She was cheery from the start – and patient too. The shop was busy when she walked in with her daughter who had asked in a recent visit if we carried post-mastectomy bras. When a dressing room freed up and it was just me and “Mom” behind closed doors, I got the low-down.
She had a mastectomy twenty years ago. The tissue in her remaining breast had started sagging with age. The bra she had been getting by with was one of those flimsy over-the-head one-size-fits-all things that was now all stretched out. The straps were falling off her shoulders. In recent years, the mobility in one of her arms and hands had become lessened to a point near paralysis. It was getting more and more difficult to get things on and off over her head. Her daughter thought we might have an idea on how to help. Today was the day they were making a day of it.
The limited mobility in her arm added to the complexity of the equation. I had just seen the movie “Hidden Figures” and maybe it gave me some inspiration of where to start. In that movie, there was a complex problem (landing a rocket ship) that required fundamental math equations to get to the one and only answer. I had to boil this situation down to the fundamentals. This woman needed a bra that she could get on herself. She needed a bra with straps that would not fall down. The bra needed to have some structure to it to give her support. Only after all of that might we deal with the idea of finding her a prothesis for the breast that had been removed two decades ago. It wasn’t a rocket ship descending from space, but it might well have been.
There were three possibilities in our stockroom. All were front-closure because with the arm situation, I considered back-closures to be out of the question: one had buttons, two had snaps. All of them had a kicked-in strap feature in the back to help them stay on her sloping shoulders. All were supportive no-wires made by the stellar bra-making companies Anita and Royce. As a bonus, all had “pockets” in their cups, but we hadn’t discussed what that meant yet.
“There!” she exclaimed as she put on one of the snap front-closure bras by herself. The other two didn’t make the cut – they were just too difficult to clasp with her limited arm and hand mobility. It wasn’t easy, but if she did up the bottom snap first, then the top snap, and then tried to get the three in the middle done, she had a pathway to supportive success. Even if she couldn’t get those snaps in the middle all done, the bra would still do a better job than what she had been wearing. As an added bonus, she also could get this one on and off over her head with some considerable effort if all of the snaps were done up in advance.
Feeling victorious, I asked if she had a prosthetic that she used. She hadn’t come in with one, by wearing a baggy shirt and kind of hunching over combined with the loose fitting bra, the naked eye couldn’t really tell.
“You mean the “form”? They gave me one in the hospital and I’ve never used it. It didn’t look right. It didn’t feel right. It just wasn’t right. I hated the way that plastic felt on my skin. I’ve just kind of made-do without one for twenty years.”
I asked if she wanted to try one of ours on and showed her how the “pocket” in the cup of the bra she was wearing would hold the “form.” The form wouldn’t touch her skin. In her cheery way she said, “Why not?”
I went back to the stockroom and grabbed three sizes of prosthetics. I’ve learned that nothing but trial and error works when you are trying to get breast sizes to match up. The size charts only can do so much. I thought about her twenty years of presentation of one breast. That’s a long time.
We tried the first form. Too small. I placed the second form in the pocket and watched as she did herself up with the snaps. I looked at her chest checking for even size and even levels. She was looking at her chest too. It had been a long time since she had seen herself like that in a bra. My eyes lifted with hope, her eyes lifted with anticipation. She put on her shirt and as she turned to the mirror, we were both looking again at her chest. There’re no words to describe it, but there she was twenty years and a surgery later, in spite of an arm that was failing her, with a servant bra fitter who happened to have the right tools in some dressing room in Manchester, Vermont. That woman in the mirror said, “Let’s show my daughter.”
As her daughter handed me her credit card (it was her treat), her Mother turned away and started dancing. Full-on shuffle your feet, sway your hips, bob your head, snap your fingers dancing. Her feet, her hips, her head, her FINGERS, dancing. Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” was playing. I’ve never loved music more. I’ve never loved my job more as she danced out the door. From the beginning, I knew she was cheery, and patient too…but I’m not sure she’s danced like that. At least not in twenty years.
Dance on. Shine on. Thank you for these blessings.
xo – Joy
