In December 1984, a search for healing strategies would have been the furthest thing from my mind. I was very fit, rarely ill, and could easily leap seven steps in a single bound. My life was busy with raising very active kids while managing a real estate career. But in December of that year, I became one of the millions of women to go down a silent path, which was to change things for me for some time to come. It came with the decision to be augmented with silicone breast implants.

After the augmentation, I enjoyed a few years of continued health and had no regrets for the decision I had made. But, increasingly, I began to suffer from excruciating headaches, as well as from gait problems and involuntary head tremors. By late 1988, I was seeking medical assistance for my health. Eventually, I was diagnosed with a thyroid problem, a heart arrhythmia, and other disorders. I was no longer a well person. Treatment continued on for the next few years, during which at no time did my medical professionals suggest that it could be my implants causing my problems.

I believe it was 1992 when I first read a magazine article about the health issues associated with silicone breast implants. Imagine my horror when I saw listed nearly all of my own symptoms and illnesses. Not long thereafter, I became one of the 440,000 women who joined the massive class action suit against the breast implant manufacturers.

My health continued to spiral downward, with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia being the most devastating to cope with. It wasn’t only physically difficult – my ill health had devastating financial consequences as well. The crucial moment came in April of 1997, when ill health, finances and a poor quality of life all collided to create a perfect storm. I woke that morning and literally screamed out loud, “Myrl, do you want to live, or do you want to die?”

(more…)

It’s interesting that the men in this clip are much more negative about fake breasts than the women.

I read this article and thought when will this madness stop? Really, why should a 15 year-old child be worried about the size of her breasts? More importantly, why would a parent purchase breast implants for a child?

I was the ripe old age of 35 when I had my breast augmentation. When I was 15, I did suffer from body image issues but interestingly enough, my breasts were not a concern to me nor did I even give it a thought about how small they were. That came later in life.

Thought I’d share this story to see what everyone else thinks about it. I know I was very shocked when I read it.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is furious over a new trend for the beauty conscious.

The country is well known for its beauty queens, says Reuters, but Chavez says the latest idea for birthday gifts is going way too far.

Girls turning 15 are being given bigger breasts to celebrate their coming of age.

But, “That’s horrible,” the story has Chavez declaring on his Sunday TV show, which went on for a record eight hours. “It’s the ultimate degeneration,.”

Plastic surgery for 15-year-olds follows, “Western-imposed consumerist icons such as Barbie dolls,” says Chavez, according to Reuters, which goes on:

“While breast implants are advertised on TV and banks offer special credit lines for such operations, if girls do get the enlargements they are not expected to become sexually active afterward.”

Adds the story, “In elevators, at huge, jam-packed shopping malls, women can be overheard openly boasting about their recent, conspicuous operations.”

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons says breast augmentation is the most commonly performed cosmetic surgical procedure in the US, says the Wikipedia.

“In 2006, 329,000 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the U.S.,” it states.

Reuters doesn’t say if penis augmentation is also offered to Venezuelan boys when they turn 15.

Beth Taylor

www.breastimplantsupport.org

TAGS: Venezuela, Hugo Chavez

This is a YouTube video documenting one woman’s experience through explant. I think it is worth viewing, especially by women who are thinking about having breast augmentation. They should remember that breast implants do not last a lifetime, and this is just one aspect of the entire implant nightmare that they may eventually have to endure.

There was a time when the world was inspired by John F. Kennedy’s words that “Ich bin ein Berliner,” meaning that all people who value freedom and democracy were Berliners. West Berlin, Kennedy said, was a symbol of freedom in a world threatened by the Cold War.

Nowadays, people seem to be inspired by more solipsistic concerns, like how to look better on the outside in order to feel better about ourselves on the inside. For women, the symbol of how we should look is Barbie. The unrelenting pressure from media and society to look a certain way has lead to the booming plastic surgery industry. In fact, the industry is racing towards levels of standardization and efficiency that will in effect allow women of all shapes and sizes to walk into a factory process and emerge at the other end looking EXACTLY THE SAME as one another - all uniqueness nipped, tucked and stuffed to oblivion.

According to The Sunday Times in London, at the upcoming annual meeting of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, a highlight will be a presentation by John Tebbetts, a Texas plastic surgeon who has figured out how to carry out breast augmentation in 30 minutes by first carrying out exact measurements of the breast skin and tissue in advance so that exactly the right size of implant is inserted at the time of surgery. Tebbetts says, “After the surgery we tell the women to go home, have a little nap then get up after two hours, wash their hair, which helps them stretch their muscles, then to go out to dinner. Between 80 and 85% of our patients go out on the evening of their surgery.”

