From Boobies to Tits (36" to 4"-6")
I went ahead and had breast reduction surgery. There have been several setbacks due to swelling, some splitting incisions from the swelling, etc, but...I noticed something in my vocabulary. My breasts are no longer "boobies"...they're "tits."
Which got me thinking, which are bigger, boobies, or tits? Turns out blue-footed boobies (seabirds) are 36" tall. 3 feet, almost a full meter. And tits (titmouse/titmice, chickadees) are 4"-5" (upwards of 15cm?). Soo, as I was joking with mum while looking up the birds on Wikipedia (she was helping me do a sponge-bath and change clothes, and helping with all the chores I cannot do while recovering from chest surgery), I said, "I think I'll have to change that to, going from half a booby to a double tit." And my mum giggled.
...It's been a slow recovery, and because I cannot risk getting cat dander, cat hair, or worse, dust from her litterbox (litter robot thing) anywhere near the wounds that have been seeping, I've been stuck mostly in my bedroom, either lying down a lot to manage the swelling, or playing on my laptop. The surgery was on the 19th of May...so yeah, haven't been feeling up to writing in LJ much.
My biggest thanks go to my mum, who has been heroically stopping by nearly every day to help out around the house (less frequently as my body has slowly healed, though I'm behind recovery schedule by about a week and a half). Next biggest go to my roomies; the hubby has since taken off for his yearly cross-country motorbike ride, and the wife was very kind in taking me to my procedure yesterday. One which involved general anesthetic to knock me out. (Mum was busy taking dad to his own surgical procedure in another city.)
Why general anesthesia? I've been having panic attacks, you see. With all those months and months and months of feminine problems that came with attached chronic pain, particularly the month-plus of suffering from the Mirena IUD that my body was trying to reject in a level of agony no painkiller would touch (I even tried ones I had given up using well over a decade ago, but no go)...my pain tolerance threshold has a crack in it.
Actually, not so much a crack, as a ravine. A canyon worn down and gouged out of my soul. Normally my pain tolerance is very high, up at the top of the cliffs...but of late, it's way down at the bottom by the stream which alternates between trickling and flowing and flooding its way through my life.
So when I needed an "aspiration of the hematoma blood" swelling my left tit...it turned out to be quite a lot, and a bit painful/uncomfortable when the doctor used her syringe. Also, I actually SAW the syringe needle, and started having a panic attack (I have a needle phobia, and cannot watch, period, my blood being drawn)...so that took me about 3 minutes of begging her to wait while I talked about something COMPLETELY different to calm down and get my mind off my fears. She pulled out about 60cc of fluid...then said it would need to be done 4-5 times more; the doctor then said she could use a suction tool in the in-office O.R. to get out the rest. (This would be done with a local, not with a general or even something as simple as nitrous oxide happy gas.) I agreed, we prepped and went in...with no real anesthesia, just some numbing agents...and the suctioning began.
Okay, here's where it gets "uncomfortable". (For a gauge of what "uncomfortable" means, for those of you who have watched the Spanish movie Pan's Labyrinth, remember that the only description of the Captain's behavior was that he was called "sadistic." Un.Der.State.Ment. Anyhoo...)
I was expecting the suctiony slurpy noises. I was expecting to feel my partially numbed breast jiggle. I was expecting and braced for all that. I was NOT, however, expecting to HEAR INSIDE MY SKULL bubbly slurpy noises rattling around, as if liquid was being DRAINED FROM MY BRAIN. If you've ever stood under an ultrasound pulse that measures your height (often found in science museums, for example), and you hear that ticking inside your skull...it's like that. It's the noise echoing up into your skull and rattling around. Only magnified like 500-fold, with bubbly slurpy noises INSIDE YOUR HEAD that you cannot escape.
