Aside from some negative, shameful feelings about getting my first period, I never really had strong feelings about vaginas one way or another. I didn’t want to talk about my period, and I didn’t want to celebrate “becoming a woman” or anything (a phrase which I now realize is incredibly trans-exclusionary, but which I was just personally mortified by at the time). Beyond that singular experience, I was not thinking about my vagina almost ever or at all. I certainly had reason to think about my vagina; I’ve had really long, bad periods most of my life. Like some that have lasted fifteen days. Every doctor has just been like, “Maybe if you lose weight, it will go away.” They’ve given me birth control pills and IUDs—sometimes both at the same time, which is just cruel, because the point of the IUD is to not have to set an alarm on your phone for 4 p.m. every single afternoon of your life. For most people, these methods make periods go away almost entirely; mine is still here, eager bitch that she is.
Still, I’m not that passionate about my vagina one way or another. She has never really held any allure or deeper meaning for me. I mostly feel the same way about my vagina as I do about my knees: sometimes they bother me or don’t work correctly, but not in a way that’s tied into my identity. The same goes for my boobs. Other than extenuating circumstances, like when I’m forced to buy a bra for an exorbitant amount of money due to my unusually large rib cage, or the time the guy I was deeply in love with in college asked me, “What happened?” upon seeing my titty stretch marks, I’m dispassionate about my boobs.
I understand, of course, why many people do have stronger feelings about vaginas and any other reproductive organs, especially those involved in being pregnant. I understand that as someone with access to birth control and abortion, and health care in general, I’m privileged enough for those parts of my body to be an afterthought. I understand that as someone cis, I’m allowed space to go whole days or weeks without being reminded about my genitals or any other body part that a stranger might feel is their business. And that, perhaps, is why it was such a shock to find myself for three years on end deeply entrenched in caring for my boobs and vagina.
It started, as many auspicious moments do, in the shower. For some reason unknown to me—and I have thought about this a lot—I decided to feel around under my boob in the shower. A lackadaisical check for lumps. This isn’t a crazy thing to do; monthly tit checks are advised once you reach a certain age or if you’re bored. But at twenty-five, I wasn’t in the demographic for lumps and I had just two days prior—two days!—gone to a gynecologist who had done her own titty check (professionally known as a breast exam).
If your doctor does a titty check, usually you can go ahead and assume that they would have told you about any lumps. You can assume that you’re in the clear for a bit. Which is why I have no clue what my hand was doing under my boob during that shower. Was I just washing off my boobs and I felt something? Was I actively looking? I don’t remember and I can’t figure it out, but either way I felt a lump.
If you’ve never felt a boobie, they’re lumpy as shit. I distinctly remember reading one magazine that said, “Boobs can feel like a bunch of grapes,” which is just such a weird thing to compare them to, but they made a point which is: boobs are odd. They feel odd, they do odd shit. They can have cysts and abscesses and infected ducts. There aren’t rules. Titty tissue is like the wild, wild West. When I was fourteen, I found a lump under my armpit that I thought was breast cancer and my doctor was like, “No, you’re fine; it will probably go away. Chill out.” So when I found the underboob lump, I was about 55 percent chill. The other 45 percent of me was like, “I’m gonna die of breast cancer this year and I should probably quit my job and move home to spend time with my family before I pass.”
Logically, I knew this was probably what’s medically known as NBD (No Big Deal). I called up my doctor, who had just examined me two days prior, which I felt a little weird about doing. It feels kind of rude to be like, “Can you please go back and check your work on #7 and show me how you arrived at this answer?” I tried to get an appointment with my Other Gynecologist, and yes, I have two, because Los Angeles is a nightmare for gynecologists and most of them can’t fit you in for an appointment until August, even if it’s February.I Anyway, the Other Gyno couldn’t fit me in and the gyno I had just gone to had left for a monthlong trip. She took one look at my vagina and left town.
