Post-Op

I’ve got perfect little tits now – the kind that men write about in their protagonists’ wet dreams. They’re stiff and pale and peaked, the way recipes tell you your whipped cream should look so you know when to stop beating it.

A few days after the surgery I lie on a thin sheet of paper as the doctor slithers the drains out from my underboob. The sensation nearly makes me pass out but I force my eyes open, convinced I’m witnessing some vital life moment, like the birth of a child, that a later, more coherent version of me would surely not want to miss. I stare down. The boobs on my body are unrecognizable. Round and gravity-defying, my nipples stand in perfect salute, purple bruises spiralling out like pinch-thin petals. My scars sear their way down then under, two smiling cyclops, blood hanging like dull teeth. Anchor scars, they’re called, which is funny because I’ve never felt lighter. My before-breasts were the anchors, really: diving off the sides of my body every time I lay down like they were the ones trying to jump ship. Now they jiggle stiffly like Jell-O just pulled from the fridge. 

The doctor slicks the blood away and re-mummifies my chest. When I stand up off the table I stumble, first steps taken off a boat onto dry land. I feel eighty pounds lighter and also like I still might pass out. I can’t stop staring down.

They’re so small, I marvel to the doctor as she peels her latex gloves off.

Well, she replies. They’re not that small.

***

I remember when I first became aware of the problem. I was in my bedroom with my mom, pulling the thin material of a training bra over my chest. It stretched way more than it should and we both noticed. My mother was looking down at me resolutely.

Well, she said, looks like you’re just going to be a bit bigger-chested.

I was twelve. Already I could feel it: that unnamable hot frustration. At the bra, at my body, at myself.

Is that a good thing or bad thing? I asked her.

Neither, she said, her back already turned to me. It’s just you.

But when you’re a kid, there can really only be good or bad. And she hadn’t said good. 

***

I was giddy to show the surgeon my boobs for the first time – it was like I was tattling on two troublesome bullies who were finally gonna get reprimanded. But when I took my shirt off at the first consultation, the surgeon was far more diplomatic than I’d hoped. Silent, she touched one drooping nipple with the tip of her pen. She gently lifted one boob up and let it plop back down. 

Well, you’ve certainly got some asymmetry there, she said. But then said nothing else.

When you go in for a breast reduction consultation, they take a Sharpie and draw on your body where they’ll make incisions. They draw a little circle around your nipple, and then another circle higher up to show where your nipple will go. A dotted line connects these two points like a border, dividing the hill of breast in half. It looks like one of those game plans that sports teams have on a whiteboard to show where everyone will go, to show how they will win.

After she’d drawn on me the surgeon showed me before-and-after photos of surgery results, which all looked like mugshots except the women were shirtless and their heads were cropped off. The surgeon pointed at one and said, She’s kinda like you – that’s probably what yours will look like. I took a picture of it with my phone.

The next photo I had in my camera roll was of me in a red dress I was trying on for Valentine's Day. I liked the dress, but, as always, my boobs looked comically huge, jutting out too intensely from my body. I got a thrill seeing those two pictures next to each other. I quickly scrolled back and forth, trying to blur the two images into one like a flipbook: me in dress, disembodied tits, me in dress, disembodied tits. It didn’t really work but it was nice to imagine.

Sharpie stays on for a long time. For weeks after my consultation, I saw phantom remnants of dark lines across my shock-white skin. I made no great effort to scrub it off. I kind of liked it. I kind of wanted it to stay on. It was like looking at blueprints for your house renovations. I wanted to remember what it was going to be, rather than what it was.

***

In the elementary school changing room I learned to make myself a concave thing, standing facing the corner like I’d be punished. I perpetually wore a sweaty white tank top under my gym clothes so no one would have to see too much of me all at once.

I was always averting my eyes, but when I’d accidentally catch a glimpse of the other girls I was shocked – how were their shapes so fundamentally different from mine? So compact? Spaghetti straps resting effortlessly against gentle bone, while mine dug into my shoulder fat like strings on a ham. It was so easy for them to slip out of miniature lace bras, to stand facing everyone else, to share aerosol cans of deodorant. Their bodies so inoffensive. Were we even the same gender, really? Should I even be in here?

