This New Me

It's been a year since I haven't had breasts, and I think I’m pretty well adjusted. At first, I thought I was going to have new breasts made from fat taken off somewhere else on my body. It turns out I lack “the right kind of fat,” so, at the last moment, I opted to forgo reconstruction.  

To conjure a picture of what my torso looks like, flat as a board and flat as a pancake don't apply. My chest is not flat. It's two concave spots on either side of a protruding sternum. It’s divots and crisscrosses of scars—some thick, some thin. The weirdest part are the little flaps that were left— “pockets, in case you want implants.” 

The local plastic surgeon apparently doesn't believe that no means no.

My ribs stick out like hills above valleys. Last month, my endocrinologist asked if I’d always had this peculiar deformity. I didn’t know that’s what it’s called, but sometimes I tell people to touch it so they can see that it's bone and not tissue. They are always surprised which lets me know that everyone who sees me probably thinks it’s flesh, like the protruding abdomens common to heavy drinkers. I don't drink. My liver has to be babied at all times. 

I can't even take a Tylenol, much less have a cocktail. 

My mother had breast cancer when I was a little girl. It was present in several lymph nodes. Her chemo at Stanford seemed to go on for years. She’s in her eighties now, having survived stage three colon cancer in her sixties. Her identical twin sister chose a lumpectomy and no treatment but it came back five years later. She passed away the morning after my wedding. My brother died young from melanoma. All of this indicated we might have the BRCA gene mutation in our family. Sure enough, we do. I have to remind myself that being able to become a previvor—when one’s chances of not getting cancer are only twelve percent—seems pretty fantastic in the scheme of things. It’s a miracle of sorts.  

So, below my weird rib protrusion, I have quite a belly, but it’s a side effect of the high dosage steroids that have kept me functioning with my health issues. “It's caused something called Cushing's Syndrome,” says the doctor at Stanford. People who know what that is sometimes ask if I have it, by the roundness of my face and, probably, the hump on my back which I don't really see unless I look. 

This belly and chest remind me of a Buddha figurine. And, weirdly, that makes me smile like one. I look down at myself and there's something baby-like, not just in the concave chest and stuck-out belly, but in the way that it all flops together without any ability to tuck it in self-consciously. 

I rather like this new me. 

-Beri Balistreri

Beri's writing appears in journals from the August 2019 issue of 'Cleaning Up Glitter' to the feminist 'Encodings' and Andrei Codrescu's 'Exquisite Corpse.' She received Literatea's 2019 Golden Pineapple Award for her creative nonfiction essay. Her plays have been produced in Monterey and San Francisco. Her creative MA is from San Francisco State and her MSW is from USC. Her novel 'Woman Murdered' is a domestic suspense available on Amazon and at select bookstores.