Make the Time and Get It Done Sooner

There was one passage in this feedback I couldn't simply pass over. In the box asking what he remembered from the day of surgery, he wrote that the cost was higher than he had expected. It is a single line tucked among kinder ones, but I think this is precisely the sort of comment that should be taken exactly as written.

Gynecomastia is a condition for which the cost depends on several factors: the extent of the excision, the state of the tissue, and the tests and anesthesia involved, which is why the final figure can differ from what someone assumed at the outset. (In Korea, national health insurance coverage may apply when the criteria are met, but that applies to those enrolled in that system.) That is why we go over how the cost is made up during the consultation — and yet hearing an explanation and actually paying are two different experiences. I won't offer excuses about it being higher than he expected. There is only one answer I can give: to make the result something that justifies what he paid. That is the standard I operated to, and it is the standard I will hold to in following his recovery.

What he had actually worried about beforehand was the recovery process and how long it would take. His verdict afterward was brief: having done it before the heat set in, there were no real problems. There is more substance to that remark than it appears. After gynecomastia surgery there is a period of wearing a compression garment, and if it overlaps with midsummer it becomes quite an ordeal — sweat, discomfort, and eventually a garment that doesn't stay properly in place. He had his surgery on the threshold of summer and got through the hardest stretch of recovery before the heat arrived, so his timing was good.

Of the clinic he wrote that the consultation was friendly and the atmosphere relaxed. His answers were short and spare throughout, but because he selected only the necessary words, each line read all the more clearly. What he most wanted to do after surgery was, again, a single word: exercise.

His message to men with the same concern was short as well: "Rather than saying 'I'll do it when I have room in my schedule,' make the time and get it done sooner." There is always a reason to postpone. Work is busy, the season is awkward, you want to look into it a bit more. And yet it is the men who make the time, like him, who end up leaving lines like this one. I hope the time he carved out proves to have been well spent, and that the training he is about to start goes to plan.

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

- Dr. Jeon Jin-woo, TRUEMAN Gangnam -