Luckily, another doctor in her office agreed to see me on short notice because titty lumps are sometimes important. She felt me up and was like, “Yeah, this is a real lump, but it’s not a big deal. I think you should go get an ultrasound of it, but it’s not cancerous or anything, so don’t freak out. But go get an ultrasound today. Right away.”
Mixed messaging, if you ask me. Also, who knew (outside of the medical world and probably a lot of people) that ultrasounds were the technology we were using for titty tumors? I was like, “Don’t we want like an MRI? A full-body scan to make sure I’m not dying???”
The closest place to get an ultrasound the same day was the ritziestII breast center in Beverly Hills. The waiting room of this boob clinic had nicer furniture than I will ever own. They had chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. They were a few streets over from Rodeo Drive and next door to a chocolatier that I could not afford to walk into. An entire boutique for rich people that just sells chocolates. Just chocolates!
Anyway, I did not belong. I don’t remember exactly what I was wearing but the odds are it was overalls. I walked in on Birkenstocked feet with a slip of paper that said I needed an ultrasound and sat next to women who said words like coiffed, women who wore kitten heels and blouses. Blouses! Imagine owning a blouse!
I finally got to go into a room after making it a third of the way through an issue of Vogue, which, as with any reading of a rich-people periodical, left me riled up. A nurse asked me to take my top off (the second time that day! Nice!) and she squirted preheated ultrasound gel onto my tits—imagine food-stand condiment bottles coming on your chest. Now, if you’ve never had an ultrasound before—I’ve now had dozens and dozens—you can tell when you’re in a fancy place when they heat up the gel.
One weird thing about getting an ultrasound anywhere on your body is it looks, feels, and sounds exactly the same as the ultrasounds you get for a baby, or at least the ones I’ve seen on TV. I kept wanting to ask, “Is it a girl or a boy?” just to get a joke in, but I didn’t because every four seconds I was gripped with the fear that I was going to find out that I was dying. Also, because I bet someone’s done that bit before and I didn’t want them to think I was unoriginal.
I’m very afraid of dying, so afraid that I had played this scene out many times in my head, although never in a Beverly Hills office with paintings of orchids hanging on the wall. In some sense, I was like, “Okay, I knew this was coming. I have been right all along to be afraid of my body killing me. They’re going to tell me I have two years to live and I will be vindicated.” My family makes fun of me for all the medical problems I think I have. One time, I got really concerned that I had pancreatic cancer because there are usually no symptoms for pancreatic cancer and I was experiencing no symptoms. My family does have a little bit of a point, but also my body is a shitshow and I have lots of random real medical problems. Recently, I got diagnosed—by a doctor—with LPR (a.k.a. silent acid reflux, which despite the name is not silent at all; it just doesn’t include heartburn) and my mom was like, “You’re such a hypochondriac.” It’s not hypochondria if you have it, Mom.
Anyway, I got called back to an exam room by a beautiful but serious nurse. The room was in the far back of the office and she apologized for the construction noise from next door. Buzz saws were frankly the least of my concerns; I was waiting to find out if I had cancer. The nurse peeked around in my boobies and told me that she saw a lump at three o’clock. My right tit was now a clock. She was very confident that it wasn’t cancer (phew!) but she wanted the doctor to come take a look at it. She handed me two washcloths for my boobs
to cover up the ultrasound gel but told me not to wipe it off. Just hold them there like a makeshift bikini.
She left and I waited awhile. There is no good way to wait on an exam table. The very act of lying down on a table—cushioned or otherwise—with your top off in the middle of the day, waiting for another adult to come in and inspect you, is weird.
Finally, the nurse came back in and announced, “We actually have to move to room 1 because it has a better ultrasound machine. Pick up your terry cloth–covered titties and let’s go.” Not those exact words, but you get it. She carried my belongings as I shuffled across the entire doctor’s office to go to a room with better equipment. It’s a Beverly Hills doctor’s office whose only focus is on breast cancer; why would you even have a room with a bad ultrasound machine?
