TKM

It was without question the nicest doctor’s office I have ever entered. Spare, spacious, and moodlit with rice-paper tower lamps and recessed lights. Four semi-lounge chairs invited clients to settle in and relax with a magazine—Glamour, Allure, Sunset, Wine Spectator—as if one were poolside on a Princess cruise. These reading choices, no doubt selected for their idle browsability, were neatly arrayed on a sturdy coffee table, which itself was centered on an Oriental rug, a real one, not one of those winking acrylic imposters at IKEA that start shedding red fuzz all over your living room 10 minutes after you lay it down. Twelve-inch ocean-colored marbled tile subtly offset soft white walls whose hushed serenity was broken only by three oil paintings bursting with bright colors and a flat-screen TV wall-mounted above a table of brochures advertising Cynosure, Juvéderm, Restylane, and Latisse, the latter of which, I learned, is a treatment for eyelash hypotrichosis, a chilling term for the relatively nonmalignant condition of short eyelashes.

While the wife and I have a DVR and enjoy our ability to fast-forward through commercials—thereby helping to kill the time-honored model of sponsor-driven television we’ve known our entire lives—whenever I see an advertisement flitting by for a pharmaceutical I’ve never heard of I make her back up, because I find novel drugs and their ads tragicomic in a complacently American way. That’s how I learned of the possible side effects of Latisse, whose first-line application is as a glaucoma treatment—we all knew that no scientists actually set out to “cure” short eyelashes; clinicians simply noticed that glaucoma patients who were taking Lumigan, the alter ego of Latisse, to decrease ocular hypertension, which sounds way more painful to me than eyelash hypotrichosis, developed darker pigment in and around their eyes, which made for thicker, longer lashes. Now, look alive, this hyper eyelash growth is not a permanent side effect; eyelash hypotrichosis is as chronic as disappointment and will reassert its bad ass the moment you discontinue use. However, the potential darkening of your iris pigment is likely permanent, so, you know, if the eyes are windows to the soul, your soul will become darker too. Permanently. Just saying. Heaven knows I’m a major consumer of pharma. Still, it seems excessive to me—especially in a world visited by the miracle of mascara—to take a prescription medication for the rest of your life, at a cost of $120 per month, to maintain slightly longer eyelashes, but that’s probably only because I dodged the eyelash hypotrichosis bullet. My eyelashes are quite long. And my irises are already plenty brown.

I could go on about the injectible wrinkle fillers that were on offer, like Juvéderm, Restylane, and Radiesse, any of which promise to usurp your unsightly nasolabial folds (a.k.a. smile lines), melomental folds (creases emanating from the corners of your mouth, or “marionette lines” in aesthetician parlance), crow’s feet, or just about any other mark of a life well-lived—for about six to nine months, after which your body absorbs it and your face resumes its natural joyful state. But one must put her judgmental opinions about necessity and excess aside when entering the previously alien dimension of plastic surgery and injectible/pharmaceutical cosmetology. I was there for the former, or at least for a consult about the former. And it wasn’t just some random plastic surgeon’s den of solicitude. I was in the surgical cosmetology capital of the world, Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, so named for the obscene consumerism and self-righteous privilege that radiate from its Rodeo Drive nucleus like the seductive, combustible rays of the sun. Touch me, skanks.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember, as hard as they’ve tried to forget, that my girls developed in a free-spirited, artistic way, with one big, floppy D-cup accompanied by a little sister two full cup sizes her junior. I would more plainly call this a developmental deformity, but I don’t want yonier-than-thou feminists all up in my grill for not embracing the perfection of my temple. On the contrary, I mask my goddess-given uniqueness, augmenting my dwarfish side with a prosthetic to approximate a chest that fails to alarm strangers.

Though I long ago stepped up from the nylon-covered foam pad of my youth—which had to be surreptitiously wrung out whenever I was so bold as to go swimming—to a silicone insert that conducts at nearly the same bounce rate as its mate when I walk and feels less like a wadded sock to those who hug me, it’s still uncomfortable and prone to slippage, and I’m tired of stealing moments for furtive adjustments. If I were less self-conscious I suppose I could adjust it more brazenly, like men shifting their merchandise in the deli window, but I’m afraid I could never summon up enough attitude to make that maneuver seem like anything but a lonely lesbian awkwardly groping her own tits.

