Two female doctors remade my breasts—both of them—at the end of May; it was my first time attended by two surgeons but my second time on the operating table in six months. The first time was for elective surgery in November, four months after a dermatologist had identified the lump under my left shoulder blade as a benign fatty tissue growth. I’d felt its gradual spread with curious fingers, occasionally despairing at what the mirror showed me: a small, uncomfortable hill of flesh that made me feel like Quasimodo.

The second time was to remove a cancer tumor lodged north of my right nipple, a growth so small it had yet to make its presence known as a lump. The surgeon went over the procedure with me. One breast would be opened and cleared and the other reduced to match the mate that radiation would shrink. The result may not be exact, but we do our best. Then, on a diagram of the female torso, she showed me exactly where she and her colleague would make their incisions. Her pen traced an upside-down question mark on the right nipple that ended a short way up my chest and then a round keyhole attached via a thin curved line to an under-breast anchor on the left.

Later, on the day of surgery, she took a black marker and ruler and draw lines and circles on my chest that she would use to guide her, just as surgeon who removed the lipoma had taken his pen and gathered the tumor on my shoulder within the boundaries of a single oval I could not see.

Twice my body had been cut open, twice my flesh had temporarily become the canvas for a surgeon’s marker and knife. Back side first then front, the geometry of surgeons. In the span of six months, two separate pathologies had transformed my body into a living art project.

*****

Painter Frida Kahlo knew what it was like to live in a healthy body until she contracted polio at age six. She recovered after spending almost one year in bed. But one leg, the right one, became thinner and shorter than the left and would cause her pain—and not a little embarrassment—for the rest of her life. Kahlo learned to hide the deformity under the long dresses and eventually, the colorful skirts that became her trademark.

Twelve years later, when Kahlo was 18 and preparing to study medicine, a trolley car rammed into the bus she was riding. A steel handrail impaled her through her hip, piercing her uterus and fracturing her spine and pelvis. Multiple surgeries followed; after that, Kahlo was forced to wear plaster corsets to support her back and keep her body straight for the rest of her life. She turned to drawing—activity she had always loved— for solace and for a brief time considered becoming a medical illustrator.

Until she realized that art could help her express her feelings about the beautiful, broken body that surgeons would remake over and over again for the next thirty years.

*****

Health did not become a focus for me until a faulty endocrine system I’d tried to mask with hormone-balancing pills through part of my 20s and most of my 30s rejected them not once, but twice, the second time causing a clot in my right leg. The clot resolved in five months because I was young and otherwise healthy. But it took more than a decade for my swollen right leg to look more or less like the left and the pain to ease and sometimes, on good days, disappear long enough to temporarily forget any of that—the hospital visits, the blood thinners, the weekly blood draws—ever happened to me.

I could never take those pills again. When doctors told me five years later that the raging menstrual cycles the pills had once controlled had made me dangerously anemic, I had no choice but to go under the knife. This was my first surgery and one that would not leave scars. Not at first, anyway.

After midlife weight temporarily rounded out my belly, keloid tendrils, pink and unruly, blossomed out of my navel, surprising me. I tightened up my diet, lost most of the weight and the tendrils retreated but only a little. I asked a dermatologist to inject what remained with silicone to shrink the keloids and flatten them until they turned silvery-white.

They are fading, slowly, the scars. But sometimes, in full rebellion against ugliness, I contemplate getting a tattoo around my navel. Something elegant, floral and baroque.

*****

Flowers meant the world to Kahlo. Behind the walls of her Casa Azul studio in Mexico City, she grew all kinds: roses, marigolds, fuchsias, oleanders and more. Bougainvilleas were among her favorites. Very often, she created elaborate headpieces that, like her skirts, became a personal trademark. She did this not just because she loved flowers, bright colors and her Mexican heritage. But also because flowers represented the fertility a random accident had stolen from her. She wanted children; but she miscarried them or was forced to abort the embryos that could not grow inside a destroyed uterus. If she could not give birth, she would wear living things on her body, transforming grief into an occasion for the joy she refused to surrender to misfortune.

*****

Sometimes, my right leg still aches. When I am able to swim at our neighborhood pools or go long-distance bicycling or hiking, endorphins and the rush of moving blood through leg veins that have lost elasticity from clot damage make the pain disappear. These days I feel the ache more because I cannot swim, cannot sweat too hard from bicycling and hiking. Not yet, anyway, not with an upper body still tender from surgery.

Looking into a mirror, I see my silhouette is slimmer now, almost adolescent, as though the weight of adult womanhood has been lifted from me along with the cancer. There’s nothing maternal in those breasts. No roundness, no softness. Now they pair well with the empty space between my ovaries, created by the surgeon who put scar-flowers in my navel. When I am cleared to don my neon-colored sports clothes to swim and bike and hike and sweat again, I will feel a new lightness. Not quite a bird, I will glide through my days with fewer of the things that marked my body—my beautiful, imperfect body—as female.

*****

A failed bone graft surgery meant to correct spine issues caused gangrene to settled in Kahlo’s shorter, much-weakened right leg. Doctors amputated it and Kahlo wore a prosthetic leg she dressed in an embroidered red boot she designed herself. Kahlo died of a morphine overdose six months after this last surgery. But not before she made a pen-and-ink sketch of that lost leg and signed the image, not with her name, but with words every bit as defiant as her red boot.

“Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar - Feet, why would I want them when I have wings to fly.”