Breast Reduction Surgery | Why I Went For It

A little over four weeks ago, less than a year after asking my doctor for a referral to a specialist, I underwent a bilateral mammoplasty, more commonly known as a breast reduction.

Over the years, I’ve spoken about my relationship with my body on various occasions, but only once scratched the surface of just how hard it’s been to love because of one particular part: my ample bust line which, to me, always seemed drastically out of proportion with my otherwise petite frame. Many of you have asked very practical questions about my experiences with the medical system and the procedure itself. Since I’m still very much in recovery, I’m going to save that story for a time when I feel like I tell it more fully. In the meantime, I think it’s equally important to explain how the heck I got to the point where major surgery seemed like the only viable solution.

I will preface this by saying that my experience is uniquely my own, much like my body. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a body shape like the one that I had prior to surgery – in fact, I think it’s one I think many people could feel very happy with. But it didn’t ever feel comfortable for me. We only live once, and we only get one body to live in. The choices we make about how to treat it and care for it are entirely our own. (And since, by and large, they have no impact on anyone else, no one should feel they have any right to pass judgement on them.) Surgery isn’t for everyone. But it was for me.

I didn’t take the decision to undergo a breast reduction lightly. In fact, I spent almost two decades feeling somewhere between vaguely and terribly uncomfortable with my body before it occurred to me to seriously consider it. I developed early, and had my first bra by the end of fourth grade, well ahead of all my friends. The experience of puberty is inherently uncomfortable, especially if it seems you’re going through it all alone. And for the first year, that was the world I lived in. But the girls around me caught up. In fact, over the next five years, they mostly surpassed me. By the time we started grade nine, I was the smallest in every class, my days of advanced development long forgotten.

If I’m honest, I didn’t give much specific thought to my bust line in high school. I hated all of my body parts equally. But a sense of specific discomfort about my breast size was already nascent within me back then. I just didn’t know what it was yet. While my girlfriends relished buying “fun bras,” I stuck with the simple few I owned, avoiding trips to Victoria’s Secret with every imaginable excuse. The reality, I realise in retrospect, was that nothing seemed to fit properly and I was terrified to find out what might. Or worse, to learn that nothing would.

When I say I hated all of my body parts equally, I’m not being cheeky. I really mean it. And for years, my deep seated desire to wake up in an entirely different physical form made me unable to focus on what specifically felt so wrong every time I looked in the mirror. I tried every imaginable bandaid solution to “fix” my body, but they all peeled off in the end, leaving the same body, with its unhealed wounds, behind. That’s what bandaids do. They stick, but not forever.

In my late twenties, I had a kind of epiphany: I was not getting a new body. And there was no quick fix for the flaws I perceived in the one I had. If I wanted a different body, I would need to work to change the one I lived in. So, despite every very cogent argument I came up with to continue avoiding physical activity, I took up yoga. Eventually, I learned to like it. Weight training followed. And then running. My body could do things I’d never dreamed possible, it turned out – all it took was a bit of effort, mostly focused not on the actual exercise, but on giving less credence to the little voice in my head that kept telling me I couldn’t or shouldn’t try things that might be hard.

Everything about my body changed when I started exercising. I developed muscles in my previously narrow shoulders, so my bra straps stopped slipping down. My skinny jeans tightened around my calves and loosened around my waist. I was pretty proud of my physical self, for the first time in my life. But there was still one notable defect. My breasts. I couldn shift weight from them. During six years on a particularly high dose form of birth control, they’d continued to expand – eventually reaching, at their largest, a size 28F or 30EEE. I tried changing birth control pills. The result was a loss of about half a cup size. I changed my diet – the result was a lot more energy, but no impact to my bra size at all. Last fall, I stopped taking birth control entirely. I’d heard it could help.

…but it didn’t.

What I experienced when I stopped birth control after a decade was improved mood and energy, along with way worse skin. My bust line didn’t budge. Not a millimetre. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that the body I wanted was almost within my reach – but no matter what I tried, I couldn’t grasp it. My breasts were always there, making me appear to be in the early stages of pregnancy if I wore an oversized top and, infuriatingly, making fitted tops look overtly sexual. There was no winning. I couldn’t buy a bra in any conventional store. The ones that did come in my size, which were few and far between, had to be sourced from specialty retailers. The price point was, in a word, unreasonable. (And, frankly, insulting.) None were comfortable.

But the problem was never really the cost. Or the way clothes never quite seemed to fit. It wasn’t the strain on my shoulders or the constant kink in my neck. (Both are unpleasant side effects of an advanced bra size.) It was that I was always hiding something. And that something was part of my body. When I looked in the mirror, my reflection was never what I expected to see. It didn’t show me as I saw myself.

“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”
– Jorge Luis Borges

That meant that every time I looked in the mirror, every time I looked a pictures of myself, my breasts were all I could see. Even when they were completely covered. I chose the photo for this post to illustrate that point. It is far from perfect. I’m exhaling deeply, my abdomen protruding. But that’s not why I’ve never shown it to anyone before. I’ve kept it to myself because I hate how this bra, which I received for a collaboration, made me look even bigger than I always felt. Stomach sticking out? Who cares, everyone breathes. Breasts look perfectly normal in a normal bra? Disaster. Burn the photos. That’s how it was for me. Always.

I’m an essentially pragmatic person. I see life as a series of problems for which there are, invariably, solutions – and it’s up to me to find them. That’s why I started to exercise. That’s why I changed my diet. It’s a big part of the reason I gave up taking birth control. I had a problem; my breast size. So I looked for possible solutions. But, one by one, they failed. By January of this year, I knew for sure I’d done everything I possibly could to solve the problem for myself. I was out of options.

And so I went to see my doctor to ask about a breast reduction. The hardest part, it turns out, was actually verbalising that that was what I wanted to another person who, I knew, did not see my body the same way I saw it myself. I was lucky. My doctor heard my concerns without questionning my judgement and made the referral I requested. Ten months later, I’m recovering from surgery.

In response to what I’ve shared about my surgery over the past month, so many of you have come forward with your own stories, which are not so different from mine. I’ve been both gratified that you feel comfortable reaching out and stunned by how many of us suffer through similar situations in silence when we could be rallying around to support each other. If you’re dealing with anything like what I’ve described, don’t hesitate to send me a message – I’m here to commiserate. And if you have questions about the medical procedure itself, leave them in the Comments section. Answers are coming soon.