The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

JANUARY 24. ONE MASTECTOMY, TO GO

137 and crushed the pills. Linc bought me flowers. My neighbor Anand wanted me to put the resulting powder in an urn. Or burn it. Or sell it on the street. I gathered the bits into a pill bottle and put it in a gold mesh bag and I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I think it should stay enclosed so that it doesn’t immediately contaminate the lake. My friend Don sent me a study not long ago about fish containing Prozac because people excreted the drugs, which went into the water supply. Really, what’s the harm? Just a littler gentler fish and human population . And what’s wrong with that? JANUARY 20. REPLACING, REFILLING, ENDING, NOT ENDING The New York Times reported Thursday on problems with breast implants . First of all, they don’t last and have to be replaced. Second of all, they can leak and spill and scar. All good reasons not to have an implant, Linc said, reading over my shoulder. But you notice women ’s breasts, I said. I didn’t marry you for your breasts, he said. He’s against all elective surgery. But wants me to do what I want to do. I sound like I’m arguing in favor of implants. I kept thinking I would have an implant after I got down to my ideal weight, because if you get an implant and lose weight, the breast stays the same size. But the more and more I live with one breast, the more natural it seems. And the more I hear about how you always feel the implant floating inside you, the less inclined I am to get the surgery. And the ones that use your belly fat are safer but require a long operation and recovery. And you have a big scar across your stomach. I do have the requisite raw material, though. I have to admit that I’ve been feeling lazy for not replacing my breast. Maybe feeling lazy and slatternly for going around braless and one-breastless. O gosh, lost a breast and didn’t even sew one back on. As if it were a button fallen off a coat. JANUARY 24. ONE MASTECTOMY, TO GO You’ve no doubt heard of drive-by surgeries—the derisive term coined by health reformers for inadequate hospital stays mandated or permitted by health insurance companies. I thought of fast mastec- 138 tomies as I read a profile of photographer Lee Miller (1907–1977) in the January 21 New Yorker. In Paris, she took jobs that her mentor and lover Man Ray passed down to her. One of these assignments was to take pictures of operations at the Sorbonne medical school. The year was 1930. We’re told: Having watched a mastectomy, she asked the surgeon if she could keep the amputated breast. She arrived for a fashion shoot at the studio of French Vogue in a buoyant mood, carrying this grisly trophy on a dinner plate, then photographed it at a place setting, next to a knife and fork. Serve that at your dinner party, Judy Chicago! The two small contact prints of a breast on a white plate were shown for the first time in a recent retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The show ended earlier this month. Miller’s son told the Times of London a different story: she was in the operating room not on assignment, but because she was having an affair with the surgeon . The doctor invited her to take pictures and gave her the breasts because she asked for them. (As a sign of his love? Did the patient on the operating table wonder where her breasts had gone? Could she have imagined that what had been inside her would suddenly be put on a plate like the head of John the Baptist? That woman is the unknown soldier.) Opines the Times: For years [Miller] had been celebrated for the beauty of her breasts. At one time, her breasts had even inspired the design of a champagne glass. Images of her face and body, particularly her breasts, had been snipped up by Man Ray as part of his reductive process of control. ‘What did all that do to her, I wonder,’ says [son Tony] Penrose. ‘The knowledge that men loved her body. Here she was, saying, “OK, you revere breasts. OK, here’s one. Have it. Eat it.”’ And the shoot took place in...