Flat-chested in a breast-enhanced world

August 3, 1998 - the nurse-practitioner finds a lump in my right breast, a lump that hadn't been there in June (I don't know if I did my breast self-exam in July). 

August 8 1998 - I learn I have breast cancer 

September 3, 1998 - I have a modified radical mastectomy

September 4, 1998 - I start a post-breast life

I've never particularly identified my self with my body.  It was easy, therefore, to deide not to have reconstructive surgery after my mastectomy.  One breast here or there --what the hell?  It never, ever occured to me taht anyone - and I mean *anyone* - could in this or any other lifetime have anything to say to me about my decision.  Turns out that lots of people thought they had the perfect right and, perhaps, obligation to comment upon my decision and, by logical extension, me.  

Several months after my mastectomy, when all possible swelling had gone down, I went to a clinic that fitted me for a prosthetic breast.  This was a breaast-like object to slip inside a brassiere.  I wore it, opposing a true breast, one day.  I could not stand it!  It was cold, weird, slumping this way and than when a real breast would have gone that way and only then, this.  After a few hours, I reached down inside my shirt and took it out.  Now what?  It was an expensive thing, this externalized breast.  Looking to protect it, I put it into my very heavy, padded mitten, figuring it would be safe there.  True; and not true. 

At the end of that aday, I suited up to go outside and walk the 0.75 cold miles home.  I had stuff to check out at the library's circulation desk, so carried my mittens in my hand until I was really ready to got out into the cold, cruel world.  I put everything down on the desk:  the books I wanted to take home, my mittens.  And then, it happened.  The silicone breast-like object slithered out of my mitten, shimmied there on the circulation desk, hesitated on the edge, and then fell to the floor at the feet of a complete stranger.  

What does one say in such a situation?  Memory draws a convenient veil over it. 

And yes, this is the back story for what I'm trying to say. 

Some days ago, I took a taxi from a hotel in Makati, Manila, Philippines, to the airport.  The driver called me "sir" for much of the first kilometers.   (Let me fill in:  I had a second mastectomy, with no reconstructive surgery.  I am concave-chested.  The muscles above where breasts would be, ramin.  The absence of breast tissue below makes me look concave.)  During the course of the drive, the driver and I talked about this and that, and - out of the blue - my body.

"Are you a man or a woman?  You have no breasts," he said,  looking at me in the taxi's rear-view mirror.  

"I have money to pay you for the trip to the airport.  That's all you need to know."  I was shocked and, as a result, rude.

Minutes of silence.

"Excuse me, ma'am.  I am concerned about you.  Do you have a family?"  It was exquisitely clear that he thought me less a woman (let's not een talk about being less a person) for not having breasts.  I said that I was fine, strong, competent, secure:  even though his questions made me doubt all that.