Seen any good scars lately?

[Catherine Money's photo of her mother, "Survivor," "One in Eight: Pasadena (CA) Portraits"]

Devon Williams had a mastectomy to remove her stage 2 breast cancer in 2006, and afterward noticed that she never saw images in the media of scars from breast-cancer surgery. "I had no images available to me," she told the San Gabriel Valley (Ca.) Tribune. "I had nothing on the Internet that gave me any comfort or inspiration. They were all frightening images, displays of diseased breasts."
She found women to photograph, found a photographer, and organized an exhibit of the photos, called "One in Eight," which is the chance that an American woman will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. The photos went on display in September in Pasadena, Ca. Williams hopes the exhibit will travel around the country.

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My Lumpectomy

The surgeon skipped doing a needle biopsy and went straight for a lumpectomy. I went to the hospital very early in the morning as an outpatient. The morning wait was long - one person had the operating room ahead of me and then there was an emergeny appendectomy. The doctor shook me to wake me to say it was cancer. I rolled onto my side, pulled my knees up in fetal position, and cried and cried. I don't remember thinking anything, no words. Just emotion. Later on I cried, thinking to myself my daughter is too young (10) for her mommy to die.

I would have to return in about a week to have the margins and lymph nodes checked. For now it's up to the lab to test the lump for the individual characteristics of my cancer.

My tumor was about 10mm. My scar is about 2 inches long.

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