Worrying Is a Waste of Your Youth

The questionnaire we give patients after surgery includes this item: what worried you most beforehand, and how was it in reality? I read the answers to that question closely every time. The gap between the worry and the reality is, I think, a more accurate record than any explanation I can give in the consultation room.

His answer read: "I was worried about pain, but there was not even a little pain." Coming in worried about pain is probably the most common case of all. Sensitivity differs from person to person, of course, so not everyone answers this way. But when anesthesia is handled carefully and operating time is kept short, the pain a man feared can end up leaving no memory at all. His one line shows that.

Of his first visit he wrote that everything from the surgical consultation to the explanation of costs was easy to follow. Gynecomastia is a medical condition, and yet there are still men who put off treatment for years because they have no clear idea of what it involves financially. So from the outset we set out what the procedure covers and what the expected cost will be. (For patients enrolled in Korea's national health insurance, coverage may apply when the diagnostic criteria are met; what applies to an international patient depends on their own country's system and any private policy they hold, which the insurer decides.) It is easier to think clearly once the cost is clear. He also wrote that the consultation he and I had before surgery felt reassuring, and if it took even a little of the tension out of the day, that is enough.

What he wanted to do afterward: go out somewhere in nothing but a white t-shirt, and build up his body. "White t-shirt" appears strikingly often in answers from gynecomastia patients. The thinner and lighter the fabric, the more it reveals, so it was always the shirt pushed to the back of the closet. He can hang it at the front now.

The line he left for men with the same concern became the title of this column: "Worrying is a waste of your youth." He said, on my behalf, what I would have wanted to say. Under suggestions for the clinic he wrote only, "You're the best." We'll work to deserve it. I hope every place he goes in that white t-shirt is a good one.

This was this patient's outcome; results and recovery vary from person to person.

- Dr. Jeon Jin-woo, TRUEMAN Gangnam -