Un.der.state.ment on just how fucking UNCOMFORTABLE that was. So I freaked and started swearing (apparently mum could hear me all the way out in the front waiting room, eek), and so she quit ahead of full drainage...and then went on vacation for a week plus to Iceland (part of her mum's bucket list)...so that by the time I realized the swelling was back and a bit worse, she was no longer in the office, and being a single-surgeon facility, they had no one who could aspirate further.
So...I was stuck for over a week with a painfully swollen, splitting, seeping set of incisions on the left, and a little bit on the right. Which is draining and the swelling going down more or less properly, but it had some sympathetic extra swelling and thus a titch of splitting from me sitting forward and bringing my elbows in to type. Hence literally being stuck lying on my back as much as possible for most of that week to try to avoid that. Oh, and when incisions split, internal sutures which are designed to slowly dissolve naturally over time as the wounds heal? They get exposed to air, they stop dissolving, which means they leave a small opening that constantly leaks. So...yeah.
Last week Tuesday, I went in for the post-vacation visit. The attending nurse who started pulling out the sutures with tweezers and plucking off necrotic tissues (dead skin, etc, that had to be removed to help promote healing)...kept telling me as I squirmed in discomfort that "This doesn't hurt! You're not actually feeling any pain."
... >.o
Okay, tip for EVERYONE in the medical line of work: DO NOT TELL A PATIENT SOMETHING DOES NOT HURT. Say it "shouldn't" hurt...because there is always a miniscule chance that it WILL hurt.
It DID hurt (I am very in touch with my body and how it feels, reacts, etc.), and so when I told him this, and he told ME that "No it does not hurt," that really fucked over my sense of trust, kicking me from "squirming discomfort and I-am-in-pain" noises to "panic attack mode." It got so bad that at one point, I demanded repeatedly to my mum (who was kindly enduring my swearing while sitting in the exam room with us) to grab my hand and hold it, because I was 5 seconds away from decking him for LYING AND TRYING TO GASLIGHT ME. (Everyone familiar with the feminist movement will know what gaslighting is, but if you're not sure, go to IMDb and look up the movie "Gaslight"--technically there are two of them to which I refer, specifically the ones from 1940 and 1944.)
Again, NEVER tell a patient that something won't hurt...particularly AFTER THEY SAY IT DOES. This severely erodes the trust that is VITAL to the patient/medical personnel dynamic.
Anyway, he gave up and went to let the doc handle it, she went for the syringe to try to aspirate some more...and the funny thing happened. I sprung a leak. Now, for those who don't know much about surgical hematomas (which are basically giant bruises), the first time around, I leaked serum, which is this orangish yellowish (kinda sherbert-colored) liquid, because during the surgery (with a scorching hot scalpel to cauterize blood leakage), I hadn't leaked much from the left, though a bit from the right. That was okay, it was expected, it just required some bandages (I got creative and started using ultra thin maxis; they're sterile enough to do the job, they're very absorbent, and being Always brand with the wings (to increase the surface area) and the dri-weave stuff, the mesh weave doesn't stick to your wounds), so I handled it well enough.
The hematoma blood itself is a slightly different matter.
It starts out sort of like grape jelly in thickness and consistency and even a bit in color (so the surgeon says, I didn't really see), but after a while it thins out, becomes "like motor oil," and can be aspirated (sucked out). Hence the first round of syringe, then the suction machine...wherein I freaked out a bit too much. She hoped the rest would go away, and it wasn't like I could endure the other half of what she needed to do at that point. (Panic attacks, scrabbling and clawing at the ravine walls crowding my bottom-flung soul.) But it didn't, and so...well, a funny thing happened post-vacation attempt.
She put in the syringe, and I sprung a leak. Not into the syringe, but from the hole the needle made. I was very carefully looking elsewhere, holding mum's hand (poor mum, she squeezed back a lot...and felt very warm liquid running down my ribs to my back. I'm lying there thinking, "oh god, the hospital gown and my pants are going to be stained vivid scarlet" and the doc quickly put a pad down there to soak it up, and pulled out another 60ccs+ or whatever. "Wow, you're just eager to get that motor oil out of there, aren't you?" She did a bit more, then tried the other side, pulling out another 40ccs or so...but hit a vein, so that sprung a very red leak (that one I saw; the first one was from the outside of the breast). That was when she stopped and put a gauze on it with some pressure to stop that leak.