In truth, I’ve just never taken pride of ownership in my chest; inasmuch as I think about my breasts at all, it’s mostly about how to camouflage them—or how much I’d like to not have to think about camouflaging them. I’ve been dreaming about corrective surgery since I was a teenager, but it’s not the kind of procedure one’s HMO covers—I’ve certainly tried to convince mine that they should—and it’s always been beyond the means of my pitifully stagnant income. But lately, catching a draft off the success of my overeducated wife—who has generously begun to cover a larger share of our household expenses with her more dynamic salary—I’ve found myself with greater financial freedom. So, totally taking advantage of my wife’s largesse, I’m blowing my newfound savings on plastic surgery. Good thing I don’t look like a trophy wife. (Give me time: My nasolabial and melomental folds are only getting deeper.)

So why lop off the big boob instead of augmenting the little one? Augmentation is, after all, less expensive, less invasive, and far less scarring—a state of affairs I find corrupt; how else to explain this being one of very few instances in which women are encouraged to want more, and punished for wanting less. I’m sorry, but if surgeons have figured out how to insert and secure 1-kilogram silicone slabs through straw-sized incisions tucked discreetly under the arms, how have they not yet stumbled on a way to decrease breast mass without cutting off our nipples and slicing down and around the mammary like they’re skinning and de-boning chicken breasts?

Still, I do want less. It’s true that as an adolescent I tried exercising only on the right side to increase the breast muscle of my stunted member. It didn’t work. At all. Probably owing to the fact that breasts are composed of milk ducts and fat, neither of which much respond to exercise.  As an adult, well, my personal presentation can be somewhat at odds with itself, with a pronounced disconnect between my chosen aesthetic and my unchosen mammatude; even as my breasts may well be the only characteristic of prove-it-in-your-face womanhood that keeps me from being bounced out of ladies’ restrooms, I’m tired of them lording their bounty over me like some sick cosmic joke.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that modern medicine has given us ways to “correct” just about anything we find disharmonious to our own big ideas about how we feel we should, want, or deserve to look? (For a staggering fee, the indirect costs of which will be passed along to my wife; good thing I married her when I had the chance.)

I’m tempted here to address the issue of misguided plastic surgery. There are plenty of people who manage to incorrect themselves in their bitchfight with nature, even people who, by virtue of having had, say, a dozen or two or three surgical procedures in their quest to micromanage their genetic code, find themselves featured on A&E, which has lately found its niche in dwelling on the addictions and obsessive compulsions of Americans gripped by PTSD, dysphoria, or even simple ennui. But who am I to say that my boob job is somehow more meritorious than that of the 110-pound 21-year-old who knows in her heart that she was really meant to have F-cup breasts? And if her newfound “self-esteem” opens avenues previously closed to her—like maybe the gates of the Playboy Mansion in Bel-Air…

Or even the stage door at San Bernardino’s Flesh gentlemen’s bar…

Well, then bully for her!

One can look up any number of websites that have little purpose beyond tracking plastic surgery disasters, generally of the celebrity variety because, really, how many uncelebrated people are going to emerge from anonymity simply to say, “Wow, look at this horrifying ‘after’ shot of me! I’m not sure what I was going for, but I sure ended up disfigured!”

Hence, the old saying is particularly applicable here: I didn’t want to just pick somebody out of the phonebook. Not that anybody uses phonebooks anymore. My wife and I occasionally receive a copy of the yellow pages but haven’t cracked one open in years, and when we recently found a white pages volume lying on the doorstep we were momentarily fascinated by the relic, as if an IBM Selectric typewriter had been mysteriously delivered to our side porch.

Needless to say, I had not started my search in the yellow pages. Rather, I asked a transgender professor at my wife’s institution of higher learning whether he could recommend any local plastic surgeons, figuring that surgeons who regularly do “top” surgeries for trans dudes would have no trouble whatsoever with the level of reduction/reconstruction I have in mind.

