Breast Implant Bandit? This Is Getting Udderly Ridiculous

No one is more obsessed with breasts than I am with my own, except for Yvonne Pampellonne, who stole another woman’s identity and $15,000 to get new implants she didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

Pampellonne went into her local plastic surgeon’s office using the name Cindy Paine and asked for new breast implants and liposuction to refresh the work she’d already had done. But she didn’t follow up with her post-surgical appointments — the man whose credit card she charged the work to did. Doctors Larry Nichter and Jed Horowitz tracked her down by using the lot numbers and weight of her old implants to discover her real name and turned the information over to police. She’s now facing three felony charges (and a lifetime of Internet humiliation as the “Breast Implant Bandit”) because she felt she needed bigger breasts.

I mean, in some way, I’m probably in no position to criticize here. Even at my skinniest, my breasts were always slightly disproportionately large for my bony frame and at my heaviest, they preceded me around corners by a step. They grew so fast that, at one point in my teenage years, I looked down to check my shoes and, being unable to see my feet, freaked out for a second that I’d lost my toes.

Laugh away. I’m used to it by now. Boys stare. Men stare. Women stare. I’ve been sent home from work as an adult for wearing a shirt that seemed fine in Ann Taylor and unexpectedly wasn’t because a shirt that shows 5 percent of my cleavage still shows more than was considered work appropriate, even in Vegas. People assume that the size of my breasts are inversely proportional to my intellectual capacity. Men that self-identify as “boob men” ask me out; even on a lake the word “motorboat” makes my blood boil and more than one guy has used his elbows to cop a feel as I’ve walked by in a crowded room. Everything that I own that isn’t a crew-neck is, by default, a boob shirt.

But, hey, it’s not all fun and games, either. Thankfully, my boobs don’t swell before my period — they stay the same size, they just weigh twice as much and therefore hurt like a motherfucker. Gravity and me, well, let’s just say we’re not friends. Some nights when I take off my bra, I ponder whether the marks on the underside of them are permanent or not. I can’t leave the house — even in a winter coat — without a bra unless I want some creepy old guy to watch my chests as my breasts joggle (it’s beyond a jiggle) up and down and side to side uncomfortably. Before I grew an ass to match, I threw my back out at the tender age of 18 bending over to pick a bowl up off the floor because I couldn’t support the weight appropriately. And when the bra store lady measured me up a few years ago and told me I was a DD, leading me into the ugly bra section, I started crying and vowed to lose weight (it took 30 pounds to lose half a cup size — but I lost two pants sizes). Maybe it’s my (extremely) pale skin, but sometimes I look in the mirror and just see udders. Moo.

That women aspire to what is, on some level, the bane of my existence (comedic obsession with them aside) is a little sad, if only because I think my ex said it best once: “The best breasts are really the ones you have access to.” I mean, sure, some guys are totally obsessed with boobs (the shallow ones) and some guys think they’re really important, but wouldn’t you rather a dude like you for you and not the sacs of silicone or dense fatty tissue strapped to your breastplate? So, great, if small ones make a girl really unhappy, let her go get the bigger ones, but, chances are, she’ll just find some new part of her body to obsess about and wish different. But at the point at which women are ruining themselves financially ($15,000 for her second set?) and legally and opting for surgery that does carry the risk of death, can we all just step back for a sec and wonder what the national obsession with milk-delivery devices is really all about?