The same Sunday Times article informs us that there actually IS an ideal breast. This week, British plastic surgeon Patrick Mallucci will share with an augmentation symposium at the Royal College of Surgeons his formula for the perfectly proportioned breast, which has the nipple pointing slightly skyward and sitting about 45 percent from the top. “An attractive breast has a balanced proportion between the upper half and lower half,” says Mallucci. “All the models I looked at conformed to those parameters.”

So, how long before assembly-line practices like Tebbett’s begin to exclusively offer implants that conform to Malluci’s measurements, and dinner is replaced by a couple of hours with stylists who, post-op, can give every woman the same shade and style of blond hair, and teach them all how to use make-up to achieve the same look?

Is this really what women want – to look identical to each other so that we don’t feel inadequate? If so, we should seriously consider all donning burqas. They would be a much healthier and cheaper alternative to achieve the same ends. Maybe then, we can remember what is really means to be a woman and to be free.

TAGS: Barbie, burqas, burqa

As a child I had an outward, perceived beauty and innocence. However the depths of my soul hurt from realities that no one could see. The average person was not enlightened to the hidden truths and untold secrets that played out behind closed doors.

A warped sense of self developed when a church elder, who was also a Sunday school teacher, groomed me as his sexual mate. I came to define myself through my sexuality and how I could please others. This tainted love affected most of my interpersonal relationships, but especially marred the love I should have had for myself.

The destructive nature of sexual abuse starts at the core of how we perceive ourselves. It expedites the downward spiral where self-admiration turns into devouring ourselves with biting criticisms. We once were free to enjoy who we were, without evaluation or disapproval. We had a sense of wild abandonment, because we were so confident in whom we were created to be.

Yet, at some point most of us lose that ability to love ourselves. Such self-confidence becomes perceived as arrogance. We cower at the thought of actually saying that we love ourselves. But in order to receive an authentic love from others, we must start with affirming our own self-worth. Negative self-talk will eventually destroy who we are meant to be and will absolutely make it impossible for us to be loved and be lovable.

We are each a beautiful work of art in the making that was created to be admired and understood. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said, “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

When darkness invades our lives, that pain either evolves into a sense of flawed beauty as a ray of hope shines through that experience, or weighs us down with guilt and self-hate, which masks our true beauty. We have a choice. We need to love ourselves and even appreciate the trials we endured, for it is those pieces of broken stained glass that makes the beauty of the stained window beheld by the world.

Marianne Williamson captured the essence of embracing yourself and the potential light that emerges through your struggles in life in her book, Return to Love:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let out own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Live an enlightened, liberated life. Your beauty starts with your love for yourself. NO living creature has the right to rob you of the love you are worth.

Martha Wade is a former Global Evangelism Mobilization Director of a Los Angeles area church. She is the founder of A Quarter Blue, an organization dedicated to curtailing child molestation.

TAGS: child molestation, sexual abuse

O.J. Simpson, a tabloid staple since his acquittal and subsequent civil-court conviction for his wife’s murder 11 years ago, has been stirring up quite a few mini media frenzies lately. First, he tried to publish If I Did It, a macabre, “hypothetical” account of how he would have killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman had he done it. The book is now controlled by Goldman’s family and on its second printing, with the “If” in the title dramatically reduced.

At the moment, Simpson is sitting in jail for allegedly leading an armed heist to reclaim what he says were stolen personal effects from the Las Vegas hotel room of a well-known memorabilia dealer.

And what has this got to do with Anna Nicole Smith?

Well, O.J. was tipped off by Thomas Riccio, an ex-con and well-known memorabilia dealer. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that this is the same guy who sold Anna Nicole Smith’s diaries for $500,000 and tried to sell a video of Smith’s breast enhancement surgery.

THE Royal Australian Navy is paying for women sailors to have breast enlargements for purely cosmetic reasons, at a cost to taxpayers of $10,000 an operation.

Defence officials claim the surgery is justified because some servicewomen need bigger breasts to address “psychological issues”.
more here … site has a poll

All the best from Ilena
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org

I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The easiest way to explain our relationship is that she is my granddaughter’s paternal grandmother. C and I have been in each other’s lives for over 12 years.

We have not been overly close, but she is well aware of the fact that I am a 29-year breast cancer survivor and a victim of silicone breast implants. Over the years, we have had many discussions about my lobbying Congress and my crusade to educate women on the safety issues around breast implants.

