A woman gets breast cancer and loses her breast. That is very much more serious – it’s a brutal operation, and the breast, unlike the hair, is never coming back – and the woman feels miserable but when she mentions this to friends, they say: “What are you talking about?! You’re alive! Who cares if you have breasts or not? Don’t even worry about it.”
The thing is, some women do worry about it.
The issue of what a woman should – and shouldn’t – think about her body after a mastectomy came up for The Weekly at the launch of Krystal Barter’s book, The Lucky One.
Krystal carries the BRCA1 gene, which puts her at high risk of breast cancer. At age 25, she opted to have both breasts removed.
“I had no trouble saying, I don’t want my breasts anymore,” Krystal said, but she also wanted a breast reconstruction, and she loves the way she looks, with implants.
She asked The Weekly to photograph her in a way that would show off her figure, because she had a point she wanted to make, about the fact that breast removal doesn’t have to mean living without breasts.
The Weekly was hesitant. If this magazine is for anything when it comes to women, we’re for courage. That can be courage in the face of the loss of a child; in confronting discrimination at work; in building a business; and in confronting cancer.
No woman should feel that she needs to be “rebuilt” after a mastectomy, nor undergo extra surgery to feel womanly.
That said, The Weekly is also for freedom: to get married or not; to have a baby or not; to having a breast reconstruction after cancer surgery – or not.
To that end, The Weekly photographed Krystal in a popular, breast-reconstruction T-shirt – “Yes, they’re fake! My real ones tried to kill me” – that seemed to exemplify her message.
To balance the ledger, The Weekly also interviewed women who chose not to have a reconstruction after breast surgery, and talked to them about the decision they made, to go with just the scars and, in one case, with a new set of tattoos, where the boobs used to be.
Krystal is the founder of breast cancer charity Pink Hope.
