Since I was a young girl, as long as I can remember, all I ever wanted was big boobs.
I got such a schmorgus bord of my parents genes, but the Corbett boobs was not one the good lord blessed me with. It didn't matter to me how many times my big breasted friends would say things like, "you do NOT want big boobs", I didn't believe them and always felt like the grass was greener on their side of the yard.
For approximately a decade, I'd meet with different doctors to determine if they were the ones I'd trust with my hard earned money and my life, to implant me with these magnificent lumps. For a variety of reason, I never pulled the trigger... Until 2015 when I decided that enough was enough and I wasn't going to wait until after I had kids when at that point (and still), it was looking like kids may never happen for me.
When I look at my pre-op and post-op before/after pictures that were taken within 10 days of each other, I already see a noticeable difference in my waistline. I even remember looking at the photo with my doctor afterwards and saying, "wow, I've already gained weight just from a couple of weeks without exercising". He shrugged my comment off and gave me info on when I could start exercising again.
My recovery from getting implants was incredibly hard. Much harder than I anticipated. Most of my girlfriends who I knew who had them all said that they felt more or less back to normal by about day 3 post-op. For me it was much closer to day 10, if even at all, to this day. I used to love running and the first time I tried running post-op I had to stop and walk home almost immediately. This past year I begged my body to get back into running and it fought me every step of the way. Five years ago when I was running regularly, I was running around a 9-10 minute mile and now I'm lucky if I can get down to the snails pace of a 12 minute mile.
It was maybe about a year after I got my implants that I learned about Breast Implant Illness, or "BII". I wish I could remember how I learned about this, but I immediately fell down the rabbit hole of information. To condense what BII is in simple terms, it is our body's way of rejecting a foreign object. At this point, I'd only gained about 20 pounds, but when I saw on the list of symptoms "weight gain, with the inability to lose it", something in me clicked and I knew it was my implants that were the root cause of my thicker frame. At the time of writing this, I have gained almost 50 pounds since I went under the knife and I hardly even recognize myself anymore. I see pictures of myself and unless I've scored some awesome angle, I am disgusted. Even my fingers and my knees look swollen. My KNEES people!
In the grand scheme of things, I count myself as very lucky that my BII symptoms are minimal. Other women suffer far greater than I have. These symptoms have shown up in other women as autoimmune disease, chronic pain, hair loss... The list is a mile long.
On top of the weight gain, I've also had monthly yeast/bacterial infections. I've stopped going to the doctor for antibiotics because I don't think it's any better for my body to be on those every single month. While I previously had depression and mild anxiety, my anxiety has been through the roof this past year and I even had a full on panic attack the summer of 2016. My brain fog and bad memory is so bad I cannot remember anything unless it's written down and even then I'll probably forgot that I wrote it down. Lastly, I noticed a serious uptake in my drinking post-op and not just drinking, but blacking out almost every time. It didn't seem to matter if I had only 2 glasses of wine, or the entire bottle, I wasn't going to remember parts of the night before the next morning. More on this topic in a later post...
On August 4th, 2015, I got 475 cc's of toxic silicone implanted and on August 27th, 2019 I will have them removed by Dr. Rodgers in Katy, TX. Just over 4 years later and honestly, this could not come a minute too soon.
The words on this page did not pour out as eloquently as I'd originally hoped, but I've started and stopped 4 drafts and honestly don't know if any of them are any better than this one. I share all of this with the world NOT for pity or attention. Those that know me well know that while I'm honest when people ask about my implants, I will confirm I have them and talk about them if inquiring minds want to know, but I don't flaunt them like a Playboy bunny. The main reason behind sharing this is because this was not something I knew about before getting them and I can't help but wonder if I'd discovered BII 5 years ago, if I still would have made this decision. We will never know, but I do hope that by sharing this information with you, it will stop at least 1 other woman out there from getting their boobs done. Or maybe even get 1 woman to realize what her implants are doing to her and inspire her to get them removed.
If you're the praying kind, please say one for me this coming Tuesday and if you're not, maybe just throw an extra fuzzy thought into the world. Even if having these removed does not heal me back to where I was 4 years ago, I know that I am making the best decision for my health and my future.
Please ask any questions that have come up for you, I'm an open book!
