So your big day of excitement comes.  You’re a little nervous.  Not quite sure what it means to be operated on.  You want things to go well, not knowing exactly what “well” means.  Don’t fret – you’re not alone!  On the day of surgery patients generally show up about an hour before we begin.  An IV is started, and you’ll get some pain medicine before we even begin.  The nurses help you prepare every little thing.  The anesthetist will talk to you, and I’ll talk to you.  We go over your operative plan, to make sure we’re on the same page, and then I draw my map to help me do things just the way we’ve agreed.  After that, you walk into the operating room, you become sleepy, and then we prepare for the operation.  To let you know how things look at this stage, it’s something like this:

Here’s Angela just before we begin.  As you may be able to surmise, we’ve chosen to place her incisions in the inframammary folds – the folds where her breasts hit her chest wall.  The incisions are about 3.5 cm long – around an inch and a half.  We placed 450cc silicone implants below her pectoralis muscles, using high profile implants (relatively narrow width but more projection).  After the procedure she looked something like this:

You’ll notice a few things about this picture.  You can already see that the implants look very large, and that they look like they come up to her collar bones.  This can be alarming to some people, but is very normal.  With time, the implants will settle, and will take on a more normal appearance.  Some people take longer for this to happen, as was the case with Angela.  As the days progress you’ll be able to see the implants’ position change.

Up next – that goofy in-between period!