The Joy of Coming Full Circle
Nipples. It's really all about nipples.
Note 1 - This post is legitimately about nipples. That’s not click bait. It contains pictures of nipples of which I have permission to show. View with kindness and respect or not at all.
Note 2 - I tried recording myself reading this. I choked up each time. And since this piece is far less about me, and far more about joy, I decided to leave off the audio. I’d be honored if you’d read it with intention.
On Saturday, I set out with my best friend on an adventure.
We were off to get her some nipples.
That’s literally all I knew when I signed up to chaperone this shindig. The desired outcome? Nipples. I mean…I’m in. What more do you need to know?
Several conversations in the week preceding this with people unrelated to the situation led me to understand that I was woefully underinformed about the particulars of this here adventure.
Them: “Wait, do you get to the pick the color?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
Them: “That has got to be agonizing. Do they use lidocaine?”
Me: Never thought about it.
Them: “Can they make them look 3D?”
Me: I sure hope so.
Them: “Is it really going to take all day?”
Me: I was told to plan on all day…🤷♀️
People are curious about nipples, particularly when the recipient is over 50 and even more so when that person has agency over what they look like, where they’re placed, and how big they are.
It’s not that I didn’t care about all of these things. It’s that what I cared about most was being there to see my best friend’s breasts come full circle. To watch the joy return. To see those titty tats offer her some much-deserved redemption. The rest, well, that all seemed slightly (if not infinitely) less important.
Three years ago my best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. I knew something was wrong because as I scurried through the airport to my gate, my phone rang. This friend never calls me. We’re a text “XO” and then schedule an hour to catch up four times a year kinda friends. I plopped my non-regulation carry on bags on the seat next to me, sat down, and answered…
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
“I have breast cancer,” she said. No hello, no build up, no tears. Just a four-word statement that caused me to forcibly exhale. She said, “I checked my MyChart results. The doctor hasn’t even called yet.”
As a former healthcare provider, we won’t even get in to how pissed I was that this information was released on the fucking patient portal before being relayed to her by an actual human with whom she had at least some semblance of a relationship, but that’s a story about our healthcare system for another day when I want to write about something that is joy-less.
That moment is seared in to my soul, the heavy weight of my body in the seat as I listened to my friend release just a teensy eensy bit of fear, an emotion wholly foreign to her, while knowing my only opportunity to help in that moment depended on a seat near the window with good cell reception.
So, when I hit the end of the D terminal at Reagan National Airport last Thursday looking for my gate, my skin started to prickle. I came to a dead halt in the middle of the concourse and looked around – Was someone watching me? Did I drop my cell phone? Was my dress hiked up under my bag? (All things that happen to me on the reg). But as I slowly turned around trying to identify the source, the prickles turned in to full on goosies (my daughter’s word for goose bumps). It was the same gate. I was flying to get nipples from the same gate where the story started. If that ain’t some shit. Goosies never lie.
The Universe has a strong appreciation for symbolic gesture. This cancer story was coming around the last curve of the three hundred and sixty degree revolution of fear, grief, resilience, exhaustion, redemption. I was being prepared for it to come full circle.
Through radiation, a double mastectomy, failed reconstruction, removal of a mediastinal mass, and months of painful lymphedema, my friend has never faltered in her steadfast gratitude.
I find that not only remarkable but somewhat unbelievable.
I’ve poked at her from time to time…as I emptied the drains safety-pinned to her compression wrap, or watched her grimace as she tried to relieve the pressure from the fluid building up in her arm, or asked what options remained after another step didn’t go the way she was hoping. I was looking for a crack, a sieve, some completely understandable fissure in the one emotion that grounded her and kept her going.
I never found it. She held on to her gratitude, allowed it to give her the strength her body and, in rare moments, even her mind did not have, and used it to explain both her capacity to handle this and her reason to keep going.
She will be the first one to tell you that she understands how different breast cancer is when you have means. Agency, money, resources, education, people. She had them all. And the realization of how much harder these three years would have been without even one of these, much less all of them, brings her to tears.
So, I will say what she never did because I am not as good of a person as she.
Breast cancer took her breasts, and, in so doing, threatened her femininity, her means of defining her own sexuality and womanhood. It took a big chunk of tissue from her back, leaving deep, angry scars that will be permanent. For years, it stole her strength, her time, and her energy. It was an unwelcome constant, an insidious undercurrent to an otherwise lovely and full life.
