Photo courtesy engin akyurt via Unsplash

Uh-muh-ni emerged from her bedroom with a confused expression.

This was not unusual. Finding me in the kitchen, she announced, “I lost my filling.” I immediately sympathized; a lost filling brought back memories of excruciating nerve pain.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed. “Did you eat something hard?”

Uh-muh-ni looked at me quizzically. This also was not unusual. “Hard?” she repeated. Her eyes rolled back as I watched her try to remember when she last ate something hard. With her memory leaking bigger holes than a mesh net, I prompted with another question.

“Are you in pain? Do we need to call the office?”

Uh-muh-ni clutched her chest and said, “No, I’m not in pain.”

“Let’s call the dentist and see if we can get you in as soon as possible.”

“I don’t need the dentist,” uh-muh-ni pointed to her breast. “ I need my filling.”

Uh-muh-ni got a breast prosthesis post mastectomy.

Even for me, born in the US, English as my first language, this is a complicated mouthful. The obstacles of successive consonants with an inconvenient digraph in the middle. What I’m saying is, it takes a lot of effort to correctly pronounce uh-muh-ni’s new prosthetic piece.

As for uh-muh-ni, she promptly dispatched with the clinical term and pragmatically referred to her boob as “my filling,” as in—

I lost my filling.

Have you seen my filling?

Give me my filling—this when we were trying on various breast prosthesis bras, crammed in a dressing room with our breast prosthesis sales woman. Uh-muh-ni pulled on a bra, and the sales woman fastened the clasps. Then uh-muh-ni asked for her “filling”. I dutifully handed the beige blob to her, which she plopped into her bra.

The breast prosthesis. Photo courtesy Ayoung Kim

So strange, the association with “filling.” I think of pork bun filling, blueberry pie filling, chicken pot pie filling, goose down filling, tooth filling.

In contrast, uh-muh-ni’s mind associated her bra cup as empty, and in need of some filling. 

It took some time for me to stop visualizing a pork bun in her bra, but in a pinch, it just might work.

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“Smily” is a nickname my mother gave herself. These are a collection of stories and poems written for her.