Locker-room ladies learn a lesson from one scarred but proud

By Diana Griego Erwin -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 5:50 a.m. PST Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2002

If you're a female member of a health club in the Sacramento area, watch out in the showers for a regular named Lynetta.

She's the one proudly marching around the shower room in the buff, a swimsuit slung over one shoulder, a scar jutting across the left side of her chest.

Lynetta O., as she asked to be called here, recently joined what naturalist and author Terry Tempest Williams referred to in her own family as the Clan of One-Breasted Women.

In Williams' case, her mother, grandmothers and six aunts all had mastectomies because of breast cancer. When Williams wrote her essay on the subject in 1990 or so, seven of these women, including Williams' mother, had died.

Lynetta, a cashier in an elegant gift shop, joined the worldwide clan last year following a mastectomy at age 46 after a particularly nasty case of breast cancer. She's learning to live with the change in her body the best she can.

Which, to her, means this:

Honestly. Sadly. Proudly.

"Why shouldn't I show off my scar?" she asked, a bit defensively. "The alternative is hiding it; covering it up as if it's something I ought to be ashamed of. Why should I be ashamed? ... I didn't ask for this. I didn't invite cancer into my life. It just came. I've paid dearly for this scar. Paid and survived. I ought to be able to flaunt it."

If she seems like a fighter, the trait will serve her well in her battle with cancer. Heck, she's accustomed to fighting. Motherhood at 17. Ugly divorce. Flunked out of college, then graduated 15 years later with honors. Tried selling Amway and Mary Kay. Found Jesus four times; lost him again.

And now this.

Another battle in which she's still scrambling to learn what the rules are exactly.

Having read the literature and discussed it with doctors, she decided to accept her scars with grace by leaving them be.

The shower-room reaction at the health club is throwing her for a loop, though. The shocked and embarrassed looks reveal how uncomfortable many other women are in the presence of imperfection. One member of the club even asked management to ask her to cover up a bit, Lynetta said.

Of course, no one bats an eye at the twig-like members battling eating disorders. That's normal.

And so, Lynetta sucked up the tears edging toward her eyelids and told the attendant they sent to talk to her that, no, she would not cover up.

She explained that she's trying really hard to love her body the way it is; to feel that this is normal (more than 190,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in the United States each year). Lynetta's goal: to accept herself just as she is.

Hearing this, the employee burst into tears and told Lynetta a story about her own grandmother. "She said something like her grandmother had had a double mastectomy and never felt totally like a woman after that," Lynetta explained.

Since Lynetta's mastectomy, some of her friends have, out of concern and friendship, gently suggested that she might want to consider reconstructive surgery to make her feel "better" about herself.

Lynetta has no trouble with reconstructive surgery for those who want it -- and many breast-cancer survivors do.

But it's not for her.

"I really feel blessed -- or, in an odd way, at peace," she said. "People are so caught up in their looks. I was, too.

"But now I have this chance to say, 'Who is Lynetta, really?' She's not a look, a dress size or a missing breast."

She found she's an artist who's good at making people laugh and a loyalist of her friends. She makes a mean vegetarian lasagna; everybody says so.

And so, she walks boldly through the shower room, saying, without words, "This is me. Take it or leave it."