Introducing my first VIP Mutant, Eleanor – Founder of Valiant Lingerie. Eleanor has been on a remarkable journey over the last year developing and designing beautiful lingerie for post-mastectomy women. Take it away Eleanor:
For almost a year now I’ve been working on something that means the world to me; Valiant Lingerie. But the story of Valiant really started a long time before that.
My mum had breast cancer twice when she was in her early thirties. I was too little to really understand everything that was going on but I remember the treatment and the surgeries she went through. I also remember very clearly how frustrated and distressed my mum was with the frumpy, clinical, unflattering bras she had to wear as a young woman who had had a mastectomy at the age of 31.
When I was 19 I had genetic testing and discovered that I have the BRCA1 genetic mutation. I had always known there was a chance there was a hereditary factor to the breast cancer in the family but this crystalized matters. This made it real. This put numbers to the risks.
I started gathering information about the steps I could take to reduce my risks. My plastic surgeon was very supportive and understanding and met with me several times to explain my options. I decided to have a mastectomy with immediate reconstruction with under the muscle expandable implants and had the surgery in 2011 when I was 24.
The physical recovery was tough but the mental and psychological recovery took far longer. My doctors were fabulous in supporting my physical recovery but mental wellbeing wasn’t on the radar! This was long before Angelina Jolie brought the BRCA genes to the attention of the world and there wasn’t a huge amount of information out there about BRCA1 or young women undergoing mastectomies.
I remember that my surgeon had a book of post-surgery photos that he showed me before I had surgery but it was hard to imagine what my body would look like or what to expect because the photos were all of women in their 50s or older. I spent hours looking online, desperate to find pictures of younger women so I could imagine what I would look like after surgery and during my recovery. I wanted to find someone with a story like mine! I wish I had had someone like Christen and a resource like BRCA Chatter back then and I am enormously grateful to have her now! Being able to connect with other young women and share experiences and stories is a gamechanger!
It has now been 9 years since I had my first surgery and building a relationship with my body and self-image has been an uphill battle at times. Sometimes, especially in the early days, my body didn’t feel like “me” anymore. It’s so strange feeling that your body is alien to you!
Which brings me back to those same frustrations my mum felt after her mastectomy. I was desperate to find lingerie that was comfortable for my new “foobies” but also helped me to look and feel like me again. I had hoped that post-surgery lingerie would have improved over the years since my mum’s surgery but as I shopped around it became more and more apparent it hadn’t! I found plenty of bras that were beige, boring and looked like something my gran would wear but nothing that made me feel confident and beautiful. Nothing that felt like me.
I felt more and more as though women like me were a second thought or thought of as a patient rather than a woman. And I wondered how much worse it must feel for women who were also going through chemotherapy and radiotherapy? I thought about how unfair it was that women who had been through surgery and treatment for breast cancer seemed to be essentially invisible to the lingerie industry. I struggled to think of a group of women more deserving of lovely things to make them feel beautiful and confident!
That’s why I created Valiant Lingerie. For all those women out there rebuilding a relationship with their body and their self-image who just want to feel like themselves again. I wish I could put into words how much it means to me, how passionate I am about creating something beautiful to give you the lingerie you deserve.
