First Woman with Implants

[Guest guest]

For those who are curious....

Patty

Excerpt from Texas Monthly Magazine, Article entitled " Silicone City "

This portion is about Timmie Jeam Lindsey, The first woman implanted with

Silicone Gel Implants.

Silicone City

The rise and fall of the implant--or how Houston went from an oil-based

economy to a breast-based economy.

by Mimi Swartz

(from the August 1995 issue of Texas Monthly magazine)

About Texas Monthly

Senior Editor Mimi Swartz

Mimi Swartz is a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine, where she has

worked since 1984. She grew up in San and graduated from

Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a B.A. in English. Her

work has appeared in Esquire, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. Her

September 1988 story, ìA Legacy of Evil,î--about the gang-rape of a

nineteen-year-old mother in San Diego, Texas--won a Headliners

Foundation of Texas E. Green Journalism Award for magazine

inividual achievement.

Swartz was recently nominated for National Magazine awards for two

stories. ìNot What the Doctor Orderedî--Swartzí tale of how an

old-fashioned Texas physician fought the takeover of modern medicine by

heartless insurance companies, and lost--received a nomination in the

Public Interest category. In the Feature Writing category, Swartz was

nominated for her article, ìSilicone Cityî, which traces the rise the

Houston economy--and psyche--to the breast implant.

Timmie does not look like an experiment in medicine,

social, and sexual engineering. Sipping coffee at a Mc's near

Channelview, she looks like a lot of other grandmothers from the

blue-collar town. She is 63 years old, a substantial woman in a nice

print dress, with thick glasses and short tinted red hair. People who

don't know her story might search for a clue in the two rather

adventurous earrings dangling from her left ear. People who do know

about Timmie will not be able to keep their eyes off her breasts.

She is the first woman in history to have received silicone-gel

implants.

Her story begins back in March 1962, when she showed up at the charity

hospital to have her tattoos removed. It was the only way she knew to

remedy the rough hand life had dealt her. Timmie had run off at

fifteen to get married, given birth to six children, and then at thirty,

found herself divorced, stuck in a dead-end job, and struggling to keep

her kids. The tattoos had become nothing more than a daily reminder of

all the wrong turns she'd taken in her life. They were red roses, one

over each breast, climbing like twin vines from her cleavage, and she

wanted them gone, as if erasing them could erase her past.

But, after surgery, the doctors weren't quite done with Timmie Jean.

They had an intriguing proposition for her: Would she like to have

better breasts? Doctors at the Baylor University College of Medicine

were trying to come up with a special kind of device, an implant that

would make a woman's chest look young again. " They just looked at me and

decided I was the perfect candidate, " she says. " You can imagine after

six children I was a size 34 Flat Feet. " " Why not? " she thought, though

when it came time for the operation, she refused to look at the

glistening silicone-filled orbs they intended to put into her body. " Out

of sight, out of mind, " she says. " If I looked at them, I might worry

about them being inside me. " The doctors told her they would make her a

full C cup, and for Timmie that was all she needed to know.

She stayed in the hospital four or five days after the surgery. Her

chest felt like a ton of bricks was lying on it, but she was worried

about losing her job, so she made herself get up and get back to work.

It wasn't until six weeks later, at a bar, that she became aware of the

momentous change in her life.

Timmie had picked out a pretty crop-top to wear, but that night it

hung out over her breasts in a way it never had before. " The men

just--well, that was a boost to my morale, she recalls, dusting off the

33-year-old memory with a broad, satisfied smile. " I thought I would

never meet anyone. I thought I would never marry again. But, boy, things

began to look up after that. " In fact, by New Year's Eve, Timmie Jean

was happily remarried and a new chapter in her life, and the life of the

breast, had begun.

" I was a guinea pig, " says Timmie Lindsey, the implant pioneer,

" but I was treated so royally I didn't feel like one. " Her life and that

of the implant have remained eerily entwined. She continued to see Gerow

over the years, and the two became friends of a sort. When the doctor

suggested she recommend the surgery to her friends, she did, sending in

her sister-in-law; when the controversy erupted over the safety of the

implants in 1991, she agreed to go on a local morning TV show with Gerow

and later appeared before the FDA to say that she had no complaints. She

enjoyed the days when women recognized her on the street and whispered

confidences: " I wouldn't trade ëem for the world, " they said of their

implants.

Timmie doesn't like to dwell on that dark time in the seventies, a

period when her body seemed to turn on her. She had joint pain, rashes,

dry mouth, dry eyes, and chronic fatigue. " I had all the same symptoms

of those others, " she says referring to the women who a decade or so

later started suing implant makers, claiming the implants made them

sick. After several years and several doctors, the best Timmie got

was the standard diagnosis of depression. She took her medication and

felt her sadness lift but still had physical problems. A few years ago,

her right knee joint was replaced, a problem some might relate to

silicone-induced rheumatoid arthritis, and some might relate to growing

old. No one really knows.

Though lawyers have approached her over the years, Timmie has never

had any desire to sue. Her sister-in-law did and so did Timmie Jean's

daughter, who has implants and a form of lupus. Both are now awaiting

awards from the global settlement, joining women who are deathly ill and

women who have little wrong with them beyond a vague dissatisfaction

that a cash award might cure.

Timmie has come to the point where she has outlived a lot of people

who mattered. She misses her husband and, oddly enough, she misses

Gerow, who, struggling to comprehend a painful divorce and the thousands

of lawsuits filed against him, died of a stroke. But Timmie is

different from Gerow and all the other people whose dreams and

drive reside in the small bags of silicone still nestled in her chest.

For better or for worse, she has no passion for either perfection or

profit, and immunity that has made her a bit player in this narrative,

one in which one of the loveliest parts of a woman's body was turned

into a laboratory for the impatient dreams of men and the secret

self-hatred of far too many women.

That was even true last November, when she fell, landing on her chest,

and her doctor found a small tear in her 33-year-old implant. " Let's

wait and see what happens, " he told her, and Timmie agreed.

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Is this how the first woman implanted dosen't have any problems?

Acording to Marcia Angell!!