You can imagine my agitation when C called to tell me about her cancer… and in the same breath say that she was having a mastectomy with the “new” silicone implant reconstruction. Then she almost laughed as she told me that her surgeon said that, being it was for reconstruction, her insurance would pay for her to have her remaining breast augmented. She could now become a well-endowed woman!

I will spare you all the details of my response to her…. ultimately C is doing her own thing. But I do want to share this:

Twenty-nine years ago, when I was 25-years old and the surgeon told me the results of my biopsies, the only thing I cared about was LIVING.

Of course, back then, if you had a breast cancer diagnosis, you had a mastectomy. There was no choice. Eventually I got silicone implants to replace what I had lost, and they made me – AGAIN - very, very sick, when I was trying so hard to stay healthy.

My personal feeling is that reconstruction should NOT be a part of the initial cancer diagnosis and treatment plan. Society has gotten all the priorities screwed up, because we don’t need breasts to survive in life. Loosing an arm or a leg would be a far worse sacrifice. There is not a woman alive who can make an informed, educated decision on implants when she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. At that time, life-saving treatment choices are far more important than reconstruction choices.

Yes, breast implants for breast cancer patients SHOULD be a choice for reconstruction. But for later, after all the important decisions have been made, the hardest treatment completed, and the woman clear-headed, hopeful and working on getting back to her life.

I waited five years before I had silicone implant reconstruction, a decision I made because we didn’t know then what we know now about how breast implants are. After going through what I went through, I wish had waited another 25 years. But that is a story for another time.

TAGS: breast cancer, breast implants, breast reconstruction

We have blamed women’s body image issues on media, and called on all women to get online, speak out and resist the digitally enhanced, cookie-cutter fantasy images that so many of us feel we have to aspire to in order to be socially accepted.

Women’s Forum Australia has taken this issue head on. It has completed a major research project that looks at studies from around the world that answers such questions as:

* What really goes on when young women pick up a glossy women’s lifestyle magazine?
* What have psychologists, sociologists and other researchers found out about how they affect women’s health and wellbeing?
* What messages are really being sent through these magazines?
* How do advertising images affect us?
* What do magazines have to do with eating disorders?

The forum has published the study in a very readable, appealing magazine called Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women’s Magazines. From an article at ABC News in Australia, here are some of the study’s findings:

* Thin, sexualised and digitally enhanced mages of women are linked with women’s experiences of poor body image, depression and anxiety and eating disorders. The images contribute to self-harming behaviours and not performing well academically.

* Women’s attitudes toward their own bodies are worse after looking at thin media images.

* In young teenage girls, looking at pictures of thin, idealised models is likely to cause lowered satisfaction with their body and a high state of depression. Reading fashion and beauty magazines is associated with wanting to lose weight and initiating diets.

* A five-year study found that reading dieting advice in magazines was associated with skipping meals, smoking, vomiting and using laxatives in teenage girls.

Everyone should take a look at the website, which offers a sample chapter, “Hate your body: we show you how!” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. She also knows that whatever beauty she has is leaving her, stealthily, day by day. Even if she is as freakishly beautiful as the supermodels whose images she sees replicated all around her until they are more familiar than the features of her own mother, she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her that will not do, her knees, her feet, her buttocks, her breasts…She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. If her body is thin enough, her breasts are sad. If her breasts are full, her arse is surely too big.

And if this isn’t enough to convince you to buy it, here’s the mini-documentary available on YouTube:

Finally, we want to point out that Faking It and its mission has received strong support from the Australian Government. Prime Minister John Howard sent a message to the WFA’s Get Real Forum, which said, among other things:

…The Australian Government is concerned about the influence that images used in advertising and marketing can have on young women’s perceptions of what is acceptable in terms of appearance and values and the effects of this on their health and self-esteem.

…The government is also calling on the commercial television and radio industries to look at the issue of child sexualisation in the media as part of their respective reviews of their codes of practice which are being conducted this year. The Government has asked the Australian Communications and Media Authority to report back to government on strategies to prevent and/or reduce the sexualisation of children in the media and on the effectiveness of different approaches by March 2008.

…The Australian Government is committed to supporting young women to succeed in achieving their full potential. The government recognises that young women are Australia’s next generation of leaders and is committed to building their capacity to take on greater leadership roles and responsibilities.

Hey, USA, Leader of the Free World, WHERE’S YOUR LEADERSHIP IN THIS?

~ Sybil and Mary