---
title: "Beautifully Unbroken Review: The Shower Shirt Inventor's Breast Cancer Memoir Begins with the Loss of Her Mother"
description: Rich Books reviews Beautifully Unbroken, Lisa F. Crites' memoir of losing her mother, breast cancer, and inventing The Shower Shirt for showering with drains.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
updated: 2026-09-02T12:34:07.162Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/beautifully-unbroken-review
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/lisa-crites-beautifully-unbroken.webp
categories: Memoir & Biography, Non-Fiction
content_type: Book Review
region: United States
publication: Rich Books
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Lisa F. Crites
    description: "Lisa F. Crites is a health and medical journalist, award-winning entrepreneur, and the patented inventor of The Shower Shirt™, the first water-resistant garment designed to protect chest surgery patients while showering. A former television health anchor with more than 30 years in medical journalism and healthcare communications, she writes a health column for Elysian Magazine and serves on several Florida nonprofit boards. Her first book, Beautifully Unbroken: A Life-Changing Invention Born of Loss, Cancer, Courage, and Faith, became an Amazon Best Seller, proceeds donated to breast cancer support groups and nonprofits serving breast cancer patients."
    url: https://www.showershirtinventor.com
    jobTitle: Founder
    worksFor: The Shower Shirt Co.
---

Anyone who has come home from surgery with drains stitched in and been told not to get them wet for three weeks will understand Lisa F. Crites straight away. She is the medical journalist from Florida who taped a trash bag over her chest after a double mastectomy in 2009, decided that could not be the best on offer, and [patented The Shower Shirt](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/lisa-crites-beautifully-unbroken). Her memoir tells that story in full, and it begins on a farm in Missouri, with her mother.

### Book: Beautifully Unbroken
*A Life-Changing Invention Born of Loss, Cancer, Courage, and Faith*
By Lisa F. Crites

In Beautifully Unbroken, Lisa F. Crites shares her journey through the sudden loss of her mother, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a bilateral mastectomy, and how those experiences produced The Shower Shirt, a patented medical garment now helping chest surgery patients around the world protect their dignity and health during recovery. Told with candor, wit, and honesty, the memoir presents healing as an ongoing process and faith as a steady guide. Proceeds from each copy sold are donated to breast cancer support groups and nonprofit organizations serving breast cancer patients.

[Amazon (US)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3GPVBLQ)

Lisa was one day home from her honeymoon, in December 2001, when her brother called to say their mother had been in a car accident half a mile from the family farm and was gone. She was sixty, Lisa was thirty-four, and the whole of the book that follows, the cancer and the invention included, is written by a daughter who still misses her.

## A Breast Cancer Memoir That Starts on a Missouri Farm

The first chapter is her childhood on a farm outside a Missouri town of five hundred people, with a strict father who sang, a mother who smoothed him over, three brothers, and winters when half the town piled onto a sled behind the family tractor. She gave up a piano scholarship for the journalism department three flights up, and spent the next thirty years in medical news, on television in Orlando and later running media for two hospital systems. She writes the way a reporter files, in short plain sentences with the facts in order. When she reaches the accident she does not soften it. What her father was asked to do at the roadside, and what the family found in the car afterward, she tells in a few plain sentences, and they are the hardest in the book.

Two later chapters are about her mother. One covers the morning of the funeral, and something Lisa felt when she put her hand on her mother's chest, which her husband, her father and her brother each confirmed with their own hands. The other covers a box Lisa finally opened in a storage unit twenty-four years later, and what was inside, in her mother's own words, gives the book its most surprising pages.

## Mastectomy Recovery, Infections and Reconstruction

The cancer came in 2009, when Lisa was forty-one and working at the hospital where her own biopsy was done, which meant she read her pathology report before her doctor could tell her. The email she sent her friends that afternoon ended with "I am turning my cell phone off, and I need to go home and take a nap!!!", and that is how the medical chapters go, honest about being frightened and funny whenever she can manage it.

She chose to have both breasts removed, and the recovery is the part of her story that the interviews never have room for. It ran to fourteen months and seven operations, with two MRSA infections, months of hyperbaric oxygen treatment and a surgeon telling her she might have to live with one breast for the rest of her life. If you or someone you love has surgery ahead, these chapters are a frank account of what recovery can involve, and Lisa is careful to say that hers was far from ordinary.