I was in so much discomfort and whimpering and cursing, that she said, "You know what? I think we're going to have to schedule this for the O.R.. This week is a madhouse for scheduling," (because she was making up for being gone a week plus), "but I should have an opening on Thursday morning, "('twas actually for Wednesday afternoon), "and we'll get in an anesthetist to put you into lala land so that we can get it all done all at once, the debriding of the necrotic tissues, all the suctioning that's still needed, all done all at once, so you wont' feel a thing. Does that sound like a good plan to you? I hate to put you through all this discomfort, but we still have a bit more to go, so I think getting you into happyland with an anesthetist on hand would be a much better solution," and I said (more like gasped), "I am totally all for that!"
So she applied gauzes, and helped me sit up, and that's when I saw it all over the gown and the pad. Hematoma blood that's gone past the thick grape jelly stage to the thinner motor oil stage really DOES look like motor oil! Kinda thin transparent brownish tan stuff, and about the thickness of a nice lightweight machine oil. Which was waaay more reassuring than the zomgmassesofsanguine!red I was expecting.
Anyhoo...so it was back home to wait for a week plus a day. On the bright side, the leaking eased (he had pulled out several of the sutures causing the problems on the left). When I went in yesterday after noon, the anesthetist was very very good about numbing the site for the i.v. catheter (srsly nice job, teeniest of pinches, then nothing but a bit of pressure from his fingers as he worked--I always get them on the back of my hand these days, as the side of the wrist is a total no-no, you can damage a nerve that runs along the bone (found that one out the hard way back in 1994 with my gallbladder surgery, still have a titch of damage), and my elbow veins will go into hiding and refuse to come out again). Once that was done, then I got to go into the O.R., lie down, there was a little bit of burning from the i.v. sedation drug, and then...boom, waking up with it all done. Everything felt bruised and tender and...well, certain parts felt like someone had taken ignition pliers to my inner flesh to mash it up a bit.
The doc said she got it all out, even some clumps of stuff, cleaned up all the incisions, etc...and I don't remember when they wrapped me in the ace wraps or put on my shirt, lol...but they got me a wheelchair and out to the car, and my roomie brought me home. Only bad thing was, because of rush hour traffic, it was an hour-plus ride home in agony, so I took a couple of the oxycodone left over from the first surgery, and whoa...lala dizzyland for a while. I went easy on the crackers because my stomach was threatening mildly to rebel at a couple points, but no biggies.
(The anesthetist gave me a nausea pill prior to surgery, and a zantac for acid reflux control; he was very thorough in wanting to ensure everything went smoothly, major kudos to him for his fine, compassionate painkilling services.) Then after a nap, had some leftover homemade house fried rice...then another nap...and now I'm feeling much better, with the oxy stuff replaced by Tylenol.
It hurts a bit more on the Tylenol, but I'm okay with that, oddly enough. I don't feel like I'm swooning or about to fall, and I don't like those feelings, so it's good...but the hour-long drive with nothing, not even water (to avoid nausea triggering on the drive home), yeah...I wanted doping at that point. I don't feel zomgawfulswollen anymore, though the left tit is still a bit expanded. The doc explained it's like soaking your fingers in water; the swelling of the skin causing all those prune wrinkles takes time to go away once they're no longer soaking in the water.
