Finding Romance, and Sex, for the First Time After a Double Mastectomy

I was at a restaurant in DC with my girlfriends when I met him. 

He was the general manager who rushed to my rescue when his staff thought I was about to go into anaphylactic shock from eating some zucchini that touched the shellfish. He made me laugh on first sight. That’s when I spotted his gray, plastic bracelet. He was connected to cancer too.

I asked what type of cancer the gray band represented. He said brain. His dad died a few years back. I told him most of the women at the table were breast cancer survivors. Including me.  I was vibrant and he was receptive. We talked for so long at the table it became uncomfortable. I wasn’t eating and he wasn’t working. I asked him to join us after dinner for a drink.

It hadn’t been a full year since my breasts were removed, replaced with cadaver tissue and implants to give the illusion I had breasts as perky as a 22-year-old. I was just six months out from my last chemotherapy treatment with awkward hair and nails still growing back after being obliterated from the toxic medicine prescribed to save my life. 

I was 31-years-old when diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, a cancer my own female hormones fueled like an accelerator on a fire. The doctors put me into medical menopause by shutting down my ovaries. A monthly shot into my ass and I had absolutely no hormone activity whatsoever. No estrogen, no progesterone, no testosterone. We were blocking it all. I had less than zero sex drive. 

But I did want to spend part of that evening with this, dark, handsome, bald man. I was intrigued.

In the months before I met him, I tried to jump-start a chemical reaction down there. I just wanted to know what was possible — would I ever get aroused again or was I fated to some kind of passionless, androgynous life like my dog whose testicles were removed when I adopted him? Even he tries humping my other dog from time to time.

No fantasy, no touch, no cream, no trick, no book, no toy, could crank the loin controls into gear. At 32, I was supposed to be in the prime of my sex drive, but instead I felt like I was 72!

My OBGYN took one look at me, and wincing, said, “Oh honey, you look like a virgin again! Does it hurt to walk?” And that was before she stuck the cold, metal device inside my private parts.

I experienced such discomfort from chemotherapy and medical menopause; I didn’t even notice how uncomfortable the area between my thighs had become. Now that she mentioned it … ouch!

He sent us to a chocolate lounge around the corner and arrived about an hour later. He sat close enough to me where I could smell his perspiration. And that’s when it happened.

The most insane chemical reaction since I hit puberty.

My pheromones wanted his pheromones and I felt like I was going to come out of my skin if I didn’t kiss him right then and there. But, we were in a public place and his employees could potentially be at the same lounge, so we did the respectable thing and started making out in the elevator.

It was delicious. I mean delicious. He was an amazing kisser, soft and firm at the same time, sensual and passionate. He was as hungry as I was. He didn’t know I didn’t feel like a woman or a sexual being at all. He set off something inside my brain that went way beyond what estrogen and testosterone do for a woman. And the response was tingling throughout my body.

And just when I felt any conscious thought slipping from my mind, he ever so lightly ran his thumbs across my nipples. Only, I didn’t have any nipples. They were removed from my double mastectomy and I hadn’t had them reconstructed yet. Embarrassed and extremely self-conscious, I pulled slightly away from him and called a time out. Yes, I literally put my hands in the time-out T we’d use in basketball: