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"F—k you, cancer": The story of a viral image
Brut America
Follow
3/25/2025
"Sandra, it's cancer. We have to remove both breasts."
After undergoing a double mastectomy, her reaction to seeing her new body for the first time went viral. Sandra Monroy tells Brut the story behind the emotional image.
Category
🛠️
Lifestyle
Transcript
Display full video transcript
00:00
You're too young to have no breasts.
00:02
You won't be able to wear a bra, you won't be able to wear a bikini,
00:05
and no one will love you, right?
00:07
Because you're incomplete.
00:09
And if I don't do this, what happens?
00:11
I mean, really, no one will love me.
00:13
I mean, really, I'm going to look like an ugly doll.
00:16
I don't even know what cancer is, nor what's going to happen to me.
00:20
Much less what comes at the aesthetic level.
00:24
I've been attending FUKAM for 12 years.
00:31
The only year I didn't do the ultrasound was in 2020, when the pandemic started.
00:38
And when I got there in 2021, the radiologist checked me and said,
00:43
Sandy, everything is still fine on the right, but there's something on the left that I don't like.
00:48
I never had a bruise, I never had red, I didn't have orange skin, I didn't have a bruise.
00:54
The results arrive, and that's when the oncologist says,
00:58
Sandra, it's cancer.
00:59
At first, it was believed that they were only going to remove the bruise,
01:03
or they were going to do both breasts, for the following reason.
01:06
Being so young, you have more years of life, and therefore, you can return,
01:13
or a new cancer can appear, much more aggressive, on the right breast.
01:18
There, you don't think if it's a breast, you think about your life.
01:21
My breasts need me, not me, my breasts.
01:24
But I also found, from the term bilateral mastectomy,
01:28
the fact that being flat didn't happen at all.
01:32
And I found women with a new aesthetic, where for me there was absolutely nothing missing.
01:38
I met Sandra because she makes super pretty, personalized monkeys.
01:43
She and I clicked, and well, the results came out as we would have liked.
01:53
She started doing things to say goodbye to her breasts,
01:57
and that's when we agreed to take some pictures so that she would say goodbye to her breasts.
02:03
What you see in the photograph are the women who have been around me all the time.
02:09
My mom, Sasha, Gina.
02:12
When the bets fell, the look of all of them, of Gina, Sasha, and my mom,
02:17
it wasn't like, oh, poor thing, but it was a look of seeing me come out of the cocoon, right?
02:26
I mean, of the metamorphosis.
02:28
What that scar is leaving you, at least in my case,
02:32
were two beautiful survival messages.
02:36
But she never saw the photo.
02:37
No, I never saw it.
02:38
Until it was published.
02:39
It was the first flat in Universal, and well, it has traveled the world.
02:46
It is the vulnerability open to the service of all.
02:50
So I think it's a debt that had to be paid by thousands of women.
02:55
When you grow up, they tell you, oh, no, he doesn't have boobs, he's flat, right?
02:59
Oh, he has boobs, look, he runs and they move, ha ha ha.
03:04
And suddenly, when you're older, they tell you, your breasts are your currency.
03:09
It's like, look, you're never going to need to pay for a drink, right?
03:11
You're a woman and you have to breastfeed.
03:13
And if you want to breastfeed and you can't, it's also wrong, right?
03:17
If they had told me before that this was happening to me,
03:20
well, I would have taught more about boobs, right?
03:22
The process is not over, right?
03:24
I mean, because, for example, Sandra has to continue taking a drug,
03:28
which she will have to take for five years.
03:31
And during that time, obviously, she has many plans, right?
03:35
Like for her scars, for her body.
03:39
Don't tell me, do it.
03:41
Don't tell me, poor thing.
03:42
What helps me is your support and your money.
03:46
Because it's one of the most expensive diseases out there.
03:49
We don't talk about it, we don't say it.
03:51
It's a family, political, economic, environmental issue.
03:56
Because in my case, the oncogenes came out negative
03:59
and that meant that my cancer came from the outside.
04:04
And being from the outside, then you ask yourself,
04:06
am I living in a world that is making me sick?
04:09
And if it's making me sick, how many more?
04:12
Why is all this stored in the closet?
04:16
Can't you see it's the first cause of death?
04:18
I mean, can't you see that one in seven of us is going to die from this?
04:22
And if we knew everything it involves,
04:24
we would look at those bodies with more respect.
04:27
Not just saying, you're missing this.
04:31
But saying, wow, if this woman went through chemo,
04:36
radiotherapy, hormonal therapy, mastectomy,
04:38
or one of all of them, or all of them at the same time,
04:42
I think we would value the ability to live,
04:45
and not what's missing.
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