Before I knew it, I’m now 8 months post-op. Following my last post about choosing implants and then choosing a hospital, I thought I’d talk about the recovery process after surgery.
Even thinking back on it, breast surgery really is major surgery.. When you read internet articles, you sometimes see stories about accidents during surgery that went wrongㅠ Since an incision is made in the chest area, there are risks, so I looked especially carefully at whether an experienced anesthesiologist was on-site. One more thing that made me trust them was that their anesthesia method was differentiated from other placesㅎ To reduce the burden of general anesthesia on the patient, they did it in the order of sedation -> general anesthesia -> sedation.
After the surgery is over, the anesthesia hasn’t fully worn off, so you feel groggy~ My mouth kept getting extremely dry and I kept smelling medication tooㅜ After resting for about an hour, I started waking up from the anesthesia, and at the same time the chest pain started coming up too.. From that point, the pain from hell and the battle against swelling began..ㅋ They said the faster the swelling goes down, the better the progress, so right after surgery I went straight to the Han River and walked around until night~ You can think of it as me walking for several hours every single day after surgery. Maybe because I walked every day, the swelling went up to below my collarbone and then went downㅎ
I had surgery through an underarm incision using dissolvable sutures~ My skin scars easily, so I didn’t even consider other areas. And it was convenient because I didn’t have to revisit the hospital to have stitches removedㅎ They say underarm incision tends to hurt more than other areas~ But since the surgical site is hidden, I’m very satisfied with it afterwardㅎㅎ
The pain was the most.. the absolute.. extremely painful out of anything I’ve experiencedㅠ You end up going through a time where you realize how much your chest muscles are used in your body.. For about 1 month, you can’t use strength in your hands or arms to lift things or pull with force...ㅠㅜ The moment you exert force, there’s tremendous pain in the chest.. After that, it gradually got better, and from the second month it felt much easier. I rested for about 2 weeks after surgery and then went to work, but even raising my arm to grab the subway handle on my commute hurt and was hard, and when the subway shook, I had to tense up to hold on, so I would secretly scream insideㅠㅜ And when walking too, you have to walk very gently so you feel as little vibration? in your body as possible.. If even a very small vibration is transmitted, there’s tremendous pain in the chest...ㅠ The hardest part among all of it was lying down and getting back up.. Getting up was so hard for me that I slept sitting up for several daysㅠ Later I got a bit of the hang of it and curled my body up, then used momentum to get up, but there was still painㅠㅜ As for smaller pains, the compression bandage pressed and rubbed so my armpits hurt, and because I couldn’t lie face down, I always had to sleep on my back, so my lower back hurt..ㅎ Listing it out like this, it really was a total mess;; Still, once time passes, it all becomes nothing major, so don’t worry too much! If we want to get prettier, we can handle this much, right^^
With an underarm incision, you shouldn’t use your arms or chest muscles until the surgical area has healed to some extent. After that, while checking the progress, you do stretches to loosen the stiff muscle tissue, and the pain that comes then plays a big part too..ㅎㅎ When you stretch until there’s a cracking sound from the muscle, an “Ah!” comes out on its own.. If you don’t do this, recovery won’t be fast, so even if it’s hard, you have to force yourself to do itㅜ Since consistent stretching leads back to soft breasts, I held back the pain and worked hard at it whenever I had time!
I’ll save the stories I missed this time for next time and wrap it up here! Thank you for reading this long post^^
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