By Joshua Grove
Beacon Correspondent
and Jennifer Champagne
Managing Editor
Katie Fink of Eben Junction is a breast cancer survivor whose scars have become both a personal truth and a public statement. She is a fearless advocate and pioneer for “aesthetic flat closure,” a form of post-mastectomy chest wall reconstructive surgery where excess breast tissue is removed to restore a flat and symmetrical appearance to the patient’s chest — pushing for recognition of the procedure as a valid and empowering choice after mastectomy.
Since 2017, Fink has helped demystify the procedure by posting on social media as The Flat Advocate and co-founding the nonprofit Flat Closure NOW. Through photography, she has turned her body into both subject and canvas, her images moving between protest and poetry — rallying on the steps of the Capitol, baring her scars with tenderness or embodying mythic figures like Atlas in the snow.
She uses her flat closure not as something to conceal but as a visual language to question beauty standards, confront censorship and reclaim power. The result is work that is part portrait, part performance and always deeply personal — photographs that invite viewers to see survival not as silence but as art in motion.
Her breast cancer journey started in 2016 when lab results from a breast reduction came back positive for Stage 1 HER2- invasive ductal carcinoma.
“They found cancer in the pathology of the tissue that had been removed when they did the reduction,” Fink said. “And within a month, I was on the table having a double mastectomy with expanders.
“I chose to do a full removal of both sides. And then I faced the decision to have reconstruction, and … they tell you that this is what all women do. You know, you get expanders, and then you get your size, and after your expanders go in, which stretches skin, then you go for the final surgery, which puts the saline implant in.”
The process did not go as hoped. Almost immediately, complications started that landed Fink in the emergency room — not once, but three times in the space of two months.
After struggling through pain and fluid buildup, and being told repeatedly that things would get better if she gave it more time, Fink decided not to go through with traditional reconstruction.
“I have five kids between middle school and high school,” she said. “I just wanted to be healthy, and it already felt like my body was screaming at me. So I’m like, no, I don’t want to wait, I just want to remove these. Well, the problem was that I got so much flak about it.
“It was something I had to fight for. It wasn’t like it was just ‘OK.’ No, it was, ‘What’s your husband saying? … You’re going to lose your femininity. How are you going to find clothes to wear?’ I’m like, oh my gosh, really?”
That societal baggage bled into lists of surgical options, interactions with providers and the repeated question of when she wanted to be fitted for prostheses. Everything reinforced the same inflexible standard for how a woman was supposed to appear, cancer or not.
“I am pretty much presenting without breasts, which causes a lot of strange feelings and thoughts and ideas about what you look like or how do you accept it,” she said. “Some women are very happy when they do that, but there was not a term for me. It was, ‘Oh, you just removed your expanders.’”
That October, Fink was in a breast cancer group coordinated by Marquette General Hospital.
“I started talking to people,” she said, “and they were like, ‘Oh, hey, you know, is this normal? This is what I look like when I don’t wear my prosthetics.’ And I was seeing these very lumpy, bumpy chests full of skin on them, going, ‘What is that?’ … And come to find out, anybody that goes in and just asks for a mastectomy was waking up on the other side with this residual tissue in the event they changed their mind.”
Fink came to realize that her style of procedure had no official terminology or billing code. At the time, what is now called aesthetic flat closure was so poorly defined that it was not covered by insurance.
“As I learned these things, something else happened,” she said. “I went to the Women’s March in Washington — the very first one in January 2017 — and I said, ‘If it’s warm enough, I’m going to take my top off,’ because I had to fight hard just to get the surgery that I did have.”
Going topless at the march opened the door to a lot of conversations, with curious marchers, reporters and people whose families had been affected by breast cancer. Those conversations inspired her to talk about her procedure with more people, and soon, Fink went down the path of becoming a full-fledged breast cancer advocate.
She started posting as The Flat Advocate on Facebook and Instagram later that year, using her platform to bring visibility to aesthetic flat closure as a surgical option, share resources and highlight other women advocating for the freedom to “go flat.”
Over time, her feed became not only a source of education but also a visual archive — through both still images and video — where advocacy and artistry intersect, documenting survival in ways that are as creative as they are courageous.
Fink co-founded the nonprofit Flat Closure NOW alongside other prominent advocates in April 2019. The group was one of a handful of organizations instrumental in getting the term “aesthetic flat closure” introduced to the National Cancer Institute’s official Dictionary of Cancer Terms in June 2020.
“We coined the term ‘aesthetic flat closure,’” said current Flat Closure NOW President Sondra Price, “started going to conferences, doing speaking gigs, things like that, and just happened to get in front of the right people.”
The nonprofit is now in the process of winding down its operations.
“We gave it five years to make a difference,” Fink said. “And from there, there’s so many flat groups now. There’s advocates who have been literally in Washington to get it coded, to make it more accessible to surgical students. Then there’s the breast implant illness women who have gone full-on to get that recognized. And so I would say our organization feels like we’ve launched a thousand ships into it. … And so the movement that we started kept rolling.”
Despite the nonprofit’s closure, its website, www.flatclosurenow.org, still hosts resources and links to information on how to choose a surgeon, medical literature and other groups that continue to advance the cause.
Of Fink’s role in Flat Closure NOW, Price said, “I think Katie is phenomenal. I would say of FCN, out of all of us, she was the one willing to be more of the public face of putting her body out there to say this is beautiful, this is a fantastic option for a lot of women. And she’s just so creative … to be able to stand in front of women and say, ‘There are all these different options, but it’s not the end of your story, you know, this is still beautiful.’
“And people being able to see that imagery also lets them imagine how their own body will look. And just that empowerment of saying this is the right choice for me. And Katie is at the heart of it — that is what she is. She walks alongside so many women from diagnosis to making that decision. And that’s just such an important piece of it. I think that her artistic ability to put this out there and just the bravery of showing that has allowed a lot more women to make that choice for themselves.”
Over the past few years, Fink has stepped back from full-time advocacy work to rest and explore other outlets. She now runs Sacred Healing Arts, a holistic practice offering energy healing, Qi Gong and past-life regressive therapies to help alleviate the stress she sees driving an increase in cancer diagnoses.
“I went into energy healing to try to help people calm down, reassess their nervous systems and to help others that have big surgeries and things like that,” she said.
Nine years post-surgery, Fink is still cancer-free and expressed no regret about choosing aesthetic flat closure. To those who may find themselves faced with a diagnosis and unable to decide which kind of reconstructive surgery is right for them, she offers this counsel:
“You really need to go deep inside of yourself and say, ‘What is the most important thing to me?’ My most important thing was to live for my family. How do I get there effectively? So I was going to take the treatment that made the most sense to me. There are many different cancers. There are many different ways to approach it. So you have to look inside yourself … surround yourself with people you trust to help get all the questions that you need to make and get those questions answered.”