I had been harboring some concern that maybe someone who spends so much time thinking about breasts—defying mass-to-perk physics ratios, discerning ideal nipple placement, defining perfect cleavage plumb lines—would try to talk me into, if not a straight-up augmentation on the wee side, meeting somewhere in the middle of the two, perhaps at a nice, plump C? Like maybe there’s a whole cadre of surgeons involved in a secret fraternal organization foresworn to protect the worldwide breast population from fallen women like me, like a sort of Operation Rescue for boobs. I didn’t want any contention with my surgeon about desired outcomes, because at a certain critical point in this transaction I’ll be out cold on a table and at the mercy of the surgeon’s mammipulations.

Trans dude having come up empty, I went to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website, where you can search doctors by surgery type, ZIP Code, etc. I chose “breast reconstruction” and selected a 10-mile radius as my parameter. It returned 194 hits, about 150 of which sported Golden Triangle addresses. Even I can’t believe there’s that much call for boobwork by Angelenos, and I’ve lived among their peculiar breed my whole life.

Daunted, I had to narrow my search down somehow, and of the 194 doctors only a handful had recognizably female names, so I started with them, guessing I was less likely to encounter pushback from a female surgeon. The “patient care consultant” for the first doctor I contacted was friendly and incredibly responsive to follow-up e-mails—though the surgeon’s consultation fee seemed a bit on the absurd precious side. Given that, before setting up a first date I wanted to have a reasonable expectation that we were going to get to second base; I didn’t want to fork over $250 taking a surgeon to dinner only to find that she didn’t want to go to bed with me, or that she had a tacky, shedding IKEA rug. When I expressed concerns to patient care consultant Sonya about whether or not the surgeon and I might be on the same results page, or living in the same financial universe, she invited me to e-mail photos of my breasts, front and profiles, for a preliminary look-see and quote.

Enter dear wife for weirdest photo shoot ever.

You know how you sometimes look at pictures of yourself and say, “Jesus, do I really look like that?” That feeling is amplified in naked photos. I sincerely didn’t think it was possible for me to harbor more dislike for that particular portion of my body, but as I sat editing images of my dysmorphic chest, cropping out all references to my head and happy trail, I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to look past it for so long. Have I had carnival mirrors all this time?

I sent the images to Sonya, resisting the urge to apologize in the body of the e-mail. I’m certain that mine isn’t the first set of amateur, anonymous, totally unsexy naked pics Sonya has been sent, nor will it be the last.

I wonder if guys surfing for free online porn ever look at before-and-after shots of breast augmentations. There seems to be an endless supply out there—most categorized by cup size, which can be pretty handy for the discerning breast man. To get an idea of what my reduction would look like, I had to use the “before” and “after” shots in reverse, flipping, for instance, A-to-D and B-to-D augmentations. This was annoying because I wanted to see an actual surgically enhanced breast in the size I was shopping for: These ragtag A’s and B’s were all just as prolapsed as mine, with none of the lifting and smoothing and precision nipplescaping that I’m hoping for in a finished product. I couldn’t find a single site that pictured a woman who had undergone a reduction with an end-point size below a C cup. Is there really no demand for such a result? Do surgeons just not post those pics because they don’t want to scare away clientele who may be worried about having too much of their womanhood slurped out while comatose? Or are the surgeons members of Operation Brescue?

Knowing that most women get reductions in order to relieve neck and back pain, the scope of these reductions seem startlingly minor to me, sometimes sloughing just a partial cup size. And pictures I’ve found depicting disparity corrections suggest that women overwhelmingly opt for an overall augmentation, with implants of differing sizes equalizing the imbalance. At the end of the day, it seems, everybody wants more, not less. Even kittens.

The online transmission of my own “cheesecake” pics—which felt weird enough; I can’t imagine e-mailing a naked picture of myself with my head attached. I guess that’s what separates me from the TMI generation, who gamely engage in sexting and then seem genuinely surprised when, post-breakup, their ex-boyfriends disseminate the nudie shots to anyone with a cell phone. Gah, I clearly wrote FYEO right there in the subject line!

