Cosmetic Surgery After Massive Weight LossBreasts? Where'd they go?

Many readers are asking about plastic or cosmetic reconstructive surgery after losing weight with gastric bypass surgery. Over the next few days I’ll share my experience with cosmetic surgery and direct you to some informative sites about procedures to clean-up the excess skin resulting from weight loss after morbid obesity. The first topic is breasts.

Breasts? Where’d they go?

In my pre-surgical consultation I remember one of the questions I asked my surgeon was “will I lose my breasts?” He assured me, yes indeed, I would lose my breasts. Nine months and 100 pounds later they were gone. I was embarrassed by after WLS breasts, now deflated skin balloons hanging from my chest. My breasts – my sexual pride and joy for so many years - were now ugly sloppy flaps of skin. I loathed my trimmed down naked boy-body. Something had to be done.

First effort: I increased my exercise: bench presses and butterflies. That didn’t help. Any exercise that works the pectoral muscles will help tone the chest, but not the breasts. Breasts are not muscle tissue, they are fatty tissue, and therefore do not respond to weightlifting or resistance exercise of any type.

Second effort: I tried some rub-in creams ordered from the back of a fashion magazine. They promised to grow my breasts by two cup sizes. The promise was a lie; don’t waste your money.

Last step: Consult with the plastic surgeon. He congratulated my weight loss, complimented my muscle tone (I really did do a lot of resistance exercise) and then he suggested mammoplasty & augmentation. He would take my deflated skin balloons, put them back front and center where they belonged and inflate them with implants. I was about 18 months out of surgery and had maintained my weight loss for two or three months. I felt confident the time was right to get on with the “finishing touches.”

The surgery was done under general anesthesia in surgical suite at the plastic surgeon’s office. He removed excess skin, lifted my nipples and repositioned them and inserted implants beneath the pectoral muscles. He closed the area with surgical tape and bound me in a surgical support bra. After I was awake from the anesthesia my husband took me home to rest and recover.

There was a great deal of pain from the muscles being lifted and moved in surgery. Also, the weight of the implants seemed great on my chest. Sitting was the most comfortable position. Lying down or standing caused discomfort. I took prescription pain medication for six days and then over-the-counter pain medicine for another two weeks. At first the breasts didn’t look normal (what’s normal about implants?) and I had the equivalent of breast postpartum sadness asking repeatedly “What have I done to my body?”

However, as the pain subsided so did my sadness or regret. My new breasts settled nicely onto my new small body and to this day I do not regret the procedure. I feel like a sexy, curvaceous woman – the woman I never thought I’d become.

For a detailed explanation of breast augmentation I recommend this article by Kimberly A. Henry, MD and Penny S. Heckaman WebMD Medical Reference from “The Plastic Surgery Sourcebook.”

Breast augmentation, or augmentation mammoplasty, has become one of the most frequently requested plastic surgery procedures by women of all ages. It is most commonly performed to increase the size of small breasts, correct a difference in size between the breasts, and for breast reconstruction following mastectomy for breast cancer. A breast implant is inserted either behind the breast tissue of each breast or behind the pectoralis major muscle, the major muscle of the chest wall, thereby increasing the size of the breast. Link to the full article.