If you are one of my regular readers, you know that I had implants with the initial breast augmentation and lift surgery. If not, implants are used to replace the breast volume that has been lost either over time or due to breastfeeding and pregnancy. They can also be used in the case of benign fibroid removal to help fill out the breast blGflA
My surgery was purely cosmetic. My breasts had degraded as far as they could go. According to the RN at one consultation, “they weren’t going to get any worse”. By degraded I mean that the areolaes covered the entire end of my breasts, my nipples pointed at the ground and my breasts had very little volume. They looked like a couple of pizza slices hanging from my chest wall.
It is not physically possible to put breasts back where they were when you were 18. Skin stretches far too much for that. What they CAN do is add volume. That’s where the implants come in. But there are big differences once the implants are in. Remember, these are foreign objects placed in your body. So they are not going to act like your own natural breasts.
Here’s what I’m talking about when I say “Headlight breasts”. They look like they were pasted on her.
Whether they are saline or silicone, they are not going to feel or act like your own natural tissue. For instance, with a natural breast in a 30+ year old woman, when we lay down, we end up with our breasts migrating towards our armpits. This is commonly referred to as fallout.
It’s just what breasts do after a certain age.
With implants, those puppies aren’t going anywhere. You lay on your back and they stay where they were put. They may move a little but not like real tissue.
This is one reason I advocate for tissue-based reconstruction whether it be TRAM flap or Lat Flap reconstruction for women who have lost their breasts.
The other reason is the feel of the breast. I can only speak from the point of a woman who has had saline implants. You can FEEL the implant through the skin. From my perspective it feels like you’re squeezing a warm, overfilled water bottle.When I poked at them, I could HEAR the saline sloshing sometimes.
My husband says, “They were very hard kind of like groping a hard, squishy melon. Well, something not as hard as melon but not as soft as breast tissue.”. He enjoys my reconstructed breasts much more. The reason he likes the tissue reconstruction better is that “they’re natural. They’re all you”.
The down side to tissue reconstruction is that, on a deep feel, you can feel the edges of the flap. You really have to search for it, but it’s still there. For my husband, there IS no down side now that the flap has softened.
