Goodbye, expander boobs
A love/hate letter to these things that taught me about change
Dear expander boobs,
After six weird months together, it’s time to say goodbye. Today I have my exchange surgery, so you’re getting removed, and I’ll wake up with my new implants.
I thought I would be counting down the days until I got to have you removed, because everyone told me I would hate you. I remember my surgical oncologist telling me about my new “weird alien boobs” (she had a mastectomy too, so she’s allowed to say that), and told me not to worry because eventually, I will “hate my implants less than my expanders.”
And, ok she wasn’t wrong about the alien boobs (TBD on the implants). You’re weird. You’re basically balloons that go in the space where breast tissue used to be, to gradually expand the skin to be ready for implants. At first, mine were filled with a little bit of air. Then the air was taken out and replaced with saline. And then, over the course of a few weeks, my plastic surgeon added more saline until it was enough.
But honestly, you didn’t suck as much as I thought you would. Maybe that’s exactly why - because I was set up to despise you. If I had been told I’d love you, I would have been severely disappointed. But instead, I was - I’m shocked to say - kind of pleasantly surprised.
You’ve looked pretty good (aka normal) in clothes.
And even in bathing suits, for the most part. (If anyone is looking close enough to notice anything weird, they’re too close!)
Do you feel like normal boobs? Absolutely not. You feel like water balloons mixed with metal plates. You have weird lumps (which was extremely triggering the first time I felt an expander lump in the place my cancer lump used to be) and ripples.
But it’s not like most people are squeezing my boobs (and the ones that are have done so with permission, with me saying, “do you want to feel how weird they are??”)... So again, unless you’re getting extremely close to them, they look pretty normal.
And I think that’s what made me ok with you. The fact that you made me feel somewhat normal. I’ve been going through so many adjustments - changes to my body, loss of sensations, figuring out what life as a “cancer survivor” is like. So the fact that I could put on clothes and look in the mirror and not want to scream “WTF?!” made a big difference.
It also helped knowing that you were always going to be temporary. I didn’t have to accept you, because you wouldn’t be around forever. If I didn’t like you, fine. You’d be gone soon.
And you and my body were changing so much in the first couple of months. My pain level was changing, swelling was changing, the amount of sensation I had in my chest was changing, and the size of the expanders was changing.
So every day, I was able to ask myself, “how does it feel now?” And the answer was always different.
It’s leaning into that curiosity that made this process so much more gentle. It’s the permanence that feels scary to me. Because there is so much permanence here. My real boobs are gone forever. I will never again be someone who’s never had cancer.
That’s what makes my incoming implants so scary to me. They’re permanent. Unless something goes wrong, they will be in my body for a long time. And I think that means I have to accept them.
But there’s the thing. Even these “permanent” implants aren’t permanent. I’ll have to get them replaced in 10-15 years, because that’s how it works.
And ugh, here’s where I’m going to get annoying and hit us with a hard truth - harder than the metal plate in these expanders.
Nothing in life is ever truly permanent.
If you don’t trust me, trust ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who put it eloquently: “The only thing constant is change.”
This can be a hard thing to accept, because there are some things in life we wish could last forever. When I’m in a moment of pure joy (or on vacation, like I was recently - see bathing suit beach photo above), I wish it could last forever. And it never can. I wish people could last forever, and dogs, and sunsets, and so many things. But they can’t.
But this harsh reality can also make life’s tough moments more manageable. They won’t last forever either. There will always be something different on the other side (yes, sometimes more hard things. But let’s stay positive - we don’t have time for a spiral today; surgery is in a few hours).
All we really have is this moment - the one happening right now. Sometimes it’s really hard to remember that, because our brains want to replay the past or stress about the future. But for me, remembering to come back to what’s happening and how I’m feeling in this present moment has been really helpful. It helps me get unstuck in some of the moments when it feels like it’s going to be hard forever.
So goodbye, expander boobs. Thanks for holding space (literally) while I figured out how to hold space for change.
You’ll be gone soon, but I want to hold onto this curiosity. I want to keep asking myself, “how does it feel now?” And not just in relation to my boobs.
P.S. What happens to you once the surgeon takes you out of my body? Can I ask to keep you as a souvenir? Sorry, did I just make it weird? You made it weird first.