But now I guess I know how those girls feel. I received no further correspondence from Sonya, not even when I followed up five days later to ask whether the doctor had had a chance to view the pics, adding, solicitously, “Now that I’ve decided to give myself this gift, I’m very excited to move forward with it.”

Nope. Nothing. Sonya may at this very moment be sending pictures of my tits to her entire e-mail address book. Subject line: OMG, so FUBAR!

But I wouldn’t let Sonya’s rejection dissuade me. I simply moved on to girlfriend doctor number two, who seemed more qualified than the last anyway, carrying board certification in both surgery and plastic surgery; her office asked for the less precious consultation fee of $125. And her patient care consultant, Nadia, informed me that a patient had just canceled an appointment two weeks out and would I like to see the doctor then? Yes, I really, really would!

Which brings us back to me, sitting in a semi-lounge chair in a moodlit office not reading a fluffy magazine, surrounded by brochures for injectible cosmetic enhancements, waiting for my name to be called, hoping this doctor would be the one.

To be continued…

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be—nor was it as “bad” as I thought it would be, like, you know, bad in a good way. I had put it off for years, always making excuses when confronted with the issue: “Oh, I have other plans” or “I can’t afford it today” or “I’d love to, but I’ve given up food.”

Nevertheless, I knew that one day I would have to go to Hooters.

Working for the Gay Agenda™ as I do, one might expect that it would be all too easy for me to enjoy a Hooters-free lifestyle. Au contraire! Ever since the chain opened a Hollywood Boulevard location, just steps from my office building, I’ve been under enormous pressure to submit to the traffic-cone-orange NASCAR-dadness of it all.

My gay male coworkers, it seems, can’t get enough of the joint—and the Hooters Girls can’t get enough of them. The gay boys wink at the HGs conspiratorially: We get it, they seem to communicate telepathically, we can appreciate the irony and campy theatricality of the situation. And we will wildy overtip you.

But the scenario is far more charged for a lesbian since many, though not all, straight women believe that all lesbians want them, and these women, the ones who think lesbians indiscriminately lust after all women, seem alternately fascinated and repulsed by the idea of being an object of lust for women, even if they’ve gone out of their way to objectify themselves to the world at large.

So when I walk into Hooters—as I was compelled to do Friday when my very best work friend chose to celebrate his final day at the company with a heaping plate of hot wings—my whole demeanor has to say, “I’m so not here for the scenery,” which isn’t hard for me, because Hooters Girls are so not my type*.

*A word on “my type”: A coworker of mine used to constantly bring magazines to my desk to show me “hot” girls, trying to suss out what he must have judged my unfathomably peculiar taste in women. I would shake my head and send him away every time, thinking that he’d one day realize he wasn’t going to find my dream girl in the pages of Maxim, but the dear boy kept trying, for all his effort managing only to further delineate the difference between gay male and lesbian ideals of womanhood. (For the record I’ll state here that I have on more than one occasion admired a dyke from afar only to realize on closer inspection, and with a fair amount of chagrin, that I’m sizing up a boy—and one who might be underage at that.) Suffice to say that my type, inasmuch as I’ll cop to having one, would not be invited back for a second interview at the Hooters hiring fair.

Once seated, though, I thought Hooters seemed like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, the main difference being that the wait staff was far less dispirited than the typical white-shirted and aproned college kids who might inhabit the Planet Hollywood galaxy. Our server, Danetra, was friendly and enthusiastic, and three other Hooters Girls who stopped by—it’s a sort of tradition, I gather, that HGs visit parties outside their own stations to spread the love, signing your table ticket while they mingle—were equally bubbly, and not in an airheaded way. I imagine we might have collected more HG autographs had we been a party of businessmen instead of three gay guys and two women, but we were shown quite enough attention for my taste, and the attention was kind, not teasing or demeaning—to us or to the HGs in question.

At the end of the day I was left to question why I had stood my anti-Hooters ground so fervently.

Could be that I was brought up in a family atmosphere where any display of female sexuality was characterized as exploitative and demeaning. Watching movies with my mom as a kid, I dreaded any hint of female nudity. A single exposed breast would turn her mood dark, her sudden, palpable anger throwing the whole family in to a state of discomfort. And need I note that she had absolutely no tolerance for the idea that a man really might read Playboy for the articles?

