Staying in the Picture: Coping With Summer and Body Image Difficulties After Breast Cancer

“Psst! You left something in your cart!”

“Come back! We have a special deal for you!”

“Your item is selling out FAST!”

The above are actual email subject lines from online retailers, at whose sites I’ve browsed bathing suits and swim cover-ups and breezy summer dresses and — God help me — shorts. Almost all of which I ultimately abandon in my virtual cart, unable to pull the trigger and complete the purchase.

They want me back. But even now — three years after breast cancer barreled unwelcome into my life, and three years after the radical, lifesaving but also life-altering surgery I chose as treatment — I’m not back. Not yet.

It’s the body image, stupid. I use that specific word because, though I clearly know better, I fall for the enticement of those retailers time after time, such as when a sundress follows me around the internet for a week, cajoling me into believing that it’ll hang on my form in a way that approximates how it hangs on the model’s. That I’ll feel as good as she looks. That I, too, can still be light and breezy, chic and confident.

In these post-cancer years, my body image issues went from garden-variety negative to nearly insurmountable. Put simply: Shopping used to be merely frustrating. Now it makes me cry.

It’s not just the cancer, of course: Outfitting my body for the summer months hasn’t been simple since I was a heedless teen grabbing short shorts and bikini tops and “borrowing” my sister’s miniskirts (hey, it was the ’80s). It’s almost a cliché that a woman (me!) in her late fifties in America, who grew up awash in glossy women’s magazines, would have body image issues.

But breast cancer took that cliché and turned it inside out. Because now it’s less about the image and more about the body, which physically, fundamentally, isn’t the same.

It's hard to have a nondistorted image about a body that, sometimes, I barely recognize.

How all this works in reality — or in a virtual or actual dressing room — is tough to explain. I had a double mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction (removal of both breasts followed by reconstruction using tissue from my abdomen). My surgery was textbook perfect. I emerged, when the swelling went down, with roughly the same size breasts as before. My dress size is pretty much the same, too, with some medication- and menopause-induced pounds. But (not to be too graphic about it) when you move body parts around, the body is never going to be the same.

I try to shop, because I do need some things and I do like to feel breezy and cute in the hot summer months (see: glossy women’s magazines; I haven’t looked at one in two decades but man, those messages burrow deep). Where someone else may be able to pop into a store, try on five summer dresses and look good in three or four of them, I pick up five cute dresses and maybe, maybe one of them won’t make me feel like a block of wood or a strange female Frankenstein’s monster, with the seams falling in all the wrong places, as though the garment rearranged itself as I was pulling it on.

I try my best not to feel sorry for myself.

I try my best to hear my husband’s words in my head: “You’re beautiful. You’re perfect. I wish you could see what I see.”

I try to explain this all not to draw pity, but to offer help. Because if I’ve been sure of one thing in the last three years it’s this: These feelings aren’t mine alone.

May it, now?

I do not say this to disrespect the NIH, or any researcher who studies the profound impact of breast cancer and its treatments on women’s emotional well-being. It’s good to get the word out, and I hope it’s something healthcare professionals who care for women like me can begin to understand.

But can we instead study how women like me can rebuild a new body image? Like everything cancer-related, it’s not about getting back but getting through. You have to get in there and muscle your way toward something different, rather than try to recapture something that’s gone.

What I understood in the initial months after surgery was that there would be a period of adjustment. What I did not understand was that it would be lifelong. I’m sorting through questions. Chiefly: what is body image, exactly? Is it the image in the mirror, the one in my head, or both of them overlaid on each other? When I try to tease out what took the biggest hit after cancer, I realize it’s something else entirely. It’s deeper, more core. It’s self-understanding. It’s identity. It’s who I am.

I’m in a struggle right now to relearn who that woman is — in time (hopefully) to rebuild a positive self-image as I get older.

I’m working on it.

One thing I’m doing is looking back at photos, specifically beachy ones, and not from when I was that heedless teen with the effortlessly good legs (God, I miss that girl), but from much more recently. Maybe at first I thought this would be something like exposure therapy. Maybe I thought I could, if I tried, see what my husband sees, or normalize this new me by just staring at it.

But as I did so, something that really should have been glaringly obvious struck me instead. I’m in the photos. As in, I showed up, in bathing suits and tank tops and sundresses, and was photographed. I got in front of the camera. I was there.

I clicked through an album of photos from a vacation to Mexico I booked for my family the year after my treatment. I was expecting to see that the bathing suit I bought for that trip didn’t exactly flatter me, that I bought it resigned to the notion that a suit that flattered me didn’t exist. But then another thought occurred to me. No matter what I felt at the time, I did buy the suit. And I packed it. And I wore it. In the sun, in Mexico, on a snorkeling excursion, with my husband and my sons because I wanted to spend the time, to treat us all after a hard year, to drink the fruity drinks, to eat the nice food.

I’m in the photos.

It’s only a start. It’s an inkling that this — that I — can be repaired. Because it’s still me in there. I’m there. I’m here.