Why I’m writing about getting a prophylactic double mastectomy

Written April 3, 2022

I decided to write a series of eight blog posts about my mastectomy journey (my mastectomy was 1/13/22 and my reconstruction was 3/31/22). There are four main reasons I wanted to do this (in no particular order):

1. To return the favor
   When I started my journey of debating whether to get a prophylactic mastectomy, I read many posts from friends of friends (like this), or from celebrities (like this and this) to better understand what I was getting myself into. So I thought, why not contribute to that collective list of blogs to share one more person’s experience. So, here I am contributing to the growing collective of posts about this topic, to help prepare other women who may have been as scared or nervous as I was. And to say: You’re not alone. Getting rid of such a huge part of your body is a huge deal. But you’ve got this and you WILL get through it.

2. To save your time
   When I posted on Instagram about getting this procedure, I had at least a dozen or so people reach out and ask if they could hop on a call to learn more about my journey, explaining that they also had BRCA and were debating whether to get the procedure. I never encouraged anyone to do it or not do it – I just shared my experience with them. But I found myself always answering the same questions 80% of the time, and so I figured: let me direct future inquiries to these posts, and then I can fill in the gaps on phone calls. (Yes, I’m always happy to hop on a call with anyone who is going through this if it will help!)

3. To spread awareness
   BRCA is no joke. In fact, it sucks. But I feel so fortunate to have been genetically tested and therefore to have found out about BRCA proactively, as opposed to finding out about it through a cancer diagnosis. So if my mastectomy can help spread the word to more people about the importance of genetic testing, I’ll be thrilled.

4. To humanize and prepare others
   Nothing in these blogs should come off as if they’re being written by a medical professional. I took the minimum number of biology and chemistry classes I could in school (though shout out to all my ridiculously incredible doctor / nurse friends!)... However, having been through just about every Dr. Google result there is on the topic of mastectomy, I can safely say that most of them didn’t feel like they showed the human side to the entire procedure. And I wanted to do that with my posts. For example - when they say “Don’t wear deodorant for two weeks”, they don’t say what you should do in order to avoid smelling gross. And so on. You get my point.

Without further ado, I hope you find any of these posts helpful. I tried to write them in a way that you should feel no need to read all of them or in any particular order.

Also: a HUGE thank you to my husband, Matt Ross, who gave comments / feedback on all of these posts. I love you!