...Now I just have to deal with the fact that the bras I got are too small and thus too tight, sitting too close to the underside incisions. But that's okay, I figured I'd have to redo them anywa once my 6 weeks of T-Rex Arms are up and I'm free to resume normal life. Oh yes, I'm on restricted movement; not supposed to move my elbows more than 12 inches from my hipbones for 6 full weeks to allow the incisions and the tender new flesh to not only knit together, but strengthen enough to take the stress. Conveniently, the last day of it is July 29th/30th...so I've set myself the goal of July 1st for un-T-Rex-ness.
Though now I'm thinking, once I'm no longer leaking at all and around 5 days have gone past (to be absolutely sure) of making another appointment for DecentExposures.com to be refitted for bras that actually will fit comfortably. We had to guesstimate the new breast size prior to surgery because after one week I was supposed to switch from ace bandages to a nice sports bra style (which is what they specialize in) for support...but had to go back to the ace wraps. *sigh* But that's okay. I knew I'd have to toss out all my old bras and start over with new ones, and budgeted for that. :-)
...And now you know way too much about my medical situation, lol...but if it helps others, then it's all good. I wouldn't go back to my old breasts. I CAN BREATHE while lying on my back/reclining. That alone makes it all worthwhile. I'm no longer suffocating. Oh, yes, almost forgot: the doc removed over 1kg from my right tit, and over 1.2kg, almost 1.3kg from the left (it was slightly larger to begin with anyway). So that's roughly 5 pounds of weight literally off my chest. Even when I was skinny but large-breasted, I never could sleep while laying back, because I was suffocating slowly under the weight. I...may not have sensation in my left nipple after all the healing is done (I don't right now), and there are a few other numb spots, though the doc says sensation always comes back to the skin; it's the nipple that's more iffy because of how the excess tissue gets cut away.
But I have nice roughly C-cup chickadee tits now, not giant H-cup seabird boobies. Or I will when they're done healing. *sigh* A week and a half behind average, but there it is. (The 6 week moratorium is an absolute for the internal healing, and not dependent upon nearly so much the surface healing issues, the doc said.)
...One more thing, I watched a .gif last week, where a guy was pulling his shirt off over his head, and I was suddenly struck by a flash of envy stronger than my admiration for his really nice abs: I was envious he could lift his elbows up over his head, lol.
*sigh*
~Lotm
Which got me thinking, which are bigger, boobies, or tits? Turns out blue-footed boobies (seabirds) are 36" tall. 3 feet, almost a full meter. And tits (titmouse/titmice, chickadees) are 4"-5" (upwards of 15cm?). Soo, as I was joking with mum while looking up the birds on Wikipedia (she was helping me do a sponge-bath and change clothes, and helping with all the chores I cannot do while recovering from chest surgery), I said, "I think I'll have to change that to, going from half a booby to a double tit." And my mum giggled.
...It's been a slow recovery, and because I cannot risk getting cat dander, cat hair, or worse, dust from her litterbox (litter robot thing) anywhere near the wounds that have been seeping, I've been stuck mostly in my bedroom, either lying down a lot to manage the swelling, or playing on my laptop. The surgery was on the 19th of May...so yeah, haven't been feeling up to writing in LJ much.
My biggest thanks go to my mum, who has been heroically stopping by nearly every day to help out around the house (less frequently as my body has slowly healed, though I'm behind recovery schedule by about a week and a half). Next biggest go to my roomies; the hubby has since taken off for his yearly cross-country motorbike ride, and the wife was very kind in taking me to my procedure yesterday. One which involved general anesthetic to knock me out. (Mum was busy taking dad to his own surgical procedure in another city.)
Why general anesthesia? I've been having panic attacks, you see. With all those months and months and months of feminine problems that came with attached chronic pain, particularly the month-plus of suffering from the Mirena IUD that my body was trying to reject in a level of agony no painkiller would touch (I even tried ones I had given up using well over a decade ago, but no go)...my pain tolerance threshold has a crack in it.
Actually, not so much a crack, as a ravine. A canyon worn down and gouged out of my soul. Normally my pain tolerance is very high, up at the top of the cliffs...but of late, it's way down at the bottom by the stream which alternates between trickling and flowing and flooding its way through my life.
