Life in Plastic

Josh and I sat in the waiting room, an office building with a view of the Manhattan skyline. I stared at the other women, wondering what they were getting done. I wondered how many of them were here not by choice. How many of them had never contemplated getting fake breasts before they learned they had breast cancer. I couldn’t have been the only one. But I was definitely the only pregnant woman getting a boob job in the crowd.

My mom once tried to sell my Barbies at a garage sale. I had twisted off their legs, cut their hair into jagged bobs and painted their faces with blue magic markers. Piled high in a supersized Tupperware bin on the front lawn, they sat between the broken clocks and scribbled books being baked by the clear blue summer sky. The Barbies’ naked, plastic, nipple-less bodies on display for the world to see.

I didn’t want that to be me.

*

“I was sooo sorry to hear about your situation. It’s always bad, but what happened to you is like really, really bad. Just terrible timing,” the surgeon cooed, looking around at the blank faces staring back at her. She pointed at my engorged belly. The baby kicked in response.

My mom had come straight from the airport. She perched next to Josh on the doctor’s stool. I sat across from them on the vinyl exam table. I was clearly on display.

Fumbling through my purse, I tried to stealthily find the transparent orange bottle of Klonopin. I had taken a Klonopin in the elevator on the way up, but the darn thing didn’t seem to be working. I popped the pill into my mouth and swallowed it without water. My psychiatrist told me it was better than going into preterm labor from all the stress. I was choosing to unquestionably believe her.

Two clear balloons filled with some sort of gel emerged from a steel drawer behind the doctor’s back. As they moved closer to me, I saw they were flat on one side like a bosu ball.

The doctor passed around a single implant, asking if we wanted to feel it. When the ‘foob’ reached my mom, she flung it at Josh—as if she were involved in a game of hot potato.

“I think this is a decision for you and Josh to make by yourselves. I don’t think I should be a part of it,” she stammered, the redness on her face rapidly spreading to her neck like an allergic reaction. The fact that she was still sitting in this room emphasized the seriousness of my situation. Normally, she’d have run away by now.

After casually tossing the implant back and forth between his hands like a hacky sack, Josh handed it back to the doctor.

“These are the most natural-looking model,” the surgeon explained, slam-dunking the implant back into the drawer. “But if you’d like, I can show you what I call the gummy bears. They are a little firmer, so they create a more cleavage-like effect.”

“Might as well have porn star boobs, if you’re going to have fake boobs,” I joked.

“No, porn star is the next level of firmness,” she said. Deadpan.

The redness in my mom’s face turned almost purplish.

“What about a DIEP flap?” I asked the doctor. My mother-in-law had opted for a DIEP flap—using fat grafted from her stomach for breast reconstruction, as opposed to implants. Now that was a surgery I could get behind.

“Given that you’re pregnant, I don’t think fat grafting is an option for you,” she said to my stomach.

“What about my thighs? Could you use fat from my thighs?” I had despised my thighs ever since summer camp when that pipsqueak Adam had called me “thunder thighs”. I hadn’t donned a pair of shorts since.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Pull down your pants,” the doctor commanded.

I tried to prop my pregnant belly up on my elbows, so I could wriggle out of my maternity jeans, feeling like I was reenacting Shamu’s lunchtime performance at SeaWorld. With much effort, I managed to pull the jeans down to my ankles and roll forward into a seated position. Upon which I noticed that the paper lining on the chair had become stuck to my sweaty thighs. I clenched my thighs together, hoping no one else would notice, and stealthily tried to shift my body in order to hide the paper stuck to my bum. But that just made it worse. The motion resembled a pregnant cat wiping its butt on the carpet.

The doctor pulled out a blue Sharpie and knelt before me, as if she were about to perform a sex act. She tickled my legs with the marker, making disheartened noises. I took it as confirmation that what she saw on my legs was, as I’d suspected, deeply troubling.

