Lesley Murphy won fans when competing in Season 17 of The Bachelor, vying for Sean Lowe’s heart way back in 2013.
More recently, though, she made headlines for wisely getting a preventative double-mastectomy after finding out that her genetics put her at major risk of getting breast cancer.
And now, after weeks of preparation, she’s gotten implants and she’s sharing her tale with the world.
Her most recent photo shows her with her surgery happily behind her and she’s doing just fine.
In this Fourth of July photo, Lesley jokes that she’s been “stuffing her bra since the ’90s.”
Avoiding cancer before you ever get it is good.
Having a great sense of humor about it is great.
Just look at how cheerful she looks in this photo after receiving her breast implants:
You may recall that Lesley discovered that she has the BRCA 2 gene, which puts her at major risk for breast cancer.
A double-mastectomy is of course the best choice, but the fact that she’s sharing this with the world is so important.
We’ve read of worst-case scenarios when women face this decision after a breast cancer diagnosis.
One woman’s husband told her that he’d rather see her dead than without breasts.
Another woman expected her husband to pick her up from her mastectomy and he never showed.
When she eventually made her way home, she discovered that he had moved out while she was in the hospital.
(The world is awful, sorry)
So when Lesley Murphy shares her story, complete with photos, with the world, she’s working to reduce misunderstandings and to normalize the life-saving procedure for other women.
It’s even better when she walks followers through every step of the way.
That photo is of Lesley after her second post-op following the mastectomy surgery.
Part of preparing to receive implants meant getting pumped with gradually increasing volumes of saline.
She described the temporary expander implants as feeling like “boulders” as they brought her up from a flat chest to a C-cup.
But now she’s past all of that and her implant surgery went well.
“Happy with a 100% chance of swollen. Exchange surgery was a success and a huge difference from the double mastectomy surgery,”
It sounds like her experience was, while not perfect, very much a best-case scenario.
“After 3 hours I woke up and drank some ginger ale, saw my mom, discussed things with my sweet nurse and was wheeled out of my favorite hospital…where I felt like we hit every bump in the road on the way home. Ouuuuch.”
Yeah, that sounds all kinds of agonizing.
You don’t need to have ever had surgery or have boobs to understand that cars aren’t exactly the most comfortable place to be when you’re not feeling your best.
Honestly, if we’d had any kind of major surgery so recently, you wouldn’t catch us posing for photos for the Fourth of July.
You’d be lucky to catch us wearing anything more than a bathrobe.
A C-cup is a lot of progress since Lesley Murphy’s post-mastectomy photo, right?
Keep in mind, though, that if Lesley had wanted to keep her chest at that level, that would have been 100% fine.
Not everyone who gets a mastectomy can afford to get implants afterwards.
Not everyone who gets a mastectomy wants to get implants afterwards, for any of a whole host of reasons.
But by sharing her story like this, Lesley may make it easier for an unknowable number of women to get life-saving procedures in the future.
Boobs are awesome, but nobody should be dying to keep them.
