breast reduction recovery for the big-breasted realist

what to expect, what you lose in breast weight and more

Like so many women before me, I found myself topless in Encino one day.

“So. What kind of breasts do you want?" asked my doctor, a cosmetic surgeon in his fifties with a son who wanted to get into comedy.

I had an answer prepared, and I was ready to haggle. (And then probably capitulate, because I am a pushover.) I'd pestered enough women who'd already had breast reductions to know that you rarely got what size you really wanted, in the end. Plenty of friends and acquaintances with enormous breasts had drifted off into anesthesia on the day of their procedure, dreaming of their new lives with vigorous little cupcakes, and had instead woken with only slightly less enormous breasts.

Sometimes they knew how much would be removed ahead of time, and sometimes their surgeons had made a game-time decision that anything under a DD cup “didn’t look proportional." Sometimes insurance wouldn't cover dreadful-sounding upgrades like "nipple correction.” But I’d almost never heard of women getting as much reduced as they’d like. A friend who was disappointed with her reduction told me that male surgeons who grew up during the era of the “Porky’s” films simply can't wrap their heads around anyone actually choosing small breasts.

After many, many years of deliberation, I’d decided to have my own huge breasts made medically less huge. I’d scheduled this consultation months before I gave birth to my third child, and I was, at long last, there in the office of the plastic surgeon. In my experience, the most unflattering lighting-and-mirror situations tend to be at hair salons where the stylists are all hot, and in hotel rooms where you’re having sex with someone new. But this guy’s intake room blew every one of those out of the water. I’ve never seen my breasts look so lopsided and defeated, like they ought to be leaning on a single crutch wrapped in old rags. I didn’t want to go for half measures, here. I didn’t want to do this again.

"What are the constraints?" I asked.

"Let's start with your wildest dreams,” replied my doctor. "And then maybe we'll meet somewhere in the middle."

"I want the breasts of 21-year-old French girl," I said. He poked the side of my naked breast with a gloved finger. It sank in up to the knuckle.

"I can do that," he said.

Here is what I wish someone had told me before he did.