What Do You Wear When Your Body No Longer Resembles Itself?

How my body and I reconciled after a mastectomy.

- Lisa Miller

How do you dress for your mastectomy? The surgery itself is easy, actually. During the cutting, you’re wearing nothing at all, unconscious and strapped to a table in a martyr’s pose, arms out in a T, while an OR crew that looks like the cast of a reality show bustles around doing God knows what. But after. What do you wear when your body no longer resembles itself?

The mastectomy veterans who became my sister guides universally recommended the Brobe for the immediate recovery. These advisers were invaluable in so many ways, but at the Brobe I felt I had to draw a line. If maternitywear is an indignity to style-conscious women, then mastectomy wear is far, far worse, and within that realm the Brobe reigns supreme. Nothing more than a wraparound robe with a built-in bra, the Brobe—crucially—has deep interior pockets, the function of which is to hold the gross drainage tubes that protrude from your body after a mastectomy and dangle painfully and disgustingly at your side. If you have a mastectomy, you need some way to support and manage those tubes, and the manufacturers of the Brobe and its imitators have capitalized on this.

Anticipating my mastectomy, I might not have known what to wear, but I knew it wasn’t a freaking Brobe. My rejection of it, I understood, illuminated the darkest corners of my closeted vanity. I didn’t want to have breast cancer, but if I had to have breast cancer, I didn’t want to be target-marketed because of my illness. “Fuck it,” I said to my husband, Charlie, with a stubbornness he recognized.