Hearing Kim Bowles tell her story in between catching frogs, drawing with chalk, and healing the stubbed toes of her two small children really allowed me to feel why the stakes are so high for her, why when she heard “Stage-3 Cancer” months after giving birth to her second child, she did everything she could to make sure she’d be there to raise her children. What I didn’t know, is that the twisted, nightmarish experience she had on the operating table is one that is going on with women across the country. 

“Bowles, a stage 3 breast cancer survivor, had just undergone double mastectomy surgery and had told her surgeon to make her “flat”—that is, do not reconstruct her breasts. No implants. No molding of a boob from excess skin. Nothing. But as the fuzzy haze of anesthesia began to wear off, she realized he had completely disregarded what they had agreed upon—her body reshaped by a doctor while she was unconscious.”

An angered community is coming together in Facebook groups devoted to sharing the photos of the pockets of skin left against women’s will after mastectomies. Reporter Catherine Guthrie found surgeons making decisions against patients’ consent, stating they’re leaving the undesired flaps of skin “in case the patient changes their mind” about going flat. The trend points towards a medical culture in which women’s desire to go flat is challenged or outright ignored.  Bowles is now routinely protesting topless outside of the hospital where her surgery went wrong. Read about her amazing story in Cosmopolitan here.