the beautiful body project | katherine

This is Katherine, over a year ago, she emailed me and asked if I would be interested in documenting her life while she went through a full double mastectomy and chemotherapy. This has for sure been one of the most touching and eye opening projects I’ve ever worked on. I got to know Katherine pretty well while chatting away during our photoshoots, and every time she left my studio, I was blown away by her positivity while going through such a hard thing in her life.

Will you lose your boobs?  Will you lose your hair?

It must be hard to lose your boobs.  Even my breast cancer surgeon  aka the guy who cut off my boobs 4  times, says “of course you’re upset, you’ve just lost your breasts”.    The medical-oncologist who poured poison thru my body to kill whatever cancer cells there _MIGHT_ be hanging around warned me “you will lose your hair”.

People, my boobs are not mittens.  I didn’t LOSE them.  I had my 36DD boobs cut off because they were trying to kill me.  There’s a difference.

I didn’t LOSE my hair, we just haven’t come up with a better solution to cancer than pouring poison throughout our entire bodies on the off chance there are some cancer cells wandering around…. well cancer cells or any other fast growing cells like hair, nail, nerve, skin cells.  We have raised billions of dollars for cancer awareness and our best shot is to send un-targetted poison thru our entire body to kill anything the looks somewhat like a cancer cell.  Fast-growth cells, the ones chemotherapy targets are not mittens either… I didn’t LOSE my hair, i killed it with poison because that was the only medical option available to me to prevent more cancer from growing.

Stop acting like we’re forgetful airheads that LOSE our body parts.  We didn’t misplace them, they are taken from us because pinkwashing “awareness” is way more fun and easy than the hard science of figuring out how to target cancer cells.  Who wouldn’t rather go for a fancy luncheon at a nice restaurant to discuss cancer awareness campaigns than spend years in a laboratory finding a way to target cancer cells instead of all fast growth cells.

So if i didn’t LOSE my boobs and hair, what did happen?

I didn’t accidently misplace a couple body parts, they were lost in a war. It was a war where one side sent out a volley of 5 major surgeries and 11 minor ones, 27 shots of radiation and 4 major doses of poison.  My side had to withstand the assault and come out the other end — that’s all, but it was a lot.

I am not mad at my boobs.  Cells evolve, they’re s’posed to.  It’s not malicious that some of my boob cells evolved into bad cells; there’s no mastermind determining how cells evolve so I can’t be mad at my body for doing what it does naturally.  It’s the same body that withstood a shitkicking and kept getting back up and healing again and again after every assault.  I am damn proud of my body for the number of times it was cut and healed and it was poisoned and it withstood.

And now, i am flat.  I love being flat…. i look at my scars and I see a year of pain and torture and survival. Letting my breasts go was easy. They didn’t do much for me – i don’t have children to feed with them, I don’t define my femininity with them, i feel more a woman now than i did when i had boobs… so they didn’t really offer me much benefit when i had them.   I feel more myself without my boobs than i ever did with them.  Now, my body is not the standard off the line model, it’s the customized version with parts i chose myself.  And i choose to be flat.

But don’t you dare suggest that I lost my boobs or hair.  Nothing i went thru was accidental or misplaced.  NOTHING.

Whatever YOU decided to do with your body, just remember, boobs are not mittens.