№ 00136: My breasts

F*ck cancer, embrace poetry

I usually release lost objects into the world on Mondays, but this week has been extra busy, and Monday evening I had to go get my breast MRI screening, which I have annually in addition to a mammogram due to my high risk status as a carrier of the BRCA-2 gene mutation.

And I was thinking of № 00136, as I was lying face down with my breasts dangling in a hole and an IV in my arm and giant magnets banged and clanged around me.

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: My breasts

Color: caucasian

Size: 34B

Approx. date lost: 15 February 201(?)

Location: Phoenix, Arizona

Here is what claimant № 00136 had to say:

“Cancer in both breasts at age 44. mary oliver helped me make sense of it all.”

When I found out I had the BRCA gene, which significantly increases your risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer, I was immediately put into a pipeline of protocols that have been developed over the last decades to prevent cancer before it starts. I was given pamphlets on bilateral mastectomies, which I could elect to do now, to reduce my risk to near 0. I was also told that I should get my ovaries removed after 40.

I spent a lot of time researching mastectomies, the different options for reconstruction, going on online forums for BRCA “pre-vivors” and looking at mastectomy tattoos on Instagram.

👋🏻 Yours truly in the changing room, ready for my MRI this Monday

Ultimately, I decided to take a cautious but conservative approach and am opting for “surveillance”, ie, scans every 6 months. The surgeon kind of looked at me askance, like, you risk your life over losing your boobs?

I share this because I have thought deeply, dear claimant, about what it means to lose that part of you.

And I am glad that you’re here. Usually I focus on the lost object in order to reclaim it, either corporeally or intangibly, and we can do that here. But also, I’m happy that we have science, that you are alive, thanks to yeeting those teats (sorry).

I’m sitting here trying to write a transition between “yeeting teats” and esteemed contemporary poet Mary Oliver, and I’m giving up. There is no transition.

Learning I have BRCA at 34 gave me my first understanding (of many more to be sure) that no matter what we do, our bodies can change in ways that we do not want or like.

There was freedom in this. There is pressure in this world to keep your body to a narrow set of expectations, and self-blame (even if just unconscious) can infect us with a fear that if we don’t maintain ourselves — our shape, our skin, our hair — it could lead to irreversible damage.

But thinking about a mastectomy taught me that no matter what we do, shit happens and our bodies can change and you know what? You should just get that tattoo you want. You should claim the space in your body that you want without fear.

So that brings me to Mary Oliver, the source of claimant No. 00136’s grounding. I tried to think about if there were any poems, in particular, that you may have turned to to make sense of this loss. I don’t know if this one was one of them, but for me, it called to mind this same feeling of marveling in the different ways that a body can be in the world, and the way that beauty manifests.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

– Mary Oliver