So when I needed an "aspiration of the hematoma blood" swelling my left tit...it turned out to be quite a lot, and a bit painful/uncomfortable when the doctor used her syringe. Also, I actually SAW the syringe needle, and started having a panic attack (I have a needle phobia, and cannot watch, period, my blood being drawn)...so that took me about 3 minutes of begging her to wait while I talked about something COMPLETELY different to calm down and get my mind off my fears. She pulled out about 60cc of fluid...then said it would need to be done 4-5 times more; the doctor then said she could use a suction tool in the in-office O.R. to get out the rest. (This would be done with a local, not with a general or even something as simple as nitrous oxide happy gas.) I agreed, we prepped and went in...with no real anesthesia, just some numbing agents...and the suctioning began.
Okay, here's where it gets "uncomfortable". (For a gauge of what "uncomfortable" means, for those of you who have watched the Spanish movie Pan's Labyrinth, remember that the only description of the Captain's behavior was that he was called "sadistic." Un.Der.State.Ment. Anyhoo...)
I was expecting the suctiony slurpy noises. I was expecting to feel my partially numbed breast jiggle. I was expecting and braced for all that. I was NOT, however, expecting to HEAR INSIDE MY SKULL bubbly slurpy noises rattling around, as if liquid was being DRAINED FROM MY BRAIN. If you've ever stood under an ultrasound pulse that measures your height (often found in science museums, for example), and you hear that ticking inside your skull...it's like that. It's the noise echoing up into your skull and rattling around. Only magnified like 500-fold, with bubbly slurpy noises INSIDE YOUR HEAD that you cannot escape.
Un.der.state.ment on just how fucking UNCOMFORTABLE that was. So I freaked and started swearing (apparently mum could hear me all the way out in the front waiting room, eek), and so she quit ahead of full drainage...and then went on vacation for a week plus to Iceland (part of her mum's bucket list)...so that by the time I realized the swelling was back and a bit worse, she was no longer in the office, and being a single-surgeon facility, they had no one who could aspirate further.
So...I was stuck for over a week with a painfully swollen, splitting, seeping set of incisions on the left, and a little bit on the right. Which is draining and the swelling going down more or less properly, but it had some sympathetic extra swelling and thus a titch of splitting from me sitting forward and bringing my elbows in to type. Hence literally being stuck lying on my back as much as possible for most of that week to try to avoid that. Oh, and when incisions split, internal sutures which are designed to slowly dissolve naturally over time as the wounds heal? They get exposed to air, they stop dissolving, which means they leave a small opening that constantly leaks. So...yeah.
Last week Tuesday, I went in for the post-vacation visit. The attending nurse who started pulling out the sutures with tweezers and plucking off necrotic tissues (dead skin, etc, that had to be removed to help promote healing)...kept telling me as I squirmed in discomfort that "This doesn't hurt! You're not actually feeling any pain."
... >.o
Okay, tip for EVERYONE in the medical line of work: DO NOT TELL A PATIENT SOMETHING DOES NOT HURT. Say it "shouldn't" hurt...because there is always a miniscule chance that it WILL hurt.
It DID hurt (I am very in touch with my body and how it feels, reacts, etc.), and so when I told him this, and he told ME that "No it does not hurt," that really fucked over my sense of trust, kicking me from "squirming discomfort and I-am-in-pain" noises to "panic attack mode." It got so bad that at one point, I demanded repeatedly to my mum (who was kindly enduring my swearing while sitting in the exam room with us) to grab my hand and hold it, because I was 5 seconds away from decking him for LYING AND TRYING TO GASLIGHT ME. (Everyone familiar with the feminist movement will know what gaslighting is, but if you're not sure, go to IMDb and look up the movie "Gaslight"--technically there are two of them to which I refer, specifically the ones from 1940 and 1944.)
