Ibuprofen and a Chevy

I got through this week with a little help from my good friend, Vitamin I.  I had a filling of my expanders on Wednesday and it about stopped me in my tracks.  I don't know if I've hit the point where they really are stretching things past the original size or if I just tweaked something leaving the office.  My chest was so tight and I felt like the expanders were pushing on my heart and lungs and trying to kill me from the inside (i would love to see that in an obit, "woman died from traumatic injury of internal organs caused by her tortoise shell implants).  Of course, instead of taking some ibuprofen and going home for the afternoon, I went back to the office, ran errands and spent the last three hours of the day in meetings.   I could hardly get out of the bed that evening.  I know the reconstruction process isn't a cake walk and there will be times that I experience some pain and discomfort, but I was definitely questioning the whole process earlier this week.

Someone in FB nation had posted an article about breasts and how normal breasts don't look like plasticized stripper boobs that we see everywhere - what, you don't see them everywhere?  Women should be proud of their asymmetrical, saggy selves and not succumb to pressures to look like Barbie.  I started thinking about that and how (or even if) it applies to my situation. I started to feel a little guilty for getting reconstruction.  Maybe I should have just lived with the mastectomies and chalked it up to "character building".  Then I thought about it for another ten seconds and thought, "nope".  I've had my character built up just about enough for a while.  It made me think of a past "character building" incident.  When I was in high school, I drove my dad's 1978 white Chevy pick-up with an extended bed and a large pipe with a chain wrapped around it on the front for the bumper.  One night while he was parked on the side of the highway working a traffic accident, a gal came around the corner and smashed in the driver's side door.  Once the insurance settled, Dad and I headed to the salvage yard and found a replacement door...a brown replacement door.  I begged my dad to let me paint it (there was a time in junior high when I was pretty good with auto body work).  He said the brown door built character and we would leave it.  Awesome.  Did it kill me to drive the big white truck with the brown door?  No.  Would I have rather had a white door?  Yes.  I'm not trying to draw an analogy between Chevy trucks and my breasts (I'd have to think about that one a while to come up with anything witty), but I'd like to have the front half of my torso look somewhat like it did.  And you know what?  If it looks bigger, perkier, and a little like Barbie, I don't care.  They will be man-made in every sense of the word and I'm not going to be apologetic.  Someone else can drive the old truck around for a while and work on their character.