Eliane Ibramoff (00:03):
My name is Eliane and it’s very much who I am. I will be 65 years old in a couple of months. I’m very much a believer in God and in spirit. I’m very happily married to a wonderful man. I’ve had experiences in my life which definitely can press one to move directions from faith to not faith. And here we are where I used to live in Battery Park City, beautiful part of downtown Manhattan. We had purchased our home here in the late ’90s because we had offices at the World Trade Center and I was here that day and it made an impact on my entire psyche.

(00:56):
I think it’s a year later. I go for my regular mammogram, la, la, la, going to get my mammogram, come back, and they call me when they get the results that the results were not good. So, okay, so we’ll take care of it. And I go for a lumpectomy. I took it all in stride. I go for a lumpectomy in Manhattan. I come back down, my husband is with me. And that then period of time after that, they let me know that that didn’t solve it. And that I have cancer and I’m going to need a mastectomy.

(01:48):
So here I am not even living at home and I have cancer and I need radical surgery. So the doctor, the plastic surgeon was a very young, handsome man and I’m in his office and he gives me one of those paper gowns and I’m sitting on like a metal table and a paper gown. And he looks at me and he shares with me that there’s three possible forms of reconstruction. And one of them is to take from my stomach, but I’m pretty small and I don’t have any stomach fat. And then the other one was to take part of my over here, but that would alter my maneuverability for the rest of my life or to place an implant. But because I’m very small breasted, he actually said, “They don’t make implants this small and so we wouldn’t be able to fill it up with as much of this saline solution.” And he said, “You might actually hear water sloshing around, the liquid sloshing around when you walk.” And I said, “Am I going to have to take Dramamine every time I take a walk?” He had no sense of humor and he didn’t think that was funny.

(03:23):
And then he looked at his watch a few times and he kept me, he left and there’s his young PA who’s got her pad and ready to write me down for door A, door B or D. And she said, “So which one are you going to choose?” And I said, “None of them.” And she said, “But you need to choose soon. What are you going to do? ” And I said, “I’m going to go and buy some scotch and go home and freak out. ” She looked at me and my husband said, “I’m going to go do some research.” My husband sent me an email with a website. They sound really great will you just give him a call? So what I did first was fax that office my pathology, about a 20 page report.

(04:32):
And then I called and he gave us an appointment to come and have a meeting. And it was for the first week of April and I hung up, I called my husband. I told him that I got us an appointment. My husband had found another doctor in another hospital facility elsewhere. And so we went there basically to interview him as well. And the doctor said to … And my husband asked this doctor what his statistics were of success. And the doctor said to my husband, “You need to go see these guys in New Orleans because they have a hundred percent statistics.” Now we had not told this doctor that we already had an appointment with these people in New Orleans because I didn’t want anybody to know we were shopping, respectfully, nor am I mentioning this other doctor’s name. And so we went, we left there and then we went down to New Orleans and so we scheduled my surgery.

(05:53):
It was April 23rd. On May 7th, I was back upstate working in my garden. To this day, even when I get a mammogram, which is always by women, the women, I just had one a couple months ago, the first thing she says to me is, “Why are you only having one?” I said, “Because this is reconstruction.” And she said, “You’re kidding.” I remember I was on one of my long walks and I’m wearing my tight little jeans and just going about my life and I saw somebody who knew me just casually and she had heard that I had cancer and I remember she walked up to me and she said, “How are you? ” Kind of with this tormented face. And I remember wondering why she looked that way and I said, “I’m fine. Why?” And she said, “Well, didn’t you have cancer?” And I went, “Oh, right.

(07:01):
Yes, I’m fine.” Because it was so outside of my life.