Sitting with my pal Shona, waiting for Will Young to come on stage at Eden Court in Inverness (he was flipping fantastic and surprisingly funny since you ask), she leant over and showed me a screen shot on her phone. “I knew you’d need to see this” Shona said.

It was from an episode of the Simpsons. Marge and Lisa are lying on treatment beds, in between them is another woman, a doctor with short curly hair, dressed in a pink strappy vest with matching lipstick and chunky jewellery. I didn’t see it at first but then, as I looked closer, I let out a faint hiss, somewhere between pleasure and disbelief. As I stared at the phone, the image curled itself into a fist and planted itself right up under my ribs, smack below the heart. Then the lights went out and Will Young came on stage.

On the most part, as a middleclass, middle-aged, educated white woman, when it comes to the media and pop culture, I’m everywhere. I’m the detective in your favourite crime thriller (god how I have a crush on Sarah Lancashire); I’m all over TV sport – some might argue to a fault (Clare Balding I’m looking at you here); I’m the professor of choice in endless history documentaries (Alice Roberts, Lucy Worsley, Bettany Hughes et al); I’m all over Strictly each autumn and I show my serious side with Kirsty Wark and Victoria Derbyshire to Newsnight interviewees.

So really, you’d have thought I’d bump into me every day, but that’s just the point, I don’t. In the wake of the Simpson screen-shot-shock, I realise that although, a bit like Clare Balding, I’m everywhere; throw a stick and it will hit one of my tribe, we’re not represented.

But I didn’t realise I wasn’t seeing me until Shona showed me that primary-coloured child’s drawing of yellow people with mental hair. Because Dr Wendy Sage, the character in the cartoon, blatantly, unapologetically, overtly, hypnotically and to me, utterly beautifully, only has one breast. Dr Wendy Sage is both hypnotherapist and breast cancer survivor and the fact that she is casually portrayed as the latter while performing her role as the former makes me weep with gratitude.

Until this moment I honestly didn’t understand the true value of being able to see yourself reflected back at you, the power of stumbling across your own image and feeling that warm wash of validation. All these years I’ve made an effort to be genuinely inclusive in my programme and podcast production, but I didn’t really get it, I didn’t understand how “other” you feel when images like yourself simply don’t exist, until they do.

Over the four and a half years since my own mastectomy, I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter many women who proudly own their post-cancer body, whatever its shape, and choose to face the world one-sided or flat.

About a year after my own mastectomy I met Anna, a super strong white-water kayaker with a huge smile and positive attitude splashing everyone in her wake, but it wasn’t Anna’s enthusiasm for the river which made me quite so star struck with her, it was the fact that she was wearing a tight-fitting rash vest which very clearly showed her to have had a unilateral mastectomy.

It was all I could do not to yank up my baggy oversized fleece and yell “snap!” in whoop of triumph. I didn’t, but that image of her burned into my brain, I was utterly inspired by it.

Then there’s Joanna who’s re-training to be a personal trainer. In a gym where body consciousness coats the walls as thickly as the sweat, her lop-sided presence each week is the one thing which keeps me going back.

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And my good friend Susan, Scottish comedy circuit legend who demanded, fought and won a battle to have a bilateral mastectomy because she “couldn’t be arsed to have just one and felt her time with them was done”.

Astonishingly her consultant wanted her to talk to a psychiatrist about such a radical decision then followed up with the comment that “it will be difficult to find underwear”. Seriously? Just how difficult does he (and yes it was a he) think it is to find underwear if you’ve had a single-sided mastectomy and don’t want to shove a prosthesis down your bra?

One good friend, who has a generous-sized single remaining breast post-mastectomy, had a family member point at her scar side and ask, “are you not going to do something about that?”

One in seven of us women in the UK will be diagnosed each year and of those 55,000 cases, 14,850 will need to have a life-saving mastectomy. Over 10,000 women a year in the UK have a single-sided mastectomy without reconstruction. How each of us feel about being single-breasted is far more nuanced and complicated than the reach of this article but, safe to say, when a lifesaving mastectomy is performed, it doesn’t just cleave away cancerous tissues. Identity, body-confidence, sense of self, sense of sex appeal and, in my case at any rate, the ability to look in the mirror, are all cut away in that self-same moment.

(Image: Breast cancer screening)

Many of us choose a prosthesis as a prop to hide our difference but how much easier would it be for us to accept our bodies, for all their being significantly changed and rearranged, to learn to love and be proud of our scars because they’re the scars of survival, if the rest of society came with us on this one? How much less pressure would we feel to have a reconstruction (which is a fantastically complicated and difficult decision loaded with potential consequences) if we didn’t feel the only acceptable version of “normal” was one where you have two breasts?

So that is why we need to seed the idea of Dr Wendy Sage far beyond the pioneering and visionary writing of The Simpsons. We need to recognise the sheer volume of single-breasted women and make them feel validated, supported and celebrated through our images, books, stories and films. If that one small screen shot of a yellow woman with chemo curls and a single breast has had a sizeable impact on me (and trust me, it has), just imagine what more images of us would have on all of us impacted by breast cancer?

Pennie Latin-Stuart is a podcaster, producer and presenter who writes and blogs about her experiences of breast cancer. To listen to Pennie’s Lump podcast, visit adventurousaudio.co.uk