I am freaking the fuck out.
I wrote earlier this week about how I was irritable, tired of sitting around doing nothing and worried about the results of this latest surgery. Some of that abated when I talked to Tiff and cried for half an hour.
"What if I hate it?" I wailed. "I was really lucky with the first two surgeries and got these amazing results. What if my luck runs out and my thighs just look mostly the same after all of this?"
"What if?" Tiff countered. "What would you do then?"
"Be unhappy? End up on an episode of Plastic Surgery Disasters or Dr. Phil."
"Your surgeon won't let that happen, Stephanie. She wants you to be happy with all of this. She would never let her own reputation be damaged by a thigh lift, especially not the one she did on her very favoritest patient."
As usual, Tiff was right. (She's a smart person. Don't you think she'd know if she were wrong?) Yes, they're still swollen and puffy, and the skin still has to retract after the lipo—which was a horribly violent procedure in its own right, as Mandypants pointed out that afternoon. It will take weeks for them to heal fully.
And it's not like my surgeon made some quick incision and then sewed me up, just to make me think she did what I wanted. She removed roughly forty square inches of skin from my thighs, sucked out a bunch of fat, and stitched me back together.
She knows intimately all of the work that went into changing my body and my health, that led to my finding her for this series of procedures. Like most plastic surgeons, she's a perfectionist (tinkering with OCD?). As my nurse said today, my surgeon would die a thousand deaths before she would let me be unhappy with this or feel like it was botched in some way.
And I have no reason to think it will be messed up. It's totally irrational. But I've been freaking out about this surgery much, much more than I did about the others. In theory, this is the easiest of the three procedures, by far. It's the longest incisions, but there's no muscle involvement. It was four hours—less than originally anticipated, which was already planned to be the shortest anyway.
Last night, I emailed a picture and a video to Tiff, of my thighs. I was sitting in the recliner, looking at how the skin and fat and muscle spread across the upholstery. They do look less dimply and saggy, though they also still look thunderous when I'm sitting.
"That's just thigh, Stephanie," Tiff said to me this morning. "They just spread when you sit."
"Really? Everyone's do that?"
"Yes. Your thighs are perfectly normal and natural. Watch The Talented Mr. Ripley. You'll see Gwyneth Paltrow's cellulite. You'll see. It's all of us."
Here's the thing: I don't know what normal looks like. It's not like I was a normal girl who got fat and then normal again. I've never been skinny. I have absolutely no frame of reference for what's normal.
I've spent a lot of time looking at other women's bodies, over the last year. It's not a matter of seeing how I want to look, or what I think I should look like. It's been about seeing how the human female form is put together. How does the hip meet the thigh? How do hip bones look on not-fat women? How much tummy bulge is average?
So now I'm trying to figure out my own body in that same regard. Do my hips curve at the "right" place? Do my breasts hug my ribcage like a regular woman? Are my hip bones too pokey?
I honestly have no idea. I can barely compare this body to my last, let alone to another woman's. I know I'm about a size 8-10 now, but it's almost impossible for me to hold up a piece of clothing and judge if it's an appropriate size, simply by its cut and shape. Almost invariably, I still pick the too-big one, thinking it's the one that will fit.
I'm trying to stay calm. This is the last one, right? But for some reason, I have been on edge about it for two weeks. My surgeon and I discussed it while she Sharpied me before going into the OR.
- Maybe it's because I know it's almost done.
- Maybe it's because I'm afraid I don't deserve this.
- Maybe it's because I'm afraid it won't matter, that I'll still never really get it, in my head, that I'm not that same girl anymore.
- And if I don't have the thighs to hide behind, what is there to keep people and their emotions and their sometimes hurt at bay?
I hid behind the fat and the food and the sadness of it all for years, to keep people from hurting me again and more. In the end, I was hurting myself more than almost anyone else ever could. But if I finally let down that guard, if I'm finally able to just be normal, what then? Will I get hurt again? Will something horrible happen that undoes all of the good?
I don't know, but it's completely possible. It's as likely as not that some external force inflicts damage on me again, when I least expect it. Maybe with laws of averages, I've already had my share, but I'm hardly an average girl—it's more than plausible that it could happen.
And it's not like me to worry about such things. That's just life, I know, and I usually try not to overact, or to react at all until necessary. I've done so much work in the last two years, inside and out, that I know I have the tools to handle whatever comes up. But it's really easy to slip back into the fat girl mindset, and I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of being that fat girl again.
So I'm sitting here now, crying my eyes out, surprised that all of this even came to the surface. I wasn't sure where I was going when I started writing tonight, but here we are. Thanks for bearing with me and letting me talk it out. Thanks for being beside me on this journey. Maybe next time, I'll let you pick the music.
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