newsbrief:
Early mastectomies can curb cancers.

Being a woman, I decide to read this article that is titled with a female-related word: mastectomy. First let me personally define the word mastectomy for you: removal of a breast. But to define a breast? What IS the thing that makes a woman most noticeably female? Breasts maybe give the body more curves: supposedly a sign of beauty. Many women are told to enhance their curvy bodies by society and end up extra feminine in clothes that identify them as curvier than men. Some women look at their breasts as wonderful sacred attachments that make them truly beautiful in a spiritual sense because they believe that nursing a baby is important to bond etc.

Let me state that women also have problems with their breasts, not from a health but a personal standpoint; too big, too small, many women find themselves the wrong size for the "look" they wish to accomplish. Other women feel uncomfortable with them because breasts may draw unwanted attention to them from others.

So stating that breasts in both good ways and bad ways are a big ISSUE for women, I will continue.

This article, which I will have to attach here, claims that removing both breasts WHILE THEY ARE HEALTHY is an effective, if radical, way of preventing breast cancer. The women they are suggesting should have this done are women at high risk for the disease. This really got me thinking. At first I was annoyed with the article: Obviously, if the breasts are gone, no cancer will develop in them. Duh, I think.

Then I start to think to myself, would I have this done if I were high risk? What are breasts to me anyway? Are they merely these blobs of flesh on my body that could easily be removed and I would still feel like myself? I don't think so.

I would feel "efeminated" (which should be a word, since women do have an identity that could be ruined by wayward scalpels). I would be depressed that these things on my body were gone even though I spent years of my life wishing they would go away. I lost all of my close to nil athletic ability when they grew on me. I don't know why but I havent been able to balance well since then. But I always had this grudge against them as a teenager because they kept dresses from fitting the right way, my body from being the sleek and skinny thing I wished it were, and they drew way too much attention for my tastes. Yet they grew on me, GREW on me psychologically as well as physically.

My Breasts have made me who I am. As a woman of the 90's, I don't think many people could remember my name and remember my face without my chest connected to it. It's just always shaped who I was: to myself, to the guys I liked that only wanted a flat-chested girl, to the guys I didn't like that wanted to get their hands on me. My entire soap-opera adolescence was based on these things and how much I wished they were different. But I love myself today, and I would not be me if it were not for their precocious beginnings.

So would I have them removed? If they were still HEALTHY?? How many women are so brave as to just have them removed? Would they think, "that's it now I won't have to worry?" My guess is that women will, for the most part, opt to keep their appearance the same until removal is absolutely necessary. It isn't vanity, it isn't stubborn defiance of the odds. It's being sentimental. Respecting how we became ourselves.