Highland broadcaster on her mastectomy and why she wants to see society normalise post-surgery bodies
Next up in our Life After Cancer series, we speak to Pennie Latin-Stuart.
After being diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2020, Pennie began writing about her experience daily and has since launched her podcast, LUMP.
In it, she shares the nitty-gritty of cancer, the mental toll, and the impact on all areas of life.
She now wants to champion spaces where people with ‘different’ bodies are represented, and ensure that those going through early diagnosis are given the information needed to make informed choices about their bodies.
Having endured a mastectomy as part of her treatment, Pennie soon found that there weren’t many images, clothes, or environments that truly reflected what life after surgery looked like.
Her first encounter with representation of someone with a mastectomy came when a friend showed her a picture from The Simpsons.
She said: “I didn’t know what I was looking at to begin with, but she said, ‘look closely’.
“I literally gasped, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was sort of shocking, but brilliantly shocking.
“It made me suddenly realise that this is something we don’t do. We don’t show people with a mastectomy in popular culture. And it just made me think, this is mad, given the figures for how many women become part of that club every year in the UK.
“To not have more of that visible just struck me as dreadful.”
The big thing for Pennie was that the character’s storyline wasn’t about cancer or mastectomy – they were a hypnotherapist who just happened to have one breast.
“When I was diagnosed and had a mastectomy, I didn’t see other women out and about, living their lives, doing interesting, normal things, and saying ‘oh, by the way, I do it with one breast’,” Pennie said.
“My concern is that we don’t have a lot of representations. When you’re at that awful crisis point and trying to make decisions, most of the information I encountered was about statistics – how likely I was to live or die.
“You’re not given images and stories of heroic women living after treatment, and I think I might have made different choices about my own treatment if I’d felt it was more okay to just have one breast.”
Pennie’s joruney after the mastectomy was complicated journey. Opting for reconstruction, it didn’t work.
Her body reacted poorly to the surgery, which involved using muscle from her back and moving it to the front.
She said: “Even though I went through all the hell of reconstructive surgery, I’ve got kind of a tiny little shrunken breast on that side.
“It’s interesting, because I’m now facing the decision of whether to have surgery to try to fix it – because I can’t undo what’s been done. But I’ve been left in a halfway house, which feels like a difficult place to be when you’ve already gone through all that surgery in the first place.”
Pennie now spends lots of time with other women like herself, many of whom are very active in sports.
A lot of them go running with what Pennie calls a "uniboob", not wearing a prosthesis because it gets in the way. However, she found there are very few underwear options for women with a mastectomy.
She said: “I met a whole gang of women through the Incredible Feet running group in Inverness. It was really inspiring – they were out running with one breast – but what became really evident is how hard it is to get bras that are one-sided.
“There are maybe three companies making them, but they’re prohibitively expensive.
“It’s understandable, because they’re made to order and customised – but they’re not readily available.
“They’re certainly not talked about as an option during your care. People are left to figure it out for themselves.
“Somehow it feels like the underwear world – and society – is treating you as lesser, especially when there’s no provision for you to get nice underwear. So you’re actually defeminised by that too.
“A good friend of mine said, ‘I want to feel sexy. I want to feel all woman. I am still all woman, even though I’ve got one breast’, and I find that really emotional.”
Pennie says her relationship with her body has changed massively since her surgery.
At the time of diagnosis, she felt confident she wouldn’t have a problem with it – but five years later, she says she still struggles to look in the mirror.
“Do I feel sexy having a missing breast? Not in my case,” she said. “Do I feel conscious of it? Less so.
“I’m less bothered about what other people think.
“It can be seen as a scar of strength and survival – but it can also be a reminder of what you went through. Looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘I had cancer’ – that’s difficult.”
Pennie wants people to have an informed and empowered choice – whether they choose reconstruction or not – and for society to support them by providing representation in popular culture.
“I would dearly love Sarah Lancashire to play some badass detective or cop who also happened to have had a mastectomy in her past life – but she’s still a badass cop,” laughed Pennie.
“I think someone like that would be a brilliant poster girl for this.
“Or I want to open a book and be reading a fantastic, riveting story, and the backstory is that the character only has one breast – but it’s incidental. It needs to be normalised and everywhere.
“I know there’s been a Skims [Kim Kardashian’s clothing range] shoot with a model, and an amazing New York Times Magazine spread featuring a woman with scarring from the 1990s.
“These are incredible – but I want to see this normalised.
“That representation needs to exist at all levels – on TV, in books, on radio, in shops. Where you can walk into a high-street store and see a one-sided bra.
“We should be hearing brilliant stories of people who – oh yeah – also happen to have had breast cancer.
“Those stories should be available at the point of diagnosis, when people most need to lean into hope.”