If breast cancer were a person, we would have had words.
But my friend, she did what she always does when life misuses her. She found a place for breast cancer to stay…a safe stopover for it to reside while she worked on a more permanent, but humane eviction plan. She housed it in her gratitude.
Which brings us back to nipples.
It’s slightly if not extremely embarrassing to admit that I didn’t know you lost your nipples when you had a mastectomy. There are some cases where nipple-sparing surgery is possible, but not all cases, and not this one, so when they took those suckers off, the little nubbins of pleasure and purpose went too.
It is possible to have surgery to reconstruct a nipple, although try to read about how that goes down without scrunching up your face. No thank you. Plus, as my friend so aptly stated “As women, we spend our entire lives trying to cover up the headlights, why in the world would we want to have surgery to make them permanently turned on??”
She’s nothing if not prudent.
But there’s another way to get nipples.
Tattoos!
You can have an artist design you a nipple.
I’m writing like this so you can catch your breath and your brain while you’re reading. Because if that is not the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard, we cannot be friends.
So, after months of waiting for a Saturday appointment with one of the most talented nipple tattoo artists in the area, it was officially NIPPLE DAY! I walked in to the shop like I had been mainlining Dr. Pepper and jelly beans. That is to say, I was STOKED!
And, if I’m being honest, which I try to be, maybe a little nervous. I’ve been the ride or die for a lot of tattoos in my day, but I’ve never done anything as personal as help pick out someone’s nipples. I also got a little queasy every time I thought about that needle descending on top of where my currently in tact nipple went. My friend was fairly certain the rewiring of her chest wall had numbed the nerves in that there area, but woo-wee, that’s one helluva experiment.
We walked in nipple-less, with reconstructed breasts and scars that had finally healed and skin still fragile from radiation. An hour and thirty-nine minutes later, we had a nipple!
We both stared at it, awed by its authenticity. I turned my head this way and that, letting my eyes cross, gazing beyond and through. Like a child with a hologram, I dared my eyes to see the illusion.
I watched a slow smile spread across my friend’s face…disbelief replaced by something hopeful, something redemptive, something like…joy.
The circle was closing. We were coming around the final bend.
Her other breast was the tricky one, the “misfit”, as I like to call her. This was the rejector, the problem child, the delicate flower. Her scars were unmistakable, but with a grateful heart and a love of all things pretty, my friend looked at her masterful tattoo artist and said “Make it beautiful.”
Not gonna lie, ya’ll. That flower hurt. But no more than the horizontal measure of her suffering that remains. That pain was temporary, one of her own choosing, so that after years of not looking down at all, her eye will now be drawn to the miraculous beauty of her own body.
Joy. Come full circle.
I’ve never been so desperately jealous of another person’s talent than I was watching Hayley, my friend’s tattoo artist, give her back her personhood. After years of feeling wholly impotent at doing anything other than sitting vigil after another surgery, I desperately wanted to be the one in that chair, experience whispering “A little more pink here. A touch of white there.”
This work is undoubtedly art, but it is also a divine service, a dedication of one’s talent to our shared humanity and communal desire to be a little bit more normal and a lot bit more beautiful.
Thank you, Hayley. For being the knot that tied the circle closed.
I grew up a reluctant Girl Scout. I maintain I did it for the cookies. There’s a song we Girl Scouts sing about a circle. If you really get us going, we’ll sing it in a round, lilting voices offset on timing so the song seemingly goes on and on…no beginning…no ending.
It’s these lyrics that played in my head as I watched my friend come around the last bend of the circle. I was never truly afraid she would die, but I was scared we’d lose her. To the exhaustion. To the discomfort. To the trauma.
For three years, this is the refrain I’ve been singing. It’s my own dedication. My assurance to her…and to myself.
“A circle’s round.
It has no end.
That’s how long
I want to be your friend.
A circle’s round.
It has no end.
That’s how long
I want to be your friend.
A circle’s round.
It has no end.
That’s how long
I want to be your friend.”
Joy has come full circle. But it will inevitably sign up for another rotation. And my friend, joy, and I will keep going. In the round. On repeat. With gratitude.
Forever.
You're so welcome. I look forward to reading and experiencing more of your literary work.
Amazing life recount. Jess, you are truly gifted. This made message smile, laugh, cry and think. Thank you!! God bless. 🙏❤️🙏