Boobs are a Treasure

As you no doubt have noticed, my blog posts are almost always peppered with exaggeration. (Perhaps even over-seasoned.) However, in an effort to convey the seriousness of my transition from boob-less to well-endowed, I've made a conscious effort to make this post completely embellishment-free. Read on!

I can understand if my boob job announcement seemed to come out of nowhere: I don't imagine I strike most people as the type of girl who'd want plastic surgery, and I wasn't terribly forthcoming about my interest in it before the fact (now, of course, I'm discussing it with the whole Internet. And with the family sitting behind me at Red Lobster. And with my grandma.) But the truth is that I've been yearning for a boob job since the day I realized that my pitifully small boobs were never going to get any bigger. When I was around 10 years old, I remember looking down at my chest and playfully referring to my little girl boobs as "mosquito bites." When I was 22 and still referring to my boobs as "mosquito bites," my attitude was more mournful than playful.

Before last month, I did everything I could think of to create the illusion of boobs and of cleavage. I tried push-up bras, but I had so little boobage that there was literally nothing to push up. I bought padded bathing suits and shunned string and bandeau bikinis because they only made my flatness more obvious. I wore strapless bras with tanks and tube tops not because I needed to support the girls, but because I needed a place to put my chicken cutlets. I did not own a bra that wasn't padded. My bras were As, but my boobs only filled them about halfway (my surgeon's patient coordinator called this a "negative A," which was awesome). My bra straps were always as tight as I could make them, but they slipped off my shoulders constantly because I didn't have enough boob to create tension. Sean and I used to joke that his boobs were bigger than mine, and we both knew that the other wasn't actually kidding.

I'd always known that I'd cancel my membership to the itty bitty titty committee some day. Trouble was, I could never decide when that day would be. (I'm incredibly cheap, you see, and not terribly fond of the whole idea of surgery or of making decisions. Particularly of the life-changing variety.) At the beginning of March, however, I realized that all signs were pointing to GET A BOOB JOB ALREADY: I had more savings than I realized so I could afford it on my own, I was freelancing and would not have to take time off of work, and I would be getting engaged soonish and I wanted to have the same (larger) ladies in all of my pictures. So I researched surgeons, made an appointment with the best one I could find, and suddenly I was fulfilling a dream.

When my surgeon asked me what I wanted to change about my boobs, one of the first things I told him was that I wanted a better shape. He asked if something was wrong with the shape I was naturally, and I told him that I didn't really have a natural shape at all. When he saw my boobs for the first time, he agreed, then set out describing them with a lot of words that all essentially meant "deformed." When I explained my deformity to my brother after my consultation he accused me of over-sharing, so if you're really curious about it you can Google "tubular breasts" (the top result is actually pretty informative). PLEASE be aware, however, that some of the pictures you'll see will be of big nasty boobs. Mine were neither big nor nasty, but they were cursed with the same tuberous vegetable shape. And isn't that what every girl wants? A pair of carrot-shaped boobs?

Without getting too technical or specific, my surgeon had to reconstruct the girls before he could cram the implants in. (Oh sweet heaven, I do not even want to think about how he managed to finagle the pre-filled implants through such small incisions and then jam them up underneath my chest muscles. Yeah, that's gross. I'm glad I was asleep.) Of course, here I am talking like my surgeon was shoving balloons in my chest cavity when really they were more like small saucers. You see, because my boobs were so small to begin with, there wasn't a lot of room or excess skin to accommodate a large implant, so my surgeon was only just barely able to take me from a negative A to a full B.

I went in for my one-month post-op appointment on Tuesday, and before my surgeon inspected his handiwork he said he wanted to look at the before pictures he'd taken. Ever the practitioner of good bedside manner, he didn't say anything while he was perusing them, so I narrated for him in my head: "Hideous! Pointy! Sweet potatoes!" When I pulled back the robe he looked up at my boobs, back down at the pictures, back up at my boobs, back down at the pictures, and then across his face scampered an expression that screamed, "Damn, I'm good!" Just before it disappeared I said, "Yeah, they look so much better than they used to. I'm really happy with them!"

Now that the swelling's gone down and the girls can safely exist outside of a sports bra, I've prepared a modest before and after that you can see after the jump!

 [On the left: No bra, no retouching, no boobs. On the right: No bra, no retouching, no problem!]