Paige More, another cofounder of The Breasties, had a nipple-sparing preventative double mastectomy in January of 2017, followed by a separate exchange surgery where she got her implants (she's also planning on doing a revision surgery in the future because of persistent discomfort). She tested positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation, and she said that she still has numbness in her chest and her armpits post surgery.
"So much information is thrown at you, and your doctors probably will say something along the lines of, 'You'll probably lose sensation,' but you don't understand what that means until you experience it," More explained. "It's like when your foot falls asleep and you touch it and you know that your finger's touching your foot, but you can't feel your finger touch your foot."
More said that for previvors like herself, survivors of cancer, and thrivers (those living with cancer), the biggest hurdle is "trying to separate your physical surgery and your physical body from the emotional trauma of the entire diagnosis and surgery." Though self-acceptance is key, it took going back out into the dating scene and meeting her current partner to really differentiate her emotional scars from her physical ones.
One day More's partner told her that he understood what she went through was traumatic, but that, to him, she is "healed" and a complete and beautiful woman. "We're conditioned to believe that our scars make us different, and different in a way that's undesirable or unworthy of love or ugly," she noted. "And to know that they actually can make you beautiful, not in spite of, but because of, who you are and what you've been through is such a gift. So that was life-changing for me and something that I'll never forget."