There was one other girl in my class who was bigger, too. Tall with bright red hair. She arrived panting to gym class a second before the bell rang because she changed in the second-floor bathroom and had to run all the way back down to the auditorium. Quicker that way, she told me once, breathlessly. I didn’t believe her for a second. I was so mad I didn’t think of it first.

***

While I was on the waitlist for my breast reduction I started running. I told people it was because I found it relaxing, which I did, but more importantly, I wanted to make my stomach flatter. That seemed to be the overarching purpose of every bodily alteration I attempted: Make It Flatter. Like I was an unsteady kid in a sandbox just trying to pat everything even again.

When I ran I wore three sports bras to keep my breasts at bay. It was very painful, but I tried to convince myself it was beneficial somehow, like carrying small weights in your hands to increase resistance or whatever. This was not true, of course. There were no benefits. But sometimes it helped to pretend.

I ran on a big oval track near my house. In the late afternoon, if I rounded the corner at just the right time, sometimes the sun would fall behind me in such a way that for a moment my shadow looked like nothing more than a big pair of tits with legs. Just for a moment. And then I would straighten and it would look like me again, but still, that image stayed with me. For a moment, that was what I looked like. That was all I saw of myself.

I got the email in September one morning while I was approaching the track.

Hi Abby. I just wanted to let you know that you have been approved for your breast reduction surgery.  I have some dates left in November and December if you wish to have it done shortly.

I stopped and squatted down in the grass with my hand against my mouth. In front of me, my shadow was only a circle, a tightly wound ball full of energy and possibility ready to explode like a planet or a big star. I stayed like that for a long time. I sucked tears back into my eyes. Then I replied to the email and started stretching.

Even with three bras, big boobs will always feel like they are going to tear off your body when your run. This is just physics. But that day, when they bounced and ached and tugged I felt a newfound hope. I swallowed the pain down and ran faster. Do it, I taunted them silently. I fucking dare you.

***

As a teenager everyone seemed to think my massive honking boobs were awesome except for me. One night I went with my mother to a yoga class taught by her Witch friend Camille. Afterward, as I rolled up my mat, Camille felt inclined to come over and offer some womanly advice. 

A lot of girls are insecure and slouch their shoulders because they have small boobs, she explained. But you don’t! So, you should be – and here she stretched her shoulders back wide, thrusting her chest forward in a demonstration of how proudly buxom I could be if only I improved my posture. I smiled thinly and thanked her. 

Once, I went to the beach with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. When I took my shirt off, she was delighted by my full bikini top. Woah! she said. Where did those come from!? I wish I had boobs like that. 

No, you don’t, I said immediately.

Why? she asked, but I couldn’t think of a reason that wasn’t depressing, that didn’t bring up back pain or underboob sweat, so I just shrugged. Lucky for me, my shoulders were always in a position ready to shrug.

You’ve got great boobs, my friend tried to reassure me again, later, when I came out of the water and immediately wrapped a towel around my chest. Flaunt it, girl!

But I was decidedly unable to flaunt it, girl. I was being told from every angle that big boobs are the shit: men love them, women covet them, and if you have them you are very lucky and should know instinctively how to present them in a way that optimizes their appeal. But I just couldn’t. I didn’t know what was wrong. Somehow, my big boobs seemed like the only two glaring exceptions to the big boob rule. When people spoke about the fun of big boobs, they didn’t seem to mean mine. They didn’t mean boobs in the shape of tube socks with two tennis balls at the bottom. They didn’t mean boobs that seemed to take up more than half your body. 

Or maybe they did. Maybe my boobs did do it for some people but I was just so unnecessarily and cripplingly insecure that it was ruining everyone’s fantasy. Maybe my boobs were a gifted pair of exceptionally talented racehorses and I was simply ill-equipped to train them to their full potential. Either way, what I got out of all these interactions was this: my boobs were not the problem. The problem was that they were attached to me.

***

They send me home from my surgery with too-strong painkillers. They make me feel high but not in a fun way, like everything is happening all around me but I’m not privy to any of it. But I need them so that the gnawing in my chest doesn’t become a snapping bite, so I gag them down with dry water. I don’t feel hunger. I wonder, off-handedly, if I might lose weight during the recovery time, and this thought is calming. Already getting started on a new body to match my new boobs.

