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My grandma always changed her clothes in the closet. But I saw her scars once. After two bouts of breast cancer, she was left with no breasts. She wore tentlike dresses, with fabric that flowed.
When he was six, my brother named my mom’s wig Gloria. Mom was going through chemotherapy that made her hair fall out in clumps. Years later I spent a week in the hospital as she recovered from a mastectomy; radiation treatment from her prior breast cancer had led to a dangerous breast angiosarcoma, a kind of cancer that forms in the blood vessels and lymph nodes.
I never knew my great aunt Berthie. She died of breast cancer in her 30s.
For most of my life, I have been haunted by these kinds of memories. And since the second half of my 20s, I have gone every three to six months for a rotation of MRIs, ultrasounds, physical breast exams, and, more recently, 3D mammograms. The imaging often picks up potential problems because my breasts are especially dense, so I go back for more. This is what I am supposed to do as someone with a family history that puts me in the high-risk category.
Three years ago a cousin had a preventative mastectomy. She had a BRCA2 mutation from her dad’s side, which gave her an estimated risk of developing breast cancer during her lifetime between 55 and 69%. Eight years earlier, Angelina Jolie published an op-ed in The New York Times about her decision to get the surgery based on her BRCA1 mutation. I was happy that she was making women aware of this, but it didn’t occur to me that I might find myself in a similar sort of situation. I had no known mutation—just a very strong family history of early-onset breast cancer.
Doctors use several mathematical formulas to estimate risk for people like me, inputting things like pregnancies, birth-control use, age of menses, and family history. About a year ago, after a biopsy prompted me to transfer to a renowned cancer center, I was ultimately told that I have a 42% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. More genetic mutations were discovered in 2019, they noted, so scientists may one day identify a mutation in my family, at which point that number could be higher.
I learned that with my risk profile, my new doctors and health insurance company considered preventive surgery a reasonable choice. Of course, not even all women with a known mutation choose surgery. Some just monitor frequently as I had been; some add in chemoprevention pills, medication that lowers your risk but has side effects.
As a mom with three young kids, I came to see surgery as the most straightforward way of avoiding the chemotherapy and radiation that had battered the bodies of my family members and extending my own life. Removing all of my breast tissue—and later putting implants in its place—could change my statistics like no other intervention we have at this point.
I carefully picked a mastectomy date seven months out, one that would give me enough time to process my feelings, back out if needed, and plan and prepare. I found a surgery mentor through the hereditary-cancer organization FORCE, looked into remote-control recliner-chair rentals, and allowed a friend to send out a MealTrain sign-up, along with spreadsheets through which people volunteered to host my kids for weekend playdates and drive me to appointments. Since I had months to workshop my mastectomy plan, several friends had suggested various versions of Bye Bye Boobs parties: a boob cake, a boob piñata. But I wanted a more meaningful commemoration.
“This is all about you,” Tara Sehmi, 27, Studio Bust’s lead scanner said to me as I entered a pop-up space set up by the company. Studio Bust was established in 2021 in the UK, founded on the idea that women should have an artistic, tasteful way to celebrate their changing bodies. The company uses body-scanning technology to produce anatomically accurate statues of a woman’s body. Last summer it set up at Manhattan’s 11 Howard. I had been tiptoeing toward the surgery date for months and was now reckoning with the fact that this was one of my last months with my body in its current form.
Sehmi let me into a dim bathroom, where “As You Are” was emblazoned on the mirror—a removable decal she brought with her. I wasn’t quite ready to strip down, so I asked her how she got into this line of work. She had worked at Victoria’s Secret in London during university, so she was comfortable with nudity and knew how to be sensitive to women at various life stages.
Sehmi told me about a recent client, a girl who had been in a car accident and was warned she might not be able to walk again: “She was in the session, fully mobile. It was three years since the accident. She’s got a huge scar from her chest all the way down her stomach. She was like, ‘I want to make sure it’s in it.’” I thought about how I had no notable scars yet, just anxiety about all my future scars.
Sehmi asked me if I wanted suggestions from her verbally or physically, like a Pilates teacher might provide. “Definitely fine with physical tweaks,” I reassured her, thinking of my years training at a professional ballet company. By this point we had spoken about Sehmi’s undergraduate dissertation and its feminist bent, so I asked: Do I try to look sexy? Or do I let it all loose? It’s whatever I want from this, she said. It’s me no matter what, and I should feel confident in my pose.
