Free Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy by Geralyn Lucas Page A

a sundae without a cherry on top. Dr. P must have read my mind and kept flipping the pages until we arrived at some tight shots of nipples. I am confused but she explains that she made those nipples. Nipple tattoos. She folded skin on the reconstructed mound to make a little pucker and then tattooed it a nipple color.
    I think I was even more surprised when Tyler told me that there’s a doctor at Mount Sinai who is famous for his nipples. Strange specialty. Especially when introducing oneself at a cocktail party. But now I was relieved that there were experts in this type of thing. Maybe I could be whole again. Maybe I could get a fabulous reconstructed breast and even a nipple. Maybe I could pass.
    Dr. P explained that there were choices on how to build my new boob: traditional implants or a tummy tuck where stomach fat was used to build a new breast. (After some serious pinching Dr. P told me I didn’t qualify because I was too skinny.) Another option involved a “donation” from another part of the body. The only fat source I had was on my butt and yes, that was where she would take it from. How strange. If I was going to lose my breast, why would I want to lose my ass, too? I still want to be a piece of ass. It just didn’t make sense. Especially after I asked what my ass would look like after the donation? There was even a photo in the book to show what that looked like: like a shark bite.
    Dr. P told me that she would insert a special breast implant called an expander when my breast was removed. It is a temporary one, a place holder boob that she will keep blowing up with fluid to stretch the skin so that when she switches in a regular implant my skin will slope and look like a natural breast.
    I was just so relieved that there would be a mound there when I woke up.
    After I saw Dr. P, I needed to ask Tyler what would happen to my breast after it was cut off of me in the OR. Would it just be thrown away? Would my nipple end up in some garbage dump somewhere? Tyler reassured me it would be refrigerated in a pathology lab, and somehow the idea of my nipple in some large refrigerator in a Tupperware container marked “Lucas-nipple” was an odd comfort. He probably made this up and I am so grateful. Like a kid who needs to believe in Santa, I need to believe my nipple is not just being thrown away.
    But now I will see the reconstruction results on me and not in that breast book. Dr. B has finished removing the dressing and he’s begging me to look. “Geri, come on, open your eyes.”
    When I open my eyes all I can see on my chest is a bright red line that looks like I took a Sharpie indelible marker and drew a diagonal line exactly where my right breast used to be. There are stitches that look like black spiders climbing up the red line, and except for the red line down the middle, it is a regular smooth skin mound that sort of looks like a breast mound. I try to remember what had been there only days before but I can’t.
    I think about the Tupperware to calm myself down. Dr. B and I look at each other. I just nod and I feel relief that the curtain has been pulled away. Dr. B readjusts the bandages and tapes them back over my mound. No more hiding. No more mystery. This is my new breast.
    Now I need to show Tyler.
    After five days in the hospital, they send me home with the plastic drains still sewn into my chest. I need to keep emptying them every few hours and keep measuring the fluid coming out to make sure that I am not bleeding too much. I want to leave the house, but I don’t own any shirt that fits over these milk quart–sized plastic containers. Tyler lends me his Tulane sweatshirt and I put on some lipstick and finally leave the house for a sushi dinner with my parents. It feels so good to be out of the hospital and to eat my dinner off of Japanese pottery instead of a plastic tray and plastic containers. But every bite of food and every swallow feels like it is pulling the milk quarts down on my chest