Have you ever Googled mastectomy photos? I really hope you haven’t. Nobody searches for those images for a good reason.Here’s what you would find if you did: pages of scary, often headless pictures from doctors’ offices. Overhead fluorescent lighting, washed-out skin, slumping postures, guts sucked in. Then you’ll see the trauma shots. The scar projects. Why are so many of the pictures in black and white? Why are they always so devastating and poignant?Of course, I know what those Google results look like. I myself searched for mastectomy photos — because I was in the process of getting my own single mastectomy.I found out I had breast cancer at the age of 29 . I opted to do chemotherapy first. I discovered the bone metastasis a few months later, and my doctors decided there was no treatment benefit to surgery. We left the tumor in while we focused on how to manage my new life with a potentially fatal, but manageable, chronic medical condition.Then the lump in my breast started changing shape and growing. It became painful , pressing out against my skin and bruising me from the inside out. It was time to finally do the surgery.The first decision was how much to take. It was easy for me to decide to take off the whole breast for a more successful reconstruction. Any attachment I had felt for the damn thing was long gone. I think this might be how you’d feel if you were to find out an acquaintance was, in fact, a serial killer. You know, “We had some nice times together, I thought you were great, even a little sexy, but then you tried to kill me and now I never want to see you again.”So on a Tuesday, I was at the doctor's getting test results of a scan, and on Thursday afternoon I woke up sans right breast. I got my drains out the following Monday, my birthday, making it exactly three years from when I first discovered the little f*cker.What comes after that, what we refer to as "the mastectomy and reconstruction," is really a series of things. It sounds like a clean, concise rip instead of the messy, jagged-edged reality of those months.There is the surgery itself to remove the cancerous/necrotic tissue and insert deflated implants called chest expanders. Then the uncomfortable chest expansion , waiting for the scar tissue over the expanded chest to heal, and then cutting it open again to shape that into a breast and lifting my natural breast to create symmetry. All in all, this process took about six months for me.