I remember being in the car with her once, I was maybe 13, when she spotted a nasty magazine lying in the middle of a busy street. She wheeled the car around and approached it as slowly as she could given the traffic—maybe 15 mph—and she instructed me to open the car door and pick it up as we passed over it. You have to hand it to her precision driving—she positioned the car perfectly so that I could open the door and scoop up the offending literature without a hitch.

Imagine our surprise when we saw that the flesh she had spotted from a moving car belonged to a fully erect man and that the magazine was Honcho, a gay men’s skin mag. We laughed as she sped away, feeling conspiratorial, like we had not only performed an important anti-smut service but were being a little naughty ourselves in the bargain. On our way home we drove through the alley behind a grocery store to dispose of the magazine in their gigantic garbage bin—she didn’t want any neighbors to find it in our trash—but we furtively flipped through its pages before tossing it away, embarrassed and thrilled by its contents.

During my brief, brilliant career as a copywriter in gay male erotica, I found myself equivocating: Men are exhibitionists, I reasoned, and there’s nothing exploitative in providing an arena for their exhibitionism. But it strikes me now that defining displays of male sexuality as mutually agreed upon exhibitionism and female displays as exploitation is terribly anti-feminist. It discredits any female who cares to exhibit her sexuality, and doubly objectifies women who participate in erotica—or work at Hooters—by discounting their free will. Women are too complicated to be sorted into my mother’s absolute categories of saints, whores, and victims.

I actually like Hooters of America’s coy “Who, us?” corporate stance on their image, as taken from the “about” section on their official site: “The chain acknowledges that many consider ‘Hooters’ a slang term for a portion of the female anatomy. Hooters does have an owl inside its logo and uses an owl theme sufficiently to allow debate to occur over the meaning’s intent. The chain enjoys and benefits from this debate.”

Despite any grudging slack I’ve extended toward Hooters since my fateful Friday lunch, I’m not sure I’d ever be inclined to go back. The food was ordinary and overpriced, like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, and I had a tough time finding menu items that weren’t deep-fried. But Hooters Girls, while still not my type, are another story entirely. I think I’d be happy to hang out with just about any of them anytime. And if they promise not to jump to any unfounded conclusions about my trying to get inside their little orange shorts, I promise to give full faith and credit to their judicious exercise of free will.

Via Salon’s Broadsheet blog, which was itself citing a New York Times article, I learned this summer that Lands’ End had introduced a revolutionary new swim line promising suits “thoughtfully designed to fit real women and flatter every figure.” Every figure? Really, Lands’ End, are you sure you want to make that claim?

I’m shaped, roughly, like a refrigerator, with identical hip and bust measurements, without a heck of a lot of contour in between. Oh, and I have only one boob—just born that way, or developed that way at any rate. And no amount of one-armed pull-ups during my teenage years did a lick of good, as my horrified pubescent self gamely tried to help the stunted hemisphere catch up with its mate.

Go for it, Lands’ End, show me the suit of my dreams.

I visited the online site and called up their virtual model, where a girl can plug in her own ghastly stats and try suits on her CGI doppelgänger. I had big ideas about giving my CGI self a makeover, with a crew cut and glasses and a less vacant look, but I couldn’t even get the thing to accept my measurements, not because it didn’t believe such a figure existed but because the application didn’t like Safari. Nor did it like Explorer. And I’m not going to download a new browser for any goddamn swimsuit model. So my virtual model defaulted to something like the actress Anne Archer, which isn’t terrible, as CGI selves go, but she wasn’t going to be very illustrative of me without considerable imagination.

Lands’ End offers a variety of ways to shop: by “anxiety zone” (my brain?), body shape, suit type, bra style, and…omigod, they have mastectomy suits with built-in pockets for prostheses! This really is revolutionary! Though in the past I’ve installed my own fake-boob pocket—a deconstructed sock sewn into the suit’s “breast shelf”—my fix has always left me wanting. For starters, I think I look reasonably lopsided even with my gelatinous friend in place. Then there’s the whole fear about it falling overboard whenever I’m hit by a wave, causing me to grope at it anxiously and often—at which time its stress-ball-like properties come in handy. (Ha! Get it?)

