My friend Christine joins me on this week's podcast to tell her story of explant and continued success as a model after her second "mastectomy," going flat and embracing her concave chest publicly on the runway. Her new biopic is coming out on April first in LA and she's invited us breast cancer survivors to come. Shoot me an email to find out how.

kathleenmoss@protonmail.com

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We spoke about Christine's new film premiering on April first. Here's the Preview!

You can buy tickets to join us here, but be sure you can come first because we really want to fill these seats!

The organization that Christine and I know each other through is Stand Tall AFC

Transcript:

My guest today is my friend, Christine Handy. She is a breast cancer disruptor and a fashion model living in Miami, Florida, and now she's a film producer—just recently. Her breast cancer diagnosis was hormone positive lobular breast cancer. And she started out with implants, and that's really what I want to ask her about first today is the journey of the implants and what that story looked like for you as a model, as a fashion model.

How did that disrupt your life?

C:

Well, I think originally breast cancer disrupted my job. That was in fact, I really wasn't planning on going back to modeling until I had implants for seven years and I really did love them, but they did not love me. And so seven years into it, I would say to my oncologist after my treatment, “Why am I still so foggy? Why do I still have joint pain? Why do I still feel this? Why do I have all these questions?” Because they were pinpointing the longitude of these symptoms on the amount of chemo I had, instead of looking at the fact that I had implants. And so I never thought that it was the implants until ultimately I had a MRSA infection in the implant and they were excavated. In an emergency situation, because I almost died the night that they were excavated, I had 104 fever and, um, it was, it had not gone into my organs, thank God, but MRSA is very dangerous. And so when I was, after I lost my implants and I woke up, it was during COVID and there was nobody allowed in the hospital.

So I woke up from surgery not knowing what I was going into like they didn't say “you're gonna wake up with a concave chest.” They just were “sign this form that says you're having number three and number four mastectomy,” which was its own trauma and I was like, “I can't be having mastectomies already had mastectomies in 2012 when I had breast cancer” and they were like, “just sign it it's for insurance reasons.” And I woke up in the hospital alone in the recovery room and there was so much grotesque pain and I reached to the middle of my sternum where there was grotesque swelling and I could tell that the swelling was in the middle of my chest and I kind of moved my hands to the left and to the right and there was empty space. And I thought, “I have no idea how to respond to this. I have no idea what the future of my chest is going to look like.” And that was frightening. And about three weeks after I was in the doctor's office, and he said, “you know, there's no chance of reconstruction. Because you've had so many surgeries on your chest, you have very little skin.”

We had to take skin because the infection, you know, got into your skin. And that was, that was it. The game over. It wasn't like I knew that aesthetic flat closure existed because I didn't, nobody ever told me that existed. It wasn't a choice. Whether I would have made a different choice or not, I don't know, I can tell you that from a health perspective if I had known the risks of implants if I had known That multiple surgeries and reconstructions took so much time away from my life and my family Then of course, I would have chosen a healthier path And so it was then that I said to myself if I feel this I have this amount of emotional pain and I have a solid self esteem, I have a solid foundation and faith. How do these women that don't have a massive team like I do of women championing for them, have a solid self esteem, which many of us don't, and I can talk about it freely because I used to not. And maybe not have a foundation that I feel is unflappable, which is my faith. What do people, how do they get through this? And that was when I thought to myself, I have to go back to modeling. I have to get into New York fashion week and model on a bigger stage. I need to go to Miami swim week and model in a bathing suit. I need to go to package this up to major brands. And ultimately I did it. It was not without a lot of closed doors. But we opened a lot of the—my manager—and the reason was so that I could say to women my beauty was not dissected because my chest was excavated. My beauty is whole because I know who I am and my foundation is my self esteem and my faith. No one can take that away from me. It has nothing to do with the external. And if I could show that, then maybe other women could heal and see that as well.

K:

Yeah. Yeah. I just saw it because I follow you on Instagram and I love the content that you share. I just saw an interview that you gave recently and you were telling the interviewer for a news show, I think it was, that you were brave to model. That other women in these situations can be brave and not just brave, but you model self love and self celebration.

You're celebrating your new body and you're doing that to show others that they can do that. And that's so much the kernel of truth that I feel was what happened to me. personally when I, after I was flat and had some confusion about what I should think about this new body. And then, you know, becoming a part of the flat community, people shared what was possible and modeled what was possible.

And so I just thank you so much for doing that in such a much bigger scale and on such a much bigger stage. Um, I want to go back and talk about what it was like to model with implants. So like, was that awkward? How long did it take you to get used to just having implants, having, you know, appearing breasted in the modeling? I don't know if it was photography or if it was runway at that point?

C:

Photography. Yeah. Um, you know, a lot of models have implants and that was, I, I never did, which was kind of odd. I felt like I was maybe the oddball out. And so it felt very ok and normal and natural, like, Oh, well, I'm now I'm just part of that club. know, everybody did it in their twenties or even earlier. So I'm just, I felt very safe and comfortable.

And I also, you know, part of the reason why I felt comfortable on implants was because I had, you know, kind of a bigger chest when high school and then had some eating issues with my modeling career. And then they were kind of smaller and I didn't always love my chest, to be honest with you. And then I was like, Oh, these implants. I wish I got a small size of implant. I didn't go like big and I was like, these just don't move. They're perfect. They just sit there and you know, I, I didn't mind them, you know?

K:

Okay. So they weren't lopsided. You didn't get any capsular contracture or hardening of the, the scar tissue around them. It wasn't awkward. Okay. So, and you did have a similar breast size to what you were used to then.

C:

They were just fluffier and they weren't sagging.

K:

Was it easier then that you didn't have nipples or did you?

C:

So my breast cancer was right underneath my left nipple. And so I didn't have nipples. I did have some sort of tattooing, but the tattooing didn't really work on my skin and I scar really well. So it, it was okay for me. Yeah, I felt okay with it all. I, again, I never knew. I just thought that's what people did. They had breast cancer. They got implants. I didn't know any different.

K:

You did swimsuit modeling still, right? So in some ways without nipples, it almost would b