Reduction Mammoplasty
Words to Know
The First Step
Plastic surgery involves many choices. Ensure you are capable of choice. Ability to choose can be determined in a number of ways:
- When you pinch the skin of your wrist, does it ripple along your arm? Does it tingle like a shock, a rogue strand of lightning?
- Have you lived through at least a dozen car wrecks? House fires? Hurricanes? List any and all measurable tragedies.
- On this diagram, label every item you have touched. Now label every item he has touched. Now him. The doctor will check your work for discrepancies.
- I choose light, I choose blood, I choose weight, I choose the opposite of heavy, I choose to accept what I become, I choose scars, I choose choice, please let me have it
- The surgery may affect your ability to breast feed. Do not say this is not a concern. Do not wince when the doctor reminds you that you might change your mind.
Is it right for me?
Breast reduction is a highly individualized procedure. You should do it for yourself, unless you want to fulfill someone else’s desires or to fit an ideal image. Breast reduction is a good option for you if:
- You have waded in knee-deep water and still managed to sink.
- You have realistic expectations that your body will outlast you, will shed its skin to reveal its striking inner light.
- You are bothered by the feeling that you have not optimized your potential for occupying the smallest amount of space. You are bothered by the breadth of you.
- Your constant is ache. Back, neck, and shoulders anchored toward the unlit realm of the sea, where dark shadows of beasts pummel you with their rage.
- Your breasts have made you an obstinate animal. Have stretched your skin to scale, have burrowed valleys in your shoulders, have reddened beneath the breast crease, have brought an unseemly itch, a burn not unlike the handle of a cast-iron skillet, when you touch it, believing it is cool.
- Your nipples cast downward, sunflowers missing their bright god.
What to expect during your consultation*
The success and safety of your breast reduction procedure depends very much on your complete candidness during your consultation. You’ll be asked a number of questions about your health, desires, and lifestyle.
Be Prepared to Discuss:
- (In detail) Why you have placed the last remaining cupfuls of your trust in a stranger who has no stake in your history?
- Medical conditions, irrational fears, each and every time you wrapped your thumb and index finger around your wrist and wondered what kept them from touch.
- Current coping mechanisms for mornings the light stabs through the window skimming into your rest.
- Family history (i.e. cancers, conditions, communication, deep and unaddressed secrets).
Your Surgeon May Also:
- Evaluate your general capacity for choice making. He will see through you, the façade you adopted before sitting on the exam table.
- Take your breasts in his hands as two small infants in need of care, or of closer inspection, or of scrutiny.
- Record detailed measurements of your size and shape, skin quality, the placement of your nipples and areolas.**
- Photograph your faceless body.
- Ask if you have plans to breast feed.
- Ask again if you have plans to breast feed.
- Are you sure?
- Insist that you might always change your mind.
*Note: This pamphlet will not be provided until halfway through your consultation.
**You may want to dissociate from this element of the consultation. The surgeon will not allow this. You still stand in front of the mirror and watch him fiddle with the measuring tape, lift your breasts, run his hands along the divots in your shoulders. He will show you the wrongness of your nipples. You are expected to pay attention.
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Carrie George is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is the graduate fellow at the Wick Poetry Center where she teaches poetry workshops throughout the community. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.