The Two Ziploc Bags I Can't Forget

This is raw, and this is vulnerable.

There are two things I need you to know about this post:

1. It is highly personal

2. It contains strong and possibly triggering visuals

Getting out of our Uber at the hospital, at 5 in the morning, we saw this graffiti, and it stopped me in my tracks. Two hours later, the surgeon was drawing the same red lines on my breasts.

The nurse was sitting close to me, two Ziploc bags by her side. Minutes out of the quirofano, the operating room, I felt good in the same way I have felt good in the past coming off of anesthesia. No pain, and a deep relief that The Thing is over.

I was curious about the two plastic bags, about why they were there, and even more, about what was inside them. So I asked.

Oh, this is what the doctor took out, said the nurse. Then she went on to tell me how many grams each bag held, and well… I couldn’t stop looking.

Pinkish white stuff, some liquid, some chunks, and one bag more full than the other. I was mesmerized, and I gave the nurse my phone so she could take a photo. I zoomed in, I saw pieces of my insides. I felt like a bada** for looking and not being weirded out, me who can barely put a Band-Aid on a cut. That morning, a week ago today, I was very much a grown-up, I was fully present, and I was no wimp.

The next day, with the anesthesia mostly out of my system, I couldn’t shake the images, and their memory disturbed me deeply. Trying to hang on to my bravery, I sent the photo to a friend with his permission (See? No big deal), and that did not help. A week later, I can’t fully shake it off.

Each bag held what I had asked the doctor to remove from each of my breasts.

Receiving a breast reduction had not been a quick decision.

From the age of 15, I have had large breasts, and for the majority of the past 45 years, even though my neck sometimes hurt - which I never related to this amount of weight I was carrying - I had not imagined that there could be an option.

As soon as my breasts had popped out (which seemed to be almost overnight), I noticed how much attention they were getting, often oddly separately from me, my true me. Not being wired to dress or act super sexy, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I sometimes felt as though there were two, well, three of us showing up at parties. In my “baby photo album”, my mom attached an unforgettable photo of me topless in a bright red bathtub, around the age of sixteen - taken by my dad. It has taken me years to admit that, even though yes, we were a French family, it was a little weird.

Then, in my late 20s, I got pregnant and for the next eight years, I was nursing one or the other of my three children. My breasts immediately went from being my everyday, awkwardly attention-getting companions to convenient, efficient tools that kept my babies alive and happy. I liked that role better.

The years passed, and there we were, the three of us. They still received a good amount of attention, and in my 50s, I slowly started to notice how heavy they were. Somehow, that had never crossed my mind before, most likely because they were making so many people happy.

Eventually, I moved to Mexico, and more and more I began to pay attention to myself. Living alone for the first time in pretty much all my life, it felt as though some invisible veil had melted. Because there was no husband/partner/children/big project to give priority to, I suddenly, naturally began to give my desires and also my discomforts more attention. It was as though I could afford to do this without taking anything away from anyone. So I did.

Two summers ago, I took a big breath and embarked on a very intentional process of healing some internal injuries I had received at the age of seventeen. It was hard, it was long, it was slow. I had decided that in the process of healing both the physical part and the emotional part of that chapter, there would 1) be no knife involved and 2) I would always be awake and present. This required searching for second and third opinions, and eventually partnering with a highly talented physician who did what I had been told could not be done. He healed me, and there has not been a day since when I am not grateful for the peace of mind he has given me. To call it a life-changing event feels trivial. Of course, The Voices ask me Hey, why didn’t you do this decades ago?, and to them I say: It must not have been time. I need to trust this.

And this brings us to today, and to why I am sitting in a sweet little house in Coyoacán, Mexico City, with my daughter, feeling a little bit of pain and a lot of gratitude.

Last summer. Hot, hot summer in the jungle, and I, still in awe of the change in my body, a change that had made every morning sweeter for over a year. Living without pain, even if a pain no one ever sees, is a miracle. And as we know, everything has a ripple effect.