I’ve been kluging my own solutions for so long it never occurred to me that there might be more “manufactured” options. A mastectomy suit would be almost as momentous a leap forward for me as when I switched to silicone from foam, which lacked natural movement and absorbed water. Yep, that girl you saw so many years ago wringing out her boob as she emerged from the Big Sur River—that was me.

My breast(s) and I, we have an uneasy relationship.

Have you ever been to Frederick’s of Hollywood with your mother? I have, and I can’t say as I recommend it. This was back in the day, in Orange County, and Frederick’s may as well have been the moon—if the moon were populated entirely by things you never, ever wanted to see in the presence of your mother, like panties whose crotches were decorated with feathers and googly eyes. But my imbalance—the fleshy, not chemical, one—was becoming obvious as I transitioned from a “B” to a “C” cup in early teenagehood, and my mother had heard Frederick’s sold “breast enhancers.”

If there are two things my mother can’t stand, and certainly there are many more than two, they would be slutty women and “showboaty” types. Frederick’s is the five-and-dime of sluts and showboats, the twin groups’ needs converging in an NC-17 miasma of hot pink, lace, and fake animal skin. And it was into this world that I was led—past the fur-lined bondage cuffs and edible undies, my mother disgustedly tsking all the way to the counter—to solve my “problem.”

A very friendly woman who was statistically likely to be named “Brandi” took me into a dressing room and nonchalantly sized me up, then she sold us a couple of sets of nylon-encased foam boobs. To “Brandi” the purchase was as controversial as soap, but we couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We paused only long enough to scout our position before stepping out of the store and back into the mall, thus ensuring that a neighbor didn’t happen upon us and get the wrong idea. This wouldn’t be my last lesson in shame.

Now a “D” cup (nature’s cruel joke on me), I’m frustrated to find that the mastectomy suits at Lands’ End all seem to top out at “C.” Are bountiful breasted cancer survivors SOL?

Never fear. Lands’ End offers live chat help, and no sooner had I entered my name and requested a chat session than a little window popped up and representative “Karen” asked how she could help.

“Hey, Karen,” I typed, then, because I’m not accustomed to using chat, I hit return to skip a line, at which time “Hey, Karen,” popped up as my complete reply, as though I were greeting my very best friend.

“Hello,” Karen typed, “How can I help you?” It sounded terse in my head, though I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way. That’s just not who “Karen” is.

I type, “I’m what your catalogue calls a ‘rectangle shape’ (Oh, stop it with the sweet nothings, Lands’ End, you’re embarrassing me!), and I need a mastectomy suit that accommodates a ‘D’ cup.”

*pause*

“Hold on,” Karen replied. “Let me check with our Shoppers.”

“Thanks!” I typed, hoping she was going to check not with actual customers but with someone whose official job title is “Shopper.”

*pause*

“Sorry,” Karen replied. “We don’t have any ‘D’ cup mastectomy suits.”

“Shoot,” I typed, hoping to charm her with my quaint word choice, then I waited patiently for her to offer some alternative advice. I’m not sure what kind of advice I expected from “Karen” exactly. I’d exhausted the whole “buy a regular suit and make it your own” thing. I was looking for something more sophisticated this time. Something along the lines of, “Maybe you could just cut the other one off?” which, believe me, has occurred more than once.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Karen asked, a bit lamely, from my consumerist standpoint.

“No,” I replied, wondering if she could sense my disappointment in the type. “Thanks anyway.” Our chat session ended with a thud, the little window vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Better put an asterisk after that “flatter every figure” promise, you silver-tongued devil. It’s not nice to get a girl’s hopes up like that.

Looking back, fear of being found out wasn’t the only reason (perhaps not even the main one) I was shy about boyfriends groping my breasts. But at the time it seemed like such a momentous announcement—maybe even a deal-breaker: “By the way, before you feel me up, I should tell you not to be put off by a certain sponginess on my right side.” Since I didn’t much date guys I couldn’t take in a bar fight, most of them took it well enough, though they more or less avoided my little underachiever from then on.

