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Table of Contents The Lipstick Manifesto Chapter 1. Stripping I visit a strip club to feel all the power I stand to lose draining out of me with my impending mastectomy. Why do boobs matter so much? And why can't we just admit it? As I watch the strippers I realize that I must learn how to strip. I will need to lose my breast, my hair, and my innocence. Maybe I am like an antique table that is being stripped: a veneer will come off to reveal a beauty underneath. Can I find a way to still exist? Chapter 2. Lumps Nine strangers feel me up in two weeks with no eye contact. My breast cancer diagnosis and nine consults with doctors. I feel I am dead already and my doctors are looking through me. I need a plan to get their attention. They tell me that I need to make the decision whether or not to have a mastectomy. The male doctors imply I should have a lumpectomy because I am young and attractive; the women have boobs and are over them. I see one more doctor, to try to put my eggs on ice and figure out if I can ever be a mother. Chapter 3. Headlights Am I going crazy? I have only one week left with my breast, and I am scared and want to see that I have a future. I could really use a set of headlights now. I unravel in my favorite French bistro. I am trying to find my faith in affirmations, Ativan, and Amazons. Chapter 4. I Need to Get It off My Chest At first it's hard to say, but then I can't stop telling people that I have cancer. It is my twenty-eighth birthday and I am preparing for my mastectomy tomorrow. Since I have one day left to walk around with my breasts, I decide I want to get street-harassed. Instead, I cancer-confess to a one- balled taxicab driver who shows me that I can be one-boobed. Chapter 5. Why I Wore Lipstick I tie my surgical gown and put on my hair net and paper slippers, and right before my mastectomy I decide to apply my lipstick. I think about how prisoners marching to their deaths somehow found one defiant gesture to mock the situation: Even as I am sedated under heavy anesthetic and my breast is being carefully placed in the pathology lab Tupperware, I will still feel attractive. It is my war paint, and maybe I am in control. Chapter 6. Peep Show I am scared to look at the wound where my breast used to be. I decide to wear my white fresh-water pearl chandelier earrings to match my bandage. My surgeon, Dr. Brower, tells me that I look beautiful and helps me take my first peep. I return home from the hospital with plastic drains sewn into my chest. Then, I need to show my husband and have sex as a one-boobed woman for the first time, with my bandages on. Chapter 7. Cocktails I am trying to remember the last time I had a real drink, while my oncologist is describing my chemotherapy "cocktail." And this cocktail will make me feel worse than any hangover I have ever had. Chapter 8. Hair Removal I stay up at night and watch the "Hair Club for Men" infomercials and cry. Sob. Weep. I wear a comb-over. It screams "I can't let go." I decide not to wear a wig because I do not want to pretend I am the same. Chapter 9. Meeting my Mojo When the past has betrayed you and the future is uncertain, then maybe all that's is living for the moment. I meet my mojo. I find a way to exist. I wear baseball hats to hide my baldness and decide to look "downtown." I figure out a way to reappear. I wear high heels to my chemo. I go to work every day -even when there is twenty-six inches of snow on the ground and I am the only one there. I get promoted. I hire a trainer named Hakim because I want his butt. Chapter 10. Busted! Just when my hair has nearly all fallen out, the invitation to my ten-year high school reunion arrives. I must attend because I'm scared that I might not be here for the next one. I am worried that my classmates would notice my boob job because I have been going through breast reconstruction and I have expanded. I decide not to reveal my cancer, and decide to be cool instead. I need to show up. Chapter 11. 18-Hour Support Bra After being under construction for so long, my final implant surgery finally happens. I need to find a bra that fit. I have been through so many bra sizes. My heart has expanded along with my breasts. I always wondered who would need an eighteen-hour-support bra -I do. I find the support from friends and family incredible. But my husband just can't deal. Where did he go? Chapter 12. Falsie I am scared to reappear and show off my new cleavage. Isn't that false advertising? I need to throw away my falsie and forgive my husband. I am back. But different. Chapter 13. I'm a Survivor I turn twenty-nine. I am a hot woman again, but am I a survivor? What if I die? I become a reluctant breast cancer advocate. But how can I inspire anyone when I feel so shaky about my own future? I realize that no matter if I live or die, I have clung on with claws. I am a survivor. Chapter 14. My Monet I am having so much anxiety about my prognosis that I decide I need to wear my heart on my boob, not on my sleeve. I decide to get a real tattoo instead of the Monet nipple tattoo that my plastic surgeon made such a hard sell for. I find my missing breast right there in that tattoo parlor in the East Village. I had been born into one body, but I had become this other one, I had fashioned part of it and I felt powerful. Chapter 15. Vomit When I begin to vomit from morning sickness, it becomes my connection between the cancer ward and the maternity ward. I feel torn between the worlds of life and death. A story that I worked on about young mother who dies from breast cancer strangely gives me the courage to become a Mom. Chapter 16. Leo, Not Cancer Can my luck get any worse? When my Grandma Ruth, dies days before my daughter Skye is born, I believe that she, too, is convincing me that somehow there is life after death. As I stand in the cemetery, I realize she has given me a gift by answering my biggest fear: even if I die of cancer when Skye is young, she will always remember me. But I am not dilating and I think it is because I realize that life is so fragile, and I'm scared to let Skye begin her life in the same hospital where I had my mastectomy. Skye is born late, making her sign Leo, not Cancer. I think it is her first present to me. I had forgotten that Cancer could mean a birthday. I had forgotten why they sold congratulations cards in the hospital. Chapter 17. The Booby Mafia Why is La Leche League obsessed with my breast feeding my daughter with one boob? My struggles to breast-feed Skye with one breast make me realize that I am trying to be a normal mom and compensate for the fact that I might leave her motherless. All the shenanigans I go through trying to pump milk are more loving than actual breast milk. Chapter 18. Pushing the Envelope It's not only my own breasts I need to worry about now -there are also Skye's. I am obsessed with getting breast cancer again and I will do anything to avoid it. I research a story on the breast cancer gene. Will this gene be my destiny? I have gene testing to figure out why I got breast cancer when I was only twenty-seven. But I realize that one gene does not Geralyn make.I definitely have the late gene and the sexy gene -they just have not discovered them yet. Chapter 19. Barbie's Boob I can't escape boobs -they are still everywhere: Hooters, Girls Gone Wild, and even Barbie dolls. My daughter's Barbie's' boobs are really pissing me off, the fact that they look so perky and perfect. The fact that they are just so big! I realize that boob obsession starts when girls are only three and that even Barbie was touched by breast cancer. Chapter 20. Developing I will whore myself for breast cancer: I do some wild and crazy things, like scream to a rowdy thirteen-year-old crowd to touch themselves and learn breast self-exams.but this would be the most daring: posing topless for SELF Magazine as part of their breast cancer handbook. I agree to the photo, but become terrified when I arrive at the studio of an extremely famous photographer because I discover that she takes life-size Polaroid images. I am scared to look, but when I finally do I am presented with a version of myself that is unfamiliar. Despite the huge scar, there is a beauty I never saw in myself before. It has developed in front of my eyes. How can I be most beautiful when I have lost so much? I've finally learned how to strip. Chapter 21. The Sky's the Limit It's amazing all the places I've worn lipstick - places I never imagined that day in the operating room. Every time I wear lipstick there is a lipsticky residue from that day in the hospital, just daring me to live for each moment. I swear I can still taste that hope.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Lucas, Geralyn -- Health.
Breast -- Cancer -- Patients -- United States -- Biography.