Free Breasts by Florence Williams Page B

She then fell hard in love with a steelworker, who talked her into getting a big tattoo. A red rose on her right breast said, “Fred,” one on her left breast, “Timmie,” and in between bloomed yet another rose. But Fred was a womanizer and things didn’t work out. At a checkup, Timmie Jean’s doctor audibly gasped when he saw her chest. Feeling ashamed and depressed, she went to Houston’s public hospital, Jefferson Davis, for dermabrasion. That’s where she met Cronin’s chief resident, Frank Gerow. He was another man with a plan for her breasts.
    I found Timmie Jean in a small unincorporated town east of Houston. With both Cronin and Gerow dead, she is, on the fiftieth anniversary of her historic implant surgery, the best remaining artifact of the era. Nothing in Houston commemorates the event or the hundreds of millions of dollars that breast implants would soon be pumping into the medical and legal communities. But then again, Houston is not a looking-back kind of place.
    “That’s how it all started,” said Timmie Jean, who’s now seventynine and, to my jaundiced eyes, surprisingly healthy for having been a surgical guinea pig. A robust and gracious redhead, she works the night shift at a nearby nursing home that no doubt houses a few people considerably younger than she. She welcomed me to the same house in which she has lived for the last fifty years, though the house, much like her chest, has undergone some augmentation, including a couple of small additions to the original shotgun floor plan. Tan with red shutters, it sits not far off Interstate 10, next to a boat-and-generator repair shop and across the street from two large chemical holding tanks. We sat on a couch covered with crocheted afghans in a room crowded with pictures of her children and grandchildren. A straw-hat collection decorated one wall, and in the nextroom, an upside-down pink umbrella served as chandelier above the dining table. Now a widow, Timmie Jean shares the house with her daughter Pamela.
    “Unbeknownst to me, implants were in development and they were looking for young women to be the first to have them,” she told me in a gravelly Texas twang. “So they brought it up to me. They asked me, would I like to be in a study to have implants? I’d never even dwelled on [my breasts]. I was okay with what I had. After six children I guess they were kind of saggy. I said, ‘You know, what I really want is to have my ears pinned back.’ My brother had teased me my whole life. They said, ‘Yeah, we’ll fix your ears too.’ ”
    So in a move that would never pass today’s institutional review boards, Timmie Jean got a cosmetic surgery she didn’t want in exchange for one she did. She went from a size A or B cup to a size C. “I have to tell you,” she said, “they said it would boost my confidence, but I had plenty of confidence.” With new breasts and new ears, though, more men did notice her. But there were drawbacks. At the time, she worked in a dress factory, and as a perfect size 12, she was the in-house model. But her new breasts no longer fit into the shirtwaist dresses of the time. And within five or ten years, she said, her implants hardened and sometimes caused shooting pains in her chest. She wasn’t able to do aerobics or certain exercises because of the pain. She is self-conscious if anyone hugs her. She has also suffered from rheumatism, and has had two knees and a thumb joint replaced, but she doesn’t know if her immunesystem troubles were caused by the silicone in her body or by a life of unceasing hard work.
    Around the time of her surgery, the doctors asked her if she knew anyone else for their study, and so she recruited her sister-in-law and her sister-in-law’s sister-in-law. Over the years, like many women, they also had problems with hardness, pain, ruptures, and symptoms of illness they believed were related to the implants. Her relatives eventually joined a class-action lawsuit against Dow