Room 1 was admittedly much nicer. There was a massive gilt-framed mirror on one wall (so you can watch your reaction to getting a cancer diagnosis?), another painting of an orchid, and classic rock hits being lightly pumped into the room. The very volume of the music said, “We understand you have breast cancer; we’re here for you.” Room 1 was for people they would never ask to hold washcloths over their tits.
My doctor arrived eventually, the most glamorous woman you can even imagine. She was wearing a lab coat and heels. Her smile was genuine but her teeth were either professionally whitened or veneers. I would bet veneers. She didn’t seem to have pores. She radiated competence, the kind of competence the people of 90210 are paying for. She was also kind and warm and funny. She came over to stand above me like a Reiki healer with her hands hovering over my boobs and said, “Don’t tell me! Let me see if I can find it!”III It could have been alarming for my titty lump to be a game for her, but instead it spoke of her casual relationship with tumors, which seemed reassuring.
She did find the lump in record time (it took me a whole shower, and my previous gynecologist never found it at all), and she quickly set to work scanning that little bitch. A Tom Petty song came on, “American Girl,” I think, and she started lamenting how sad it was that he had died so young; I wondered if it was good bedside manner to mention people dying young in a situation like this, but she was the professional. This was my first time maybe being diagnosed with cancer, and the nurse said it wasn’t cancer, so I had no right to get too miffed. She then asked me if the music was okay and if I had any requests, and I was like, “Is the tumor so bad that you’re letting me pick the music as my last make-a-wish moment?”
It turns out the lump was actually at four o’clock, not three o’clock, on the titty-clock face. So the nurse had been wrong about that. The lump was the size of a peanut M&M according to my doctor. When she told me that, I replied, “I wish it were a peanut M&M,” and we both laughed, me nervously, her politely.
And then she told me that the edges of that peanut M&M lump were actually rough instead of smooth, which usually means cancer.
What.
The.
Shit.
We transitioned seamlessly from peanut M&M jokes right into “You might have breast cancer and we need to do a biopsy.” I really wanted to be like, “Oh no, no, the nurse—that nurse that was just in here, who gave me these towels—she said it wasn’t cancer and the gynecologist said it wasn’t cancer too. You’re actually my third opinion of the day and I reject this one.” She also broke it to me that even if the lump wasn’t cancer, we were going to have to do surgery.
The good news, according to her, was that it had not spread to my lymph nodes, and she was very confident that we could get the whole tumor out. Which is like, definitely good news, but also I know a tiny bit about cancer and one thing I know is that a peanut M&M clump of cells is a lot of cancer!!! Anyway, it was Wednesday and I’d find out on Monday if I had cancer. If I have any advice for you, it’s to get all your medical testing that might be serious done on a Monday to give you the most business days possible in a row after your test.
I got the biopsy, which hurt a lot (which is bullshit; I didn’t realize biopsies hurt), and then I tried to call my mom, who didn’t pick up because she was at a fancy dinner event with her husband or something, and then I called my boss and was like, “I can’t come in tonight for work because I think I may have breast cancer, is that okay?” So the first person I talked to and cried to was my boss, and I kept apologizing for crying. And then I got in my car for an hour-and-a-half commute home because LA is like that.
Then I entered a purgatory that anyone who has ever had to wait on medical results knows. It’s Schrödinger’s biopsy. Until you get the results back, it might be nothing and it might be death and you can’t actually start mourning or grieving anything, but you have to sit around knowing that on Monday morning literally every aspect of your life could shift. Waiting is hell. Waiting over a weekend for results is double hell.
Luckily for me, it turned out that the lab was very fast and I got the results early and I did not have cancer. I had a very, very rare type of tumor. Did you know that most tumors in boobs are cancerous? That cysts and abscesses and fat deposits and scar tissue are incredibly common but noncancerous tumors just aren’t? But I got lucky.