The chapter she calls The Truth We Tell to Survive is about her cousin Mandy, who flew in from Kansas City, and a kind lie the two of them told each other across fifteen years. It is the best chapter in the book. Lisa is just as straight about her doctors. The surgeon she credits with getting her through is named and thanked in the dedication, and the one she could not warm to is given a single letter, and an honest explanation of why she stayed with him anyway.

## The Story Behind The Shower Shirt

The invention starts with the first question she asked at her follow-up appointment, which was when she could have a shower. The answer was not until the drains came out, in two or three weeks. Every woman Lisa called had managed with a trash bag or plastic wrap, and so did she. The chapters that follow are as close to a manual for inventing something at a kitchen table as a memoir gets. Her aunt and her cousin made the first prototype out of a beauty salon cape, a friend of a friend who imported antique car parts from China found her a factory, and a firefighter who tested an early version changed the design. Lisa tells you what the first order cost, what the patent examiner said, and why the shirt went on sale in October 2010 rather than a month later. Anyone who has ever had an idea in a hospital bed should read these pages twice.

> "Would you want your mother, sister, or daughter standing in the shower with a trash bag after breast cancer and amputation of the breasts?"
> — Lisa F. Crites, to the Medicare coding committee

The chapter called Penile Implants Necessary, Breast Cancer Debated? is about Medicare, which twice refused to give the shirt a billing code. Lisa was invited to make her case to the committee in Washington, and the question above is the one she put to the men on the panel. What she had found in the rulebook while preparing explains the chapter's title. A bill to cover shower garments after mastectomy was introduced in Congress in 2014 and never came out of committee, and she is straightforward about why.

## Faith, a Second Medical Crisis and the Sale of the Company

Lisa calls herself spiritual rather than religious, and her faith in these pages is the practical kind. She heard a voice on the worst night of her recovery, and later another, and she tells you plainly whose she believes they were.

The last third of the book is new even to people who have followed her. A chapter on what breast cancer does to the mind comes with a guest section from a clinical counselor that you may want to hand to someone. A medical emergency in 2021 was followed by a brain scan that changed how she worked, and by a neurologist whose instruction was to keep writing, which is partly how this book came to exist. Then she sold The Shower Shirt Co. after fourteen years, a publisher approached her within days and was told no, and she lost someone close to her while she was still writing, which she keeps for the closing pages.

Lisa says she agreed to write the book for the same reason she made the shirt, which is that it might help one person, and her own list of who that person might be runs from [a woman just diagnosed](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/latrece-wright-uninvited-pebble-health-scare) to a daughter who has lost her mother to an inventor who doubts a painful idea could matter. That is who this book is for, and it will not let any of them down. It is a memoir, and there is still enough plain detail on drains, infections and reconstruction to be useful to a woman with surgery ahead of her. The family photographs, captioned in Lisa's own voice, tell a good part of the story on their own. Read it, then pass it to the friend who is about to go through the same thing.

## FAQ

**Q: How do I shower after a mastectomy?**
Lisa's surgeon told her she could not shower until her drains were removed, two to three weeks after surgery, because the drain sites are a route into the wound and tap water is not sterile. The Shower Shirt was designed so you can shower with the drains still in, held in internal pockets under a water-resistant cover. Follow your own surgeon's instructions on timing.

**Q: What is the best book to learn about breast cancer?**
Beautifully Unbroken is a memoir, not a clinical guide, and Lisa says so in her own disclaimer. It is useful for the day-to-day detail, such as what drains are like, why infections after tissue expanders happen, how long reconstruction can take when things go wrong, and what the years afterward can feel like. Read it alongside your care team's own material.

**Q: What is a good gift for a woman with breast cancer?**
The care bags sent out by Driven By Heart, the Florida breast cancer charity whose board Lisa served on, hold soft blankets, post-surgical bras, drain holders and a Shower Shirt. The memoir suits a woman who wants to hear from someone who has been through it, particularly one who has also lost her mother.

**About Lisa F. Crites**
Founder, The Shower Shirt Co.

Lisa F. Crites is a health and medical journalist, award-winning entrepreneur, and the patented inventor of The Shower Shirt™, the first water-resistant garment designed to protect chest surgery patients while showering. A former television health anchor with more than 30 years in medical journalism and healthcare communications, she writes a health column for Elysian Magazine and serves on several Florida nonprofit boards. Her first book, Beautifully Unbroken: A Life-Changing Invention Born of Loss, Cancer, Courage, and Faith, became an Amazon Best Seller, proceeds donated to breast cancer support groups and nonprofits serving breast cancer patients.

[Website](https://www.showershirtinventor.com)