Sehmi began by aiming a flashing-light camera at my naked body, walking around it to get all sides for 30 seconds. She scanned me four times in four different poses. We came up with the poses together based on what I liked about the models I’d seen and how my body looked in the full-length mirror. I tweaked my pose each time after looking at the rendering on Sehmi’s laptop.
Ultimately, I decided on a ballerina’s plié (bent supporting leg) with a tondue (leg out and pointing straight forward) while arching my back, putting my arms on my head, and twisting just a little. “As You Are,” it turns out, meant something quite specific to me.
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When Mads Montagu-Andrews, 31, started Studio Bust, she had been looking for ways to memorialize her own pregnancies. During her first pregnancy, she offered to be a model to get a free line drawing of her body. For her second, she wanted to go three-dimensional and considered making a cast of her belly, but she felt it would be hard to display in her small London apartment.
Her husband had been using 3D software for furniture design, and they realized that if they incorporated 3D printing to make a mold, they could produce bronze and bronze-like sculptures for what they estimated to be about one-tenth of the price a sculptor would charge. In time for her third pregnancy, her new company was born, along with a rendering of her own pregnant body, displayable on her living room shelf.
“I’d been going to the Rodin Museum in Paris since I was 16,” Montagu-Andrews says. “I wanted to make the world of sculpture a little bit more accessible.” The company is woman owned, run, and staffed, including the two women who do all of the hand finishing. “I really wanted to have jobs that they could do alongside motherhood, so it’s very flexible,” Montagu-Andrews tells me. (Some male contractors strip the bronze and sand.)
The smallest non-bronze figure retails for $745. The smallest bronze goes for $1,795. Some people opt for freshly mixed bespoke colors, like bright reds or greens. “You definitely don’t need to have this done,” says Montagu-Andrews. “But I want the people who do to feel like they’ve got a beautiful heirloom piece they’ll love.”
To date, about 64% of the company’s busts are of pregnant women. Some have opened up about their IVF journeys and how much work it took to conceive. Clients do not always share if they are pre- or post-mastectomy, but anecdotally it seems several are. “Then in Paris, we have such a different clientele than in other places,” Sehmi says. “It’s nearly all women above 50.”
About three months after my hotel scanning session and three-and-a-half weeks after my mastectomy, a package arrived. I didn’t think much of it—probably more fall clothing orders arriving for the kids.
When my kids returned home from school, they asked to open it. I took a closer look and told them this was the sculpture I’d said would be coming. My daughter suggests an unboxing video, and so we do one in which I am opening the package and my kids are jumping around like popcorn. “Is that really your body?!” my daughter gasps. And then, “Is that before or after you got your surgery?” And then, “It’s a good way to remember!” all without taking much of a breath.
I put the bronze mini-me on our living room’s fireplace mantel, between wedding pictures and pregnant belly pictures and in front of a preschool art project, and sent photos to close friends who were in on the process. “Rodin-esque,” writes one. “Very powerful,” writes another.
The bust looks very different from distinct vantage points. Front on it is fierce (and my DD-cup breasts are there for it); sideways gets me closer to Degas’s famous Little Dancer; from an angle and behind, you see an athletic glutes curve I am heartened to still possess. It takes me a few days to reflect upon how this very physical representation of my before self makes me feel.
Though the surgery has forced me to slow down, much of my recovery period has been a just-get-through-the-day series of physical steps: measuring liquid from the drains attached to my body, taking antibiotics four times a day, attempting motion-restricted showers amid waves of piercing pain, emailing the nurses to ask if extreme itching is normal, and then trying to be available for my kids. I have all but stopped deep reflection.
So when I finally sit in front of my replica and invite myself to think about the last few weeks, I realize that not once have I regretted this surgery. And not once have I been embarrassed by this statue, not even when my daughter tells my son’s physical therapist, “That’s my mom’s body on the mantel!” I love that this statue, getting ready for a cancer-avoiding mastectomy, separates me from what my mom, grandma, and great-aunt endured and that it is a symbol of art and culture and strength.
I am grateful to possess a keepsake that my daughter might inherit. I wonder what she will one day see in my statue, how much of that will be informed by her future options to meaningfully reduce her risk of breast cancer, and what more we may one day know about our genetics.
For my part, I will remain proud that this bust depicts a woman who made a very big, very bold decision. I can be impressed by her guts and beauty while also loving the strong new version of me—with stitches, scabbing, and arms that cannot reach above my head.
The truth is I am not worried about what I still can’t do. I know I’ll get there. Or better yet, I’ll go somewhere new. The real me dances onward.