A week or so later, I went in for surgery to remove my titty tumor and it was heavenly. They put you under a very warm, heated blanket because the surgery room is so cold and then you pass out and somehow wake up with no memory of any time passing, which is trippy as hell.IV And when I got out of the surgery my glamorous doctor came over to me with the tumor in a clear film canister—well, it probably was not an actual film canister, because that seems unsanitary and not official—and was like, “Actually, your tumor was the size of a Reese’s cup and had started to grow on the muscle, so we had to take more than we thought, but the good news is, the titty looks normal and we think we got it all.” Obviously, your question is, what type of Reese’s cup is she talking about? The big flat ones that come in two-packs or the individually foil-wrapped ones? I don’t know!
I got a call a week after the surgery from my doctor, who said, “Good news and bad news.” Which is a phrase that almost never means mostly good news and just a sprinkle of bad. Dr. R was like, “Okay, good news, it’s not cancer.” And I was like… I thought we had already established that? And she said, “Well, we like to double-check.” So the good news is something that I thought I already knew, that I didn’t think was up for discussion. Can’t wait to hear the bad news.
Reader: they did not get it all.
The second surgery was going to be way more aggressive, because apparently this fucker was starting to grow on bone and wrap itself around things, and this tumor was a fast-growing tumor and I needed to get it out before it turned into the size of a chocolate Easter bunny or whatever the next-size chocolate item was. Are all doctors measuring things in chocolate? I don’t know.
A couple of weeks later I went under again, and when they opened up my titty area (chest), they had to do a lot of… rearranging. When I woke up, my doctor told me that the surgery had been more extensive than they’d expected and that what was left looked like a “shark bite” (her words) on my rib cage. She told me she’d had to take out more of my boob than planned and that my boob would be a bit uneven.
What.
The.
Shit.
I mean, good news: not cancer. Good news: they thought they got it all for real this time. Good news: I had survived two surgeries. Good news: I could still breastfeed (presuming I have time to have children before climate change renders the world uninhabitable).
Bad news: I had a surgical drain coming out of my boob, collecting blood and fluid in a clear grenade-shaped plastic canister,V and also: now I had a wonky titty??!? At age twenty-four?
I didn’t even like my boobs beforehand! Like at all! They were mediocre; kind of deflated and covered in stretch marks from gaining and losing and gaining and losing weight. They were not twenty-four-year-old tits, which feels like the most embarrassing possible thing I could admit to you, somehow. I don’t know why six chapters b
ack or so I was fine with talking about come on my face but admitting that I have mediocre boobs is just a bridge too far, apparently.
And now they were uneven?!? COME ON.
The perhaps exciting upshot of this story is that I worked with my doctors and insurance company for two years trying to get a reconstructive boob job. I paid thousands of extra dollars in health insurance each year in the hopes that the cost of the surgery would be lower, and I finally got approved. So now I have new tits and whenever people, usually men, are rude about plastic surgery—which happens all the time!—I get to be like, “I had a boob job.” And then they backpedal. And then I get to say, “Because I had a tumor.” And then they try to backpedal faster. And that’s what they get for trying to make someone else’s body their business.
But for two years I had a slightly wonky tit mocking me for all the times I didn’t appreciate having nice-enough (albeit stretch-marked) perfectly even titties. Throughout this titty imbroglio, I kept expecting to feel something about womanhood. I was waiting, trying to figure out the right time to really feel connected to my womanhood via my lost boob chunk.
Retrospectively, this was a weird fucking feeling for me to be expecting, since it’s not like I normally believed that boobs had anything to do with womanhood. Many, many, many women don’t have boobs, of course. I was waiting for a Chicken Soup for the Noncancerous Breast Tumor Survivor’s Soul moment, though. I was waiting to be like, “Who am I with a wonky tit? Why do I feel less female?” I didn’t feel less female at all—OF COURSE.
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