"All I Remember Is Falling Asleep and Waking Up"

More than the surgery itself, many people worry about the days that come after it.

Will I be able to go to work? What about washing, moving around? How restricted daily life will feel often becomes the most practical reason that holds a decision back. The person in today's story began with exactly that concern.

Our surgery is performed under local anesthesia. Just before the operation begins, I inject a local anesthetic around the areola and say, "This will sting a little, please bear with just this part." That was the last thing this patient remembers hearing. The next words he heard were, "The surgery went very well, we'll move you to the recovery room now." He said he couldn't understand how it had ended in an instant, and when I told him the operating time, he was even more surprised to learn it had been about thirty minutes. Over years, I have shortened the time considerably through accumulated surgical experience, and I believe the shorter the operation, the safer it is for the patient. He wrote that lying in the recovery room, his mind felt truly at ease, and that the thought "this long-standing worry about my protruding chest is finally over" kept turning in his head.

If you're worried about daily life right after surgery

What this patient worried about most before surgery was whether daily life immediately afterward would feel too restricted.

After the surgery, he wrote this: "I thought daily life would feel restricted right after surgery, but after about three days there were no problems, and I was glad."

This is his course of recovery, and the pace of recovery varies with the extent of surgery and each person's condition. Still, the "long stretch of not being able to do anything" that many people imagine often differs from what recovery actually looks like. It is most accurate to confirm in consultation what flow is expected in your own case.

Here is how the actual schedule is explained. For the first 12 to 48 hours after surgery, there is a risk of bleeding, so you wear an additional compression over the compression garment. Because the chest and abdomen are compressed twice over, this period is admittedly a little uncomfortable. When you come in the next day, we check for bleeding and remove the extra compression, and from then on it becomes much more comfortable, so he said there was no great strain even at his job. During this period, upper-body exercise is prohibited, but you can do light walking or lower-body squats, so he wrote that it never felt confining.