Lesbians, you may have heard, are of a different breed entirely, and the girls have by and large found my stunted member compelling, if not downright fetish-worthy. From girlfriend number 1, the littlest mammary has enjoyed acceptance and affection, and girlfriend number 6 suggested that we go so far as to celebrate it with a unilateral piercing. This wasn’t long after I had first seen—in a feminist bookstore, natch—the “Tree” poster of a topless Deena Metzger, her arms spread wide in joyful tribute to her tattooed mastectomy site.

I became fascinated by the idea of turning a potential source of shame into a focal point. “Let’s do it,” I said, and just for the asking I was shirtless in a gynecological exam chair, a heavily pierced and tattooed dyke asking me where I wanted it. “My right,” I said, losing my bra. The piercer smiled and nodded at the dwarfish one. “Cool,” she purred, and got to work.

If there’s enough call for the term acrotomophiles—folks sexually attracted to people with missing limbs—surely there’s a tiny kingdom in which I and my fellow uniboobs would be worshipped by dint of what’s not there, and methinks it would be populated largely, if not entirely, by lesbians. God bless ‘em.

I ordered a mastectomy “tankini” in a “C” cup, and upon receipt I was delighted to find its built-in “soft-cup bra” just generous enough that I could pour myself ever so gently into its smallish confines. (You’re not off the hook, Lands’ End—see to those generously endowed cancer survivors PDQ!)

Still, I see a little breastwork in my near future: I think I’m gonna let ‘em cut the other one off. I know that this imperils my status as an object of worship, but the imbalance is almost certainly exacerbating my spinal arthritis, and at this point I measure relief by the inch, not the yard. I hope to get it lopped off in the next year or so, thus achieving the boy-girl body of my dreams. (Is it too late to become a supermodel?)

At any rate, my left side has seen quite enough attention lavished on the right, and she’s felt more than a little slighted: Imagine for a moment that you’re a conjoined twin—no, really, imagine it—and that your dwarf sister, who was for many years considered grotesque and weird in comparison to you, because, you know, though you had a dwarf growing out of your side you had developed in a more expected way, is now continually fêted because, after all, isn’t she just as cute as a button? And come to think of it, who ever said bigger was better, Jolly Green Giant? Yeah, you’d be pissed, too. And maybe it’s about time ol’ lefty meets the brief, white-hot pain of a piercing needle and joins the ranks of her much-venerated sister. She’s been in exile so long, my left breast, the prodigal daughter led astray by punky hormones all those many years ago, and she’s ready to come home at last.

“It is like fanny pack,” the Russian cardio tech told me as she fastened a pouch around my midsection. And she wasn’t off the mark. While my heart monitor’s mission control, the ambulatory EKG recorder, was not quite as large as your classic fanny pack, it was nowhere near as sleek as an iPod—think more Walkman circa 1979 (when, by the way, Sony initially introduced their portable cassette player as the “Soundabout”).

The Cardiac Studies receptionist apparently wasn’t kidding when she told me to wear a loose-fitting blouse to Thursday morning’s appointment, where I received a Holter heart monitor to wear for 24 hours, just to see if there’s any cardiac mischief to account for my blackouts. (When the receptionist called to schedule me for a “Holter fitting” I thought she was saying “halter,” which left me wondering for several days just how many straps might be involved.)

The first shirt I put on Thursday morning was voluminous, from about two sizes ago, back when I treated my depression with food instead of meds. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt unconscionably dumpy, and I couldn’t imagine that the wires and such would need that much wiggle room, so I changed into a shirt that was biggish but not ridiculously so. As it turned out, that shirt was just big enough to contain my gadget-augmented girth.

Shouldn’t portable medical technology be at least as advanced as portable music technology? My partner’s current-generation iPod—and only the 30GB model at that—stores 7,500 songs; my heart monitor was to store only 24 hours worth of cardiac activity (on a 64MB chip) and was about five times the size.

