Mandy, breast-cancer survivor

Shooting with Mandy was one of the most important experiences of my career as a photographer. A breast-cancer survivor, she reached out to me and asked why I'd never done a shoot with women who "aren't whole," as in, women bearing the scars of mastectomy surgery. I'd never had the opportunity before! She's a painter, so I asked her to paint something I could incorporate into the shoot (she chose to do a painting of her perception of her own body), and I also asked her to write something before and after the shoot, to reflect her state of mind. I am including both the Before and After, and you can see how stark the change was!

As a woman I suppose I am supposed to feel some sense of accomplishment having birthed and breastfed three children. I fulfilled my biological purpose. For a short time I did feel accomplished. I was proud of what I had done. Not all women can do that, and I happened to be one of the lucky ones. I was secure in my sense of self acceptance. Then the diagnosis came when I was 36. Breast cancer.

I was told I had to endure a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. All of which would ultimately change the woman I had grown to finally accept and love.

After the mastectomy I became very angry. I started feeling useless and unattractive. I mean, come on! Who would want to look at a woman with one normal breast and a reconstructed fraction of a breast for the other? The reconstructed one has no nipple. There is a 7-inch scar across my skin where I once had stretch marks from my years of breast feeding. The skin is so thin you can literally see the implant just under the surface. There is a criss-cross pattern to the new “foob” because the surgeon had to create a new pocket to hold the implant because there just wasn’t enough skin and fat to do it more naturally. The right side is noticeably smaller than the left, so wearing normal clothes and bras is just ridiculous-looking. But hey, I’m alive, right? Not really.

Your new body becomes the new norm and you learn to try and just ignore it. Yes, there is constant pain, not just physically, but emotionally, too! Every single time I look in the mirror I see what cancer did to me. It has left me a broken woman. What I once considered to be moderately beautiful in an understated sort of way is now completely hideous to me. I cannot look at my bare chest in the mirror without feeling shame and anger.

I HATE what cancer has done to me. I remember reading a list once that another cancer survivor wrote detailing all of the things that cancer could not take from you. While reading the list I remember thinking, “Bullshit.” Cancer can and will take everything from you at one point or another. It stole my happiness. It stole my vitality. It stole ME.

I have tried time and again to find the original Mandy. Time and again I fail. I am just a mere whisper of the girl I used to be before breast cancer. A muted version of the woman who loved life so completely she was up for anything!

When I look in the mirror I see damaged goods. I see someone who will never be as alive as I was before cancer. The hell that chemo and rads put my body through is insane. Most people are under the impression that cancer patients lose all kinds of weight when they get sick because they can’t keep food down from the chemo drugs. Not true. In fact most patients gain 10-30 pounds during treatment because the chemo drugs cause fatigue, body pain, dizziness, and yes, nausea. Fatigue and pain so intense you wish you could just sleep through it, or it would kill you. I was there. Wishing it would just end. Most of the time I spent sleeping or lying around because my body just could not function like I thought it should have. So here I am, 25 pounds fatter than I was before chemo and mad as hell at everything.

You would think that some of that fat I gained would have collected in my breast, but that will never happen. The mastectomy took all chances I had for that to happen.

The scars. The scar’s a constant reminder that breast cancer is a killer. The small scar across my left breast is a reminder that I fought back, but the big one. The big scar where my once-lovely mommy boob used to be kills me. I miss her. The girl I used to be. I wish she would or could come back and make me whole again. I am tired of people looking at me with pity in their eyes. The woman I was before? I don’t know her anymore.

This is the new me. Somehow, someway I have to learn to love her. I just find it impossible to do right now. Maybe one day I will piece myself back together and feel worthy. Maybe one day.

Contrast that spirit with what Mandy wrote after the photoshoot experience:

Before today’s experience I honestly thought that my scars were something I NEEDED to keep hidden from the world. I thought they brought shame to me as a woman. That they were a scarlet letter on my femininity. I was wrong. Women and men do not need two nipples to be whole. We are perfectly beautiful the way we are.

My hopes for this shoot were initially about finding my personal comfort and acceptance of myself again. I thought, if I could get through this—through having someone other than my medical team look at me, REALLY look at me and see the woman I am and not cringe—then my body is not as horrifying to others as I had lead myself to believe. For the last two years I have had this mental picture of how others see me. It wasn’t pretty. I learned that it wasn’t other people’s perception that I was afraid of. It was my own.

Being outside today at the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge was soul-soothing. Baring my skin was even more so. I was reminded that every now and then I need to reset my senses and just breathe. Not everything is perfect, and that’s okay. I learned that things don’t always go as planned because things happen. Things change. Something better is in store if you just go with it.

I want others like me who feel inadequate or incomplete to know that I understand. You’re not alone. There are few things in this world scarier than feeling broken and helpless. It’s actually quite natural to feel these things after a huge event in your life, but don’t dwell on it. It has only helped shape you, not completely define you. You can be brave enough to be broken. There is a story written in the stars that makes it worth it just to bare the scars. Left foot forward, and then our right. It’s not over. We’ve still got fight. We may not be able to see where this is all heading, but keep going until there’s no more fear inside.

I learned that I can’t go back to the way I was. She’s not here anymore. I have blossomed into something far more beautiful and worthwhile. Something internally unyielding in my desire to live and help others.

Selfishly I want someone to see this and say, “If she can do this. If she can bare her body and soul to heal her weary spirit, I can, too.” If just one person can look at this and find self acceptance, then my heart will be full of love and compassion. I will be able to say that this part of my journey on this Earth was not wasted. When that happens I can honestly say that this day, and this life, was not wasted.

Mandy did the painting herself (a painting depicting how she viewed her own body), and I used Photoshop to digitally map the painting onto her skin.