – not fear but similar.
This was a new kind of grief.
I have never been able to depend on my mental health. However, outside of some allergies and manageable asthma, my body has always been there for me. But when the tissue sample from my lumpectomy returned and told the story of a larger than expected, slow-growing tumor alongside additional widespread cancer cells, it felt like my body had betrayed me.
I had likely been walking around with cancer for years (yes, plural). My body never warned me of these invaders, and had it not been for an eagle-eyed ultrasound tech, I could have been walking around for another year (at least) as the cells multiplied and spread. I know better than to think, “Why me?” and that “Why not me?” is the more accurate question. But even still, it felt like my body had broken an unspoken agreement between us.
The long, (or longer than I expected) recoveries from each of the three surgeries only aggravated this emotional wound. Not only had my body harbored these malignant cells but now, months after their removal, my physical energy struggled to return to baseline. How dare my body not bounce back? How dare it not show gratitude?
Then there is the response to my physical loss, the mastectomy, which has taken me much longer to even begin to process. As in, I’m only getting to it now. Maybe that’s because the physical changes happened gradually: mastectomy, inflating the expanders in stages, before the eventual reconstruction. I never had a chance to get used to one change before I was walking into the next procedure. Or, because until now, none of it felt final.
“I’m feeling bizarrely emotional about this step,” I told the tattoo artist as she held a stencil with various sized circles up to my three-month-old boobs.
“I hear that a lot. This is the last step of a long journey,” she looked up from the stencil. “What size were your old nipples? Do you want to go smaller or larger?”
Oh my goodness was this whole thing so freaking bizarre. Every phase of breast reconstruction has been weird, but this day was the (literal?) cherry on top.
“Will you always have zombie boobs?” Anessa had asked me a few days earlier when she saw me getting dressed after a shower.
Zombie boobs were what she was calling my post-reconstruction, nippleless boobs with horizontal scars. I think she was confusing Frankenstein’s monster with zombies, but I knew what she meant. And honestly, that description felt right – my boobs were back from the dead following a surgery with foreign materials.
“Well, I’m going to get tattoos that look like nipples. So, they won’t look totally like zombie boobs anymore.” I explained.
“But you never get your nipples back?” She asked earnestly.
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m sorry you don’t get them back, Mommy.”
“Me too, baby.”
Anessa’s empathy cracked me open. Not only because it is rare for her to express it, but also because it forced me to finally face the end of this physical journey. And, perhaps more to the point, the grief I had been shoving down for months now. Since the mastectomy, I have been telling myself not to worry about what my body looked like because there was always another appointment ahead.
But now, it’s over.
Later today I will remove the Tegaderm tape that has been protecting the tattoos and the body I see in the mirror will be my forever one. It is not the one I entered this year with, and it is not one I voluntarily chose. I’ve tried to minimize this loss by saying they were just boobs, or at this point in my life they were purely ornamental. But our bodies are not trivial, and neither is the way we feel about them.
At the core of most grief is a resistance to change. Be it the loss of a job, a pet, a person, or a part of our body – we resist the new life that comes with the loss and grief is born. I know from talking to other women who have undergone reconstruction following a mastectomy, that eventually I will get used to this new body. Eventually, I will accept this change and see this body as my own.
But not today.
Because, like every other kind of healing, it will take time.
ID: Kelly bending over at the waist toward the camera and making kissy lips. She is wearing jeans and a tshirt, her hair is down and parted at the middle. She is indoors at a restaurant.