When I poked around online I found that Kaiser and I weren’t exactly on the cutting edge; there were Holter systems that looked far sleeker than the one I was wearing. But noting their price tag of around $1,500, I understood Kaiser’s hesitation to replace the older models. They have to trust us riffraff to wear these things for a full day without absentmindedly diving into a swimming pool or wandering through a magnetic field. Besides, they probably do have some shiny new units that they reserve for their real patients. (I fear that Kaiser has written me off as a head case and is merely humoring me with dummy tests; my suspicion is reinforced when my MRIs are performed at a unit outside the hospital in a trailer marked “MRI 2,” which my partner jokes should read “MRI too!” being the fake one and all.)

So I went to work Thursday feeling like I was packing a bomb or wearing a police wire, what with the electrodes and surgical tape covering my chest and midsection and the hard, bulky box strapped to my stomach. The tech joked that she hoped I didn’t need to go to the airport that day. I told her I didn’t but that I was worried about scoring drugs later that night.

As the day wore on, I grew increasingly itchy and uncomfortable. My “unit,” as I had come to regard it with grudging acceptance, was the least of my worries; at least its straps were adjustable. But my tape-covered chest made me feel like a papier-mâché girl.

And the worst was yet to come.

The worst being that I had to sleep in this thing, the wires of which crisscrossed my bra such that it, too, would have to stay put until the following morning. For our lady readers, what’s the first thing we want to do when we get home from work? Take off our effing bras! It’s onerous enough making our pendulous pods defy gravity all day, but curtailing their freedom to flop around all yippee-skippy once we’re abed is beyond mean. The wee hours are when my breasts exercise their natural inclination toward ptosis. To deny them their due is to offend nature.

The best thing about wearing a heart monitor for 24 hours was that it made me appreciate not having to wear one. It is one of two tests I’ve undergone that I would not ever like to repeat, the other being my sleep-deprived EEG, prior to which I had to stay awake for 30 hours, toward the end of which time I would have given up nuclear secrets, the identity of the Black Dahlia’s killer, or even my friend Hugh’s cheesecake recipe, anything that might promise to earn me some horizontal relief. I’d submit to another spinal tap—without a local—before I would willingly repeat either of those tests.

Having my monitor removed this morning can be counted among my life’s great moments, assuming that we’re speaking liberally and are including the top 500 moments or so. I’d put it above finding five dollars (at age 12 in the parking lot of the Rusty Pelican) and beneath learning to swim.

I was supposed to have a female tech for both attachment and removal, but this morning a male tech came to fetch me from the waiting room. Maybe the Kaiser folks figured I was androgynous enough to go either way. At any rate, I didn’t care. I popped my shirt’s snaps open so fast you’d have thought we were shooting an exam-room porn scene, except that women in porn films seldom wear long-sleeve corduroy shirts—too seldom if you ask me. The tech countered my sexy move with his own, tearing the electrodes and tape from my bare skin like a crazed animal, or at the very least like someone who had other patients to see and no time for procedural foreplay.

After our frenzied exchange he said I was all set and turned away to futz with the equipment. Covered in conductive gel and adhesive residue, I stood at the exam-room sink with a paper towel pitifully dabbing at my angry red skin—even angrier now than it had been the previous morning, when the Russian woman rubbed it mercilessly to rough up the areas where the electrodes would sit. “Oh,” today’s tech said, removing the lid from a canister of pre-soaked gauze. “You can use alcohol for that.”

So I’m electrode-free, and I’ve shed my unit, and I can’t wait to free my boobs, which have been in their current state of bondage for 32 hours. Were I a woman of lesser endowment I’d consider giving them a weekend furlough, two luxurious days of bra-less hedonism, but nature is a cruel mistress, having saddled this tomboy with D-cup glands that forced her to stop boxing the neighborhood boys just as she was hitting her prime.

In a few days I’m certain to receive a call from my doctor telling me that everything looks normal; what else could be expected of a placebo test? A few days after that I’ll be scheduled for another appointment at MRI too! And thus life moves inexorably forward in Jabberwocky, where I’m thinking about buying a fanny pack to house my new Sony Soundabout.