Again, NEVER tell a patient that something won't hurt...particularly AFTER THEY SAY IT DOES. This severely erodes the trust that is VITAL to the patient/medical personnel dynamic.
Anyway, he gave up and went to let the doc handle it, she went for the syringe to try to aspirate some more...and the funny thing happened. I sprung a leak. Now, for those who don't know much about surgical hematomas (which are basically giant bruises), the first time around, I leaked serum, which is this orangish yellowish (kinda sherbert-colored) liquid, because during the surgery (with a scorching hot scalpel to cauterize blood leakage), I hadn't leaked much from the left, though a bit from the right. That was okay, it was expected, it just required some bandages (I got creative and started using ultra thin maxis; they're sterile enough to do the job, they're very absorbent, and being Always brand with the wings (to increase the surface area) and the dri-weave stuff, the mesh weave doesn't stick to your wounds), so I handled it well enough.
The hematoma blood itself is a slightly different matter.
It starts out sort of like grape jelly in thickness and consistency and even a bit in color (so the surgeon says, I didn't really see), but after a while it thins out, becomes "like motor oil," and can be aspirated (sucked out). Hence the first round of syringe, then the suction machine...wherein I freaked out a bit too much. She hoped the rest would go away, and it wasn't like I could endure the other half of what she needed to do at that point. (Panic attacks, scrabbling and clawing at the ravine walls crowding my bottom-flung soul.) But it didn't, and so...well, a funny thing happened post-vacation attempt.
She put in the syringe, and I sprung a leak. Not into the syringe, but from the hole the needle made. I was very carefully looking elsewhere, holding mum's hand (poor mum, she squeezed back a lot...and felt very warm liquid running down my ribs to my back. I'm lying there thinking, "oh god, the hospital gown and my pants are going to be stained vivid scarlet" and the doc quickly put a pad down there to soak it up, and pulled out another 60ccs+ or whatever. "Wow, you're just eager to get that motor oil out of there, aren't you?" She did a bit more, then tried the other side, pulling out another 40ccs or so...but hit a vein, so that sprung a very red leak (that one I saw; the first one was from the outside of the breast). That was when she stopped and put a gauze on it with some pressure to stop that leak.
I was in so much discomfort and whimpering and cursing, that she said, "You know what? I think we're going to have to schedule this for the O.R.. This week is a madhouse for scheduling," (because she was making up for being gone a week plus), "but I should have an opening on Thursday morning, "('twas actually for Wednesday afternoon), "and we'll get in an anesthetist to put you into lala land so that we can get it all done all at once, the debriding of the necrotic tissues, all the suctioning that's still needed, all done all at once, so you wont' feel a thing. Does that sound like a good plan to you? I hate to put you through all this discomfort, but we still have a bit more to go, so I think getting you into happyland with an anesthetist on hand would be a much better solution," and I said (more like gasped), "I am totally all for that!"
So she applied gauzes, and helped me sit up, and that's when I saw it all over the gown and the pad. Hematoma blood that's gone past the thick grape jelly stage to the thinner motor oil stage really DOES look like motor oil! Kinda thin transparent brownish tan stuff, and about the thickness of a nice lightweight machine oil. Which was waaay more reassuring than the zomgmassesofsanguine!red I was expecting.
Anyhoo...so it was back home to wait for a week plus a day. On the bright side, the leaking eased (he had pulled out several of the sutures causing the problems on the left). When I went in yesterday after noon, the anesthetist was very very good about numbing the site for the i.v. catheter (srsly nice job, teeniest of pinches, then nothing but a bit of pressure from his fingers as he worked--I always get them on the back of my hand these days, as the side of the wrist is a total no-no, you can damage a nerve that runs along the bone (found that one out the hard way back in 1994 with my gallbladder surgery, still have a titch of damage), and my elbow veins will go into hiding and refuse to come out again). Once that was done, then I got to go into the O.R., lie down, there was a little bit of burning from the i.v. sedation drug, and then...boom, waking up with it all done. Everything felt bruised and tender and...well, certain parts felt like someone had taken ignition pliers to my inner flesh to mash it up a bit.
