My Tata's

They jiggle when I brush my teeth, and honestly, that’s the most cardio I’ve done in months

There’s no warning. No pamphlet. No oncologist whispering, “Brace yourself.” Just one day, you’re a man with prostate cancer, and the next, you’ve got... options. Yes, gentlemen: welcome to the Hormonal Hooters.

It starts subtly — a puff here, a jiggle there — until one morning, brushing your teeth, you notice your chest swaying like it’s auditioning for Dancing with the Stars. You're not brushing. You're shaking maracas.

Stage III Androgen Deprivation Therapy: Chesticles.

My wife, who’s spent 40 years as the household's sole cleavage licensee, is now forced to share top billing. I've reassured her: these aren’t pleasure domes. They’re government-issued grief pillows. Non-operational. Morale-sucking. FDA-approved. I’ve gone from Alpha Male to Cup A. And I now wear a shirt in the pool — not from modesty, but to avoid being asked if I’m nursing.

How It Started

As with all noble disasters, it began with chemical castration — a heroic gesture for science and survival. Dignified? No. Nobody tells you that ADT doubles as your entrance into the Miss Estrogen Pageant.

The mood swings were easy to dismiss — traffic, politics, general despair. But then one morning I looked down and thought, Good God. Is that... contour? It was. Subtle but insistent. My once-flat chest now featured mild topography. Two uninvited, resolutely perky visitors had moved in.

My wife, naturally, noticed before I did. She has a PhD in Observing Things That Are Subtle But Potentially Mockable. One night, while I was reaching for the salt, she cocked her head, narrowed her eyes, and said, "Are you... blossoming?" My wife, ever the psychiatrist, didn't laugh, at least not out loud. She just tilted her head clinically, like she was observing a curious new case study in hormonal identity erosion. “Fascinating,” she murmured, scribbling in a mental notebook. “Tell me more about how that makes you feel.” Now, here’s the thing no one prepares you for: your spouse will start referring to your breasts as mutual property. “The four of us are going to the movies,” she’ll say. “The girls want ice cream.”

Deal with It

We laughed, because really, what else can you do? “The four of us are tired,” she’d say. Or, “The four of us are not wearing that shirt in public.” It was ridiculous. It was honest. It was a marriage with side effects. There was a brief, delusional moment, probably triggered by heatstroke and low testosterone, when I joked about entering a wet T-shirt contest. You know, reclaim the narrative, lean into the bounce. My wife didn’t even look up from her book. Just said, flatly, “No.” Not a raised voice, not a hint of debate. Just the kind of firm, judicial "no" that ends empires. And so ended my budding career as Miss Damp Ontario. She didn’t say anything more for a few days, possibly trying to suppress the laughter, possibly Googling "how to comfort your husband without body-shaming his estrogen surge." Eventually, she leaned in one evening, squinted at my chest with clinical detachment, and said, “They’re actually quite symmetrical.”
It was a bonding moment.

The moral of the story

You deal with it. You joke. You buy a bro. You compare cup sizes with your life partner and lose, graciously. Because if you’ve lived long enough to grow ADT boobs, it means you’re still alive — to mock them, to complain about them, to give them ironic nicknames like “Thing One and Thing Two”, and to squeeze in one last slow dance with the person who knew you before you became the estrogen-powered wonder you are today.

The real punchline, the hidden clause in the cancer treatment contract they never read aloud, is this: survival isn’t about triumph or dignity or heroic narrative arcs. It’s about absurd persistence. It’s about waking up with hot flashes and nipple chafing and a hormonal profile that would confuse most endocrinologists, and still showing up for your life like it’s an off-Broadway tragedy being rewritten nightly by a stand-up comic with a drinking problem. You cope by naming your chest ornaments, laughing when they clap during brisk walks, and reminding yourself with grim, glorious defiance — that as long as you can laugh at it, you own it. The cancer doesn’t get the last word. You do.

At the end, it’s not about the boobs. It’s about being alive long enough to make fun of them.

And so, in this grand anatomical vaudeville act I now call my morning routine, the crown jewel is this: they jiggle when I brush my teeth. Not in unison, mind you, no, that would be too elegant. They jiggle in opposition to my belly fat, like a pair of disgruntled metronomes set to different composers. One goes left, the other goes right. One flops forward in earnest, the other recoils in horror. It's physics. It's biology. It's tragicomic choreography.

And frankly, THAT is comedy gold.