The ripple effect for me was that I had become less and less tolerant of feeling uncomfortable. I had seen the power of saying “no more” and of putting energy behind these words. I had felt, more than anything, the Freedom, the body-freedom, the possibility of replacing discomfort with levity.

And all of a sudden, in my 90% humidity casita, I realized that I could no longer stand the underwire bras that had been my partners for decades. Suiting up in the accessories, which I had never ever questioned until That Day, made me want to cry. I tried, I pushed. I couldn’t.

So I did some research and I learned about a company that makes non-underwire bras for large sizes. I ordered one. It was not cheap, and I did not believe that it would work, that it would support me. When it arrived, I could not rip the package fast enough. Sure enough, no wire. It came with specific instructions such as “step into it” and “wait a few days till it adjusts to your body.” I stepped into it, I waited, and you know what? It DID adjust to my body! The stretchy, SCUBA diving-like fabric held me just fine. No wires. It was amazing! I ordered a couple more. And I was so very happy.

And then I was not.

Because in order to hold my heavy breasts without a wire, well… something else had to hold me, hold us. And that something else came in the form of being held pretty darn tight around the rib cage. Which, within a few weeks, also made me want to cry. It was hot - really hot - and I felt as though someone/something was constantly holding me tight - really tight. I couldn’t do it.

A little more research introduced me to a brand of no-wire, lighter bras in really pretty colors. Lacy, cute, they held me, sort of. But by then, something odd had happened: I had peeked behind the curtain. I had allowed myself to believe in the possibility of Freedom and Levity. There was no closing the curtain. And even these little bras felt like prison. They itched (some kind of synthetic fabric), and I was forever readjusting myself within their pretty cups.

Yes, I did try to go braless in a F*** It! way. It didn’t work. The weight, without support, was too much. Negotiating the rocky jungle roads without a bra … well… I’ll just let you imagine.

Then came my “sticky plastic stickers” discovery. They were the first to give me a sense of Freedom. I went to a concert wearing a backless dress and danced and danced. It was amazing. That night, I calculated how many of these I would need for the rest of my life. Could I buy them wholesale? When I saw the blisters on my skin the next morning, I knew that I had once again hit a roadblock.

This is when, in the span of ONE thought, everything changed.

I was standing in my bathroom, once again searching my brain - and the internet - for yet one more option, when I spooked myself.

I heard myself exhale a powerful prayer, the kind I have been accustomed to being answered.

“Please, please, please let me live without a bra.”

In the end, that’s what I wanted. After more than 40 years of being strapped, I wanted to Simply. Not. Wear. A. Bra.

The honesty of that prayer surprised me, and almost at the exact same time, it let me know that I needed to CHOOSE a solution immediately. Because I know Life is always listening, and I knew that unless I chose, Life would choose for me. And for sure, I did not want to have my breasts removed in order to save my health.

Ufff. It was as though a lightning bolt had struck, and yet everything looked the same.

And just like that, even though it had not been on my list of options ten minutes before, Breast Reduction became my solution.

It felt crazy, it felt outrageous, it felt scary, and it felt right.

It took a few months, the way these special things often take. It took magic, too. The first time I brought it up to someone important to me, I held my breath. Hearing the words out of my brain and into the air between us - where they were gently welcomed - was big.

One of my closest friends’ brother is a plastic surgeon, and he had operated on her when she was much younger. She had called her experience life-changing. As have other women who shared their journey with me. I talked with him and a few other doctors. Then I made a commitment with my friend’s brother, I journaled, I let the fear do its thing, I wore the itchy, pretty, lacy bras, and last week, with my daughter by my side, I let him fill two Ziploc bags of my flesh.

It has been a beautiful, intense, guided week. I have felt - and still do - vulnerable. In a few more days, I will be returning to my life in the middle of nature’s wildness, and this scares me a little bit. But I trust that there, too, I will be taken care of.

More than anything, I am in awe.