“Don’t worry the marker will wash off after a shower or two,” she said, noticing my alarm at the Picasso emerging between my legs. “But I have some unfortunate news. Your thighs are the wrong kind of fat.”

She stood up and frantically began drawing stick figures on the whiteboard. We watched her illustration with rapt attention.

“Most people have fat inner thighs. But you have fat outer thighs.” She emphasized just how fat by drawing line after line on the board, further increasing the girth of the stick figure’s outer thighs.

“Got it,” I said. I wasn’t sure what was more disappointing—finding out I had breast cancer or finding out my thighs were the wrong kind of fat.

“So, we’ll go with the gummy bears, I guess.” I said in the same casual tone one employed when deciding between heirloom and field tomatoes at the farmer’s market. Once it became clear I was not going to come out of this with thin legs, my momentary excitement evaporated. I wanted this to be over.

“So, the surgery will likely be as soon as possible after the birth. As soon as you can be cleared for surgery, that is.”

“But I need to be able to pick up my baby. She’ll be a newborn,” I squeaked, sweat soaking my armpits. “Will that be a problem?”

“You can lift up to ten pounds for the first two weeks.”

My slightly premature infant would likely weigh significantly less than 10 lbs. I could definitely pick her up. Then I realized there was no way I’d be able to pick up my one-year-old son. I instinctively reached for the bottle of Klonopin. Both fates registered as equally devastating: dying from untreated breast cancer, being unable to pick up my son. Rationally, I knew otherwise. But it didn’t matter.

At thirteen months, unlike my future baby, my son actually knew I was his mom. His mom, who had just saddled him with a sibling at far too young an age, would then have to refuse to sweep him up in her arms. Each rejected uppy a stomp on his nascent heart.

And the worst part was he would not be able to understand that it was all for him. Everything I was doing was for them.

“But it’s one surgery, right?” I begged.

“Normally, it takes two. During the first surgery, we come in after the surgeon has removed all the breast tissue and place expanders in to expand the cavity, so we have room for the implant. Later, there’s a minimally invasive surgery to swap out the expanders for permanent implants.”

My skin grew hot, as her words pummeled me in the chest. I didn’t have time for two effing cosmetic surgeries. I had children to get back to. Why didn’t anyone see that I was a mother? I didn’t have time for this.

“I have an idea!” I could see the light bulb gleaming in the thought bubble above her head. She came over to me and started gingerly pinching the fatty tissue at the top of my breast. I flinched, trying to slide my body away. Rubbing the skin between her thumb and index finger, she said, “Your skin has great elasticity. We may be able to do it all in one surgery!”

I nearly jumped into the diminutive doctor’s arms, all but knocking her over with the weight of my 33-week pregnant body.

She was a good doctor, after all.

In spite of her body-shaming comments, she had heard and understood what was most important to me. I didn’t care how I’d look in a bikini in my hypothetical future. I wanted to be with my kids now.

I thought back to the naked Barbies. I pictured my pesky little brother using a magnifying glass to melt the curved plastic mounds on their chests into deformed blobs—the same way he had torn off their heads. One of the dolls was a pregnant Barbie my mom had bought for me when she was pregnant with my brother. Some imitation doll from China that was made out of thin plastic with blue eyeshadow and a red felt maternity dress. Underneath her pop-off belly, there was a cavernous space with a curled-up baby inside. By the time she was relegated to the yard sale, the hole in her middle lay exposed for the world to see, like a gaping wound.

I had lost the baby. I’d searched my whole house. But the tiny, helpless doll was gone.

That would definitely be worse than losing my breasts.

-Jenny Leon

Jenny's writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, Motherwell, Kveller, HuffPost Canada and HerStry amongst others. Her essay "Am I Still Your Mother" was nominated by HerStry for a Pushcart Prize in 2024 and she has been shortlisted for the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize twice. She is working on a forthcoming memoir about the grief she experienced after being diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant and the resilience she found to have another child.