Truman Customer Story Column
I Want to Walk Tall with My Back Straight
"I worried about safety."
That is the first sentence this person wrote when asked what worried them most before surgery. It is not a common answer. Most worry that it will hurt, that a scar will remain, that recovery will take long. This person worried one step earlier: whether the process of surgery itself is safely managed.
For someone who comes in with this worry, I think explaining the procedure exactly as it is makes the best answer.
One of the things we watch especially closely in this surgery is bleeding. So for the 12 to 48 hours after surgery we have you spend the time with additional compression over the garment, and when you come in the next day we check for bleeding before removing that extra compression. During this period you should not do upper-body exercise; light walking and lower-body squats are fine.
That there is a process of checking in a set order — that, in the end, is the answer we can give about safety.
After the surgery, this person wrote that it went cleanly, with no need for worry. But I have to add that the course differs from person to person and varies with the extent of surgery and your own condition.
For their impression of the first visit, they wrote: "I was shaking, but the staff were very kind, which was good."
I was glad they wrote "shaking" plainly. You can generally guess from the expressions of people entering the consulting room, but it is rare for someone to say it themselves. Easing that tension a little at reception, in the consultation room, in the treatment room is about half of our work.
An Answer of Sleeping SoundlyAsked about their memory of the surgery, they said, "I slept soundly without a worry, so I don't know."
The surgery is performed under sedation and takes about thirty minutes. How it went is explained in the recovery room afterward. An answer that there are few scenes to remember reads to me as a good sign.
For what they most wanted to do after surgery, they chose "walking tall with my back straight."
For people who have lived with gynecomastia a long time, posture changes first. Rolling the shoulders to hide the chest, leaning the upper body forward — repeat that for a few years and it becomes your default posture. So straightening your back is a story about the body, and at the same time not only about the body.
The answer they meant to leave for others with the same concern stopped before the sentence ended. What can be read is the sense that it would be better to have a consultation than to spend the time deliberating. I transcribe only what was left. That is their view, and whether your condition calls for surgery is something to judge after confirming it through an examination.
As for what they would ask of TRUEMAN, they wrote that they could ask for nothing more. Rather than lean on that, we will keep the same order for whoever comes next.
