The “Blow-Up Doll” phase of my treatment

I am currently in what I refer to as the “blow-up doll” phase of my treatment. Every Monday morning I truck over to my plastic surgeon’s office for an expansion of my breast implants. The process takes less than 5 minutes, but is one of the most surreal things I have ever experienced. First my doctor uses a stud-finder, yes you read that correctly…a stud-finder, to locate the metal ports embedded under my chest muscle within my expandable breast implants. He then sticks a big needle into the port which I cannot feel at all since I no longer have nerve endings in my chest. Using the needle in the port he adds saline to the implant. At the first of our “blow-up doll” sessions he literally doubled the size of my breasts as my husband and I watched in amazement. He warned me that it would feel much like I had over-stretched a hamstring. He was correct in that I did indeed feel stretched, so stretched that I had a hard time breathing for a few minutes. I immediately reached for the ibuprofen in my bag, and after it kicked in I could breath almost normally. This week, with my sister looking on, my doctor again repeated the process…but this time with a little less saline. I watched in amazement as my boobs expanded even more. What a testament to modern medicine! Now only 5 short weeks after a double mastectomy, I have boobs even bigger than before my surgery. Granted they still look a little like a science project, but not bad for 5 weeks out of surgery. I still have two more of these “blow-up doll” sessions. Then I must maintain my over inflated status for 3 months in order to form a proper capsule under my chest muscle for my “real” implants. In January I will go back into surgery to have the expandable implants replaced with permanent silicon implants (which will be smaller and more natural looking), and then I will have a final surgery several months later to reconstruct my nipples. Anyway, in the words of my good friend Dan, “here’s to modern medicine and to blow up dolls”.