It is very hard to sleep. I usually sleep on my side, but I cannot do this, so I’m forced to stay sluggish on my back, staring at the ceiling. My brain doesn’t trust me to go fully unconscious again after what happened last time. But it feels fun, giddy, that first night; I feel like a child up past midnight on New Year’s. I watch Animal Planet on mute in an attempt to tire my eyes. My chest shrieks dully, bandages constricting my breasts like birds in a tight-fisted cage. I absentmindedly hover my hands above them, palms domed. Soothing. Hush, we’ll get through this together. Hush now. Imagine, me and my body finally on the same side. On screen a snake gargles an egg through its body and we stay smiling.

***

Even though I’d been with my girlfriend for several months by the time I was seventeen, I was still mortified for her to see my boobs. She knew they were big, obviously, but I’d done a pretty good job of hiding just how big. We’d only ever made out in dark tents and borrowed bedrooms, and if it were up to me we could have gone on like that for years, my body forever dim and horizontal. But now I was kneeling in front of her in a sports bra at 3pm in my childhood room, everything going numb, my breath heavy and thick.

You okay? she asked gently. She was already shirtless and perfect. I felt the need to warn her.

Yeah, I said, laughing sadly. I just really hate my boobs.

The daylight illuminated her nodding, understanding face. I really wished we weren’t doing this in daylight.

When I peeled my bra off I felt them fall heavy like lifeless offerings to a table. I didn’t dare look down. She made no noise, but bent and started to kiss me. It was nice. It was so nice, but I didn’t feel a fucking thing. I kept my eyes closed until we were back under the covers, until the light in my room shifted from beige to blue to black. What I can’t see won’t hurt me. At the very least, it will hurt a lot less.

***

When I return home with my bandages off, my mother insists she do her energy work on me. Energy work is a lot like praying, because you hold your hands a certain way and it only seems to work if you want it to. She hovers her hands an inch above my freshly hacked breasts, saying Yeah, I feel the heat there. I lie still, eyes closed. When I was younger this was how she soothed me: not with touch but with the proximity of it.

She returns home the next day with little crystals that she bought from a woman named Karen who sells essential oils and spices and overpriced little crystals. There’s a white crystal for healing, jade for protection, amethyst because it’s our birthstone, though she cites another reason. I thank her and lay them in the valley of my chest, hoping at least part of me wants them to work. After a while they just feel cold so I take them off.

I feel tired and ravenous for days, though I eat little. I mostly sleep. When I muster up the energy, I stumble into the bathroom and just stare at my tits like a gross ogling man or a sweet hungry baby. I turn myself this way and that, running a hand gently over the diminished bumps again and again. I can’t help it. I can’t stop staring. I can’t stop thinking, Okay. Okay. So this is what my body is meant to look like.

 ***

My bruises have soured into a lovely piss-yellow that almost resembles skin. Five days post-op and I’m poking my boobs every hour now, like fruit waiting to ripen. Slight touch still nauseates but I am soft, holding them as I would a breath. Fingers poised as if to puncture.

They’re still hard like silicon, like implants. The idea of someone mistaking my surgery for an augmentation is delightful to me. I conduct the confrontation in my head: those things real? sneers an imaginary man. No, fake, I tell him proudly. Chest out, lip pout. They certainly feel fake. I keep having to remind myself that nothing has been added to me, only taken away. My body does not yet feel like my own, and so it is much easier to love.

I’ve had a lot of surgeries in my life but this one is by far the sexiest. I feel stupid and seductive. I feel like the painkillers must still be in my system. I feel like a snake, like Eve, like something too good to be true, too good to be. All I know is I’m bloodied and bruised and take four antibiotics a day and my scars seep blood and puss, but I feel way too good to care. All I know is that before, I’d never compare my body to any food people would actually eat. All I know is that before, my breasts pulled my shoulder blades down but now I’d throw open any overcoat with ease. I’d show anyone. C’mon folks, I’d say. Step right up, step right up, come see the tits on this one. The magical self-deflating balloons, the malleable Frisbee girl, whose body was passed from latex-hand to latex-hand before finally being returned to her, pornographic and perplexing and utterly foreign. Step right up, don’t be shy – God knows she isn’t. C’mon. Get it while it’s hot.