The doc said she got it all out, even some clumps of stuff, cleaned up all the incisions, etc...and I don't remember when they wrapped me in the ace wraps or put on my shirt, lol...but they got me a wheelchair and out to the car, and my roomie brought me home. Only bad thing was, because of rush hour traffic, it was an hour-plus ride home in agony, so I took a couple of the oxycodone left over from the first surgery, and whoa...lala dizzyland for a while. I went easy on the crackers because my stomach was threatening mildly to rebel at a couple points, but no biggies.
(The anesthetist gave me a nausea pill prior to surgery, and a zantac for acid reflux control; he was very thorough in wanting to ensure everything went smoothly, major kudos to him for his fine, compassionate painkilling services.) Then after a nap, had some leftover homemade house fried rice...then another nap...and now I'm feeling much better, with the oxy stuff replaced by Tylenol.
It hurts a bit more on the Tylenol, but I'm okay with that, oddly enough. I don't feel like I'm swooning or about to fall, and I don't like those feelings, so it's good...but the hour-long drive with nothing, not even water (to avoid nausea triggering on the drive home), yeah...I wanted doping at that point. I don't feel zomgawfulswollen anymore, though the left tit is still a bit expanded. The doc explained it's like soaking your fingers in water; the swelling of the skin causing all those prune wrinkles takes time to go away once they're no longer soaking in the water.
...Now I just have to deal with the fact that the bras I got are too small and thus too tight, sitting too close to the underside incisions. But that's okay, I figured I'd have to redo them anywa once my 6 weeks of T-Rex Arms are up and I'm free to resume normal life. Oh yes, I'm on restricted movement; not supposed to move my elbows more than 12 inches from my hipbones for 6 full weeks to allow the incisions and the tender new flesh to not only knit together, but strengthen enough to take the stress. Conveniently, the last day of it is July 29th/30th...so I've set myself the goal of July 1st for un-T-Rex-ness.
Though now I'm thinking, once I'm no longer leaking at all and around 5 days have gone past (to be absolutely sure) of making another appointment for DecentExposures.com to be refitted for bras that actually will fit comfortably. We had to guesstimate the new breast size prior to surgery because after one week I was supposed to switch from ace bandages to a nice sports bra style (which is what they specialize in) for support...but had to go back to the ace wraps. *sigh* But that's okay. I knew I'd have to toss out all my old bras and start over with new ones, and budgeted for that. :-)
...And now you know way too much about my medical situation, lol...but if it helps others, then it's all good. I wouldn't go back to my old breasts. I CAN BREATHE while lying on my back/reclining. That alone makes it all worthwhile. I'm no longer suffocating. Oh, yes, almost forgot: the doc removed over 1kg from my right tit, and over 1.2kg, almost 1.3kg from the left (it was slightly larger to begin with anyway). So that's roughly 5 pounds of weight literally off my chest. Even when I was skinny but large-breasted, I never could sleep while laying back, because I was suffocating slowly under the weight. I...may not have sensation in my left nipple after all the healing is done (I don't right now), and there are a few other numb spots, though the doc says sensation always comes back to the skin; it's the nipple that's more iffy because of how the excess tissue gets cut away.
But I have nice roughly C-cup chickadee tits now, not giant H-cup seabird boobies. Or I will when they're done healing. *sigh* A week and a half behind average, but there it is. (The 6 week moratorium is an absolute for the internal healing, and not dependent upon nearly so much the surface healing issues, the doc said.)
...One more thing, I watched a .gif last week, where a guy was pulling his shirt off over his head, and I was suddenly struck by a flash of envy stronger than my admiration for his really nice abs: I was envious he could lift his elbows up over his head, lol.
*sigh*
~Lotm