Last Thursday I went to Chapel Hill for my second "fill-up". Everything went great! Stewart went with me to learn how to do the procedure in the hopes that we could finish the rest of the fills at home. The nurse had him do most of the appointment and we left with enough saline, syringes, and needles to do three weekly fills at home. Up to that point fills had been bi-weekly so we didn't have to travel to Chapel Hill every week. From now on we hope to be able to fill every week, which would mean in three weeks I will be ready to have a pre-op appointment with the surgeon to schedule surgery!!!
Skip a week ahead to today... first attempt at doing a fill at home... and everything went great! So excited! Things are moving along much faster than I thought they would. At this rate I will be finished with reconstruction in no time! After my fill last week I noticed discomfort for the first few nights and I am already feeling a little discomfort from the fill today. As more saline is injected into the expanders it causes the skin to pull real tight and it takes a few days for the skin to stretch. I am thinking at this point that the tightness and discomfort will be a little worse after each fill. Overall this experience has been so easy and fast!
The big question is... how big do I go? While researching my reconstruction I found that the one thing most women who had expanders and then implants disliked about the end result was their size. They felt they either went too large or too small. And of course no one, not even the surgeon has a great way to decide when you have filled enough. The most common trick seems to be trying on old bras, but the expanders are so wide that I don't feel like this works well. Because women are all shapes and sizes you can't just pick a size or fill to a certain number cc's of saline. What would be a C cup on one woman isn't always a C cup on another, and the size that 450cc's of saline gives one woman may be much smaller or larger on another woman. Yeah, yeah I know... what a hard decision! Truth is with all the scars I don't think things will ever look like what I would like for them too, so is it really that important for the size to be just right. Well, probably not but after all surgery I have already been through I don't want to have to go back and do any of this again! So if anyone has any helpful thoughts ~ let me know! One thing I do know for sure... this is one decision that I don't want to let my husband make! (Just kidding ~ I love you Stewart!)
No comments:
Post a Comment