frankenstein

by Christie Page

To put into words what it feels like to look down and see breasts again—my breasts, or at least the closest approximation of them—is almost impossible. The weight, the curves, the way my palms remember the shape even when my eyes don’t… it’s symbolic of something I never realized mattered so much until it was gone.

I don’t give a damn about feminist think-pieces claiming breasts don’t define womanhood. I don’t want to hear about empowerment, or how we’re supposed to transcend our bodies.

I care about my truth.

I’ve been in the medical field nearly twenty years. When the time came for my bilateral mastectomy, I genuinely believed I was prepared. I had worked in plastic surgery. I’d seen the best reconstructions, the worst outcomes, and everything in between. I was young. “Healthy.” A fast healer. Someone who could handle it.

I took my breasts for granted.

It was a love-hate relationship: complaining about their size, living in sports bras, rolling my eyes at the inconvenience—and yet reveling in the attention they brought. They got me out of traffic tickets. They inspired more than a few flirtations. Hell, when I was younger, they even made me money.

I took for granted the role they played in my identity, my sexuality, my marriage. The choreography of touch, the instinctive places you guide your lover’s hands. I took for granted how hard-wired they were into the reality of the men in my life.

I was so optimistic about my own resilience that I refused to let myself feel fear, grief, or vanity.

What a lesson I learned.

If you’re a woman, stand in front of a mirror one morning—no makeup, no clothes, fresh from the shower—and really look at yourself. Most of us immediately catalog every perceived flaw: wrinkles, dimples, rolls, stretch marks, the too-big, the too-small. That’s on a normal day.

Now take that same body and cut off your breasts.

Flatten the chest.

Add a thick scar across each side.

Then try having the same conversation.

Try having sex with your husband.

Try feeling sensual. Desirable.

Try going out with your girlfriends, sitting in the sun as they wear tank tops and sundresses, soft cleavage showing, effortlessly feminine in ways you no longer feel you can access.

Because even if you’re “handling it” on the outside, you know the truth waiting at home in the mirror:

You are not okay.

It is a loss.

You have to learn a new way to accept the body you now occupy.

And I did.

I had a brilliant surgeon who helped rebuild what cancer took from me.

He listened. He understood. He created breasts I grew to love—beautiful, natural, mine in all the ways that mattered. For years, I felt confident again. Human again. Woman again.

Until the night my partner hit me with his truck.

My body became a mangled map of abrasions, lacerations, punctures, road rash—

and my left breast looked like a twisted piece of meat.

That side of my body took the brunt of the hit, the drag, the fall.

Dealing with the accident was traumatic enough—the fact that he caused it, the fact that he withheld the truth, the fact that he stood by his lies. But seeing my body in daylight—the body I had fought so hard to accept—was soul-splitting.

I fractured into so many pieces that night I didn't know if peace would ever return.

I felt incomplete.

I felt damaged.

I felt like everything I had painstakingly stitched together had come undone—threads scattered, fabric ruined.

I felt sorry my body survived what my soul had not.

Writing that still requires me to step away.

It’s not that I wanted to die.

It’s that I felt like I already had—

and was reborn a Frankenstein.

I had learned to love myself after a battlefield of anorexia, bulimia, abuse, and cancer.

I had accepted being loved despite my scars—physical and otherwise.

But he took that from me in an instant and never looked back.

He has never contributed to my medical care.

He has never been held accountable because people enable him—smiling, greeting him, excusing him.

After all, it wasn’t them he destroyed.

That was August of last year.

It has been ten months of internal torment—rage, grief, injustice, confusion—wandering around in a body that felt both familiar and unrecognizable. A body I fought to reclaim and then lost again.

A Frankenstein.

Stitched. Unstitched. Stitched again.

And finally—after many agonizing months—I was blessed once more with an extraordinary surgeon. He removed the implants, excised the deformity and scar tissue (and when everything was removed, the scrub techs said they could see my heart beating beneath my chest wall), and rebuilt me with implants that restored not just shape, but dignity.

He filled the space.

He filled the deformity.

He filled a piece of my soul.

I once again have my femininity.

I once again can face the mirror.

I once again can look down and feel whole.

To feel whole again is immeasurable.

I feel like an ember rising from ashes—

glowing, lifting, igniting again.

I am on my way back

to setting this world on fire.

And still I rise.

Photo of Christie Page

BIO: Christie Page is a bestselling author, poet, and visual storyteller whose work examines trauma, embodiment, resilience, and the strange magic that keeps us alive. Her essays and poetry have been featured in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Elephant Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and more. She is a multi-award-winning poet, a former medical professional of 22 years, and a survivor who writes at the intersection of pain and transformation.