Will My Cups Ever Overflow?

Things that look silly on me: baseball caps, tube tops, v-neck sweaters, bras, most bridesmaid dresses. There’s a long list.  Other than baseball caps, the reason why I should stick to tee-shirts is simple: I am one seriously flat-chested girl. And, let’s face it, buxom babes can don baseball caps more capably than the rest of us.

Before you start thinking that this is simply a case of media-fueled female body scrutiny, let me explain. I am below an A-cup. We’re talking very symmetrical mosquito bites. I’m called sir when I forget mascara. I don’t require wearing a bra at the gym. My sense of humor exists to compensate for a lack of cleavage. So I’m not considering breast augmentation simply because I saw one too many skin flicks or ’cause the new line of Victoria’s Secret lingerie doesn’t make me look like Adriana Lima. I am literally flat-chested. Which is fine. I’m fortunate enough to have a boyfriend who is either attracted to girls built like boards, or is a closet homosexual.

The average salary for a plastic surgeon is $300,000 a year,  though it can vary by years of expertise and location. Understandably, those professionally nipping-and-tucking in Bismark make less than those in Burbank, due to the fact that more ladies are stepping under the knife in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Some of these slick scalpel-smiths net nearly 4 million per calendar year. I’m obviously not alone when it comes to being enticed to get myself sliced and diced.

In a study, nearly 56% of men indicated that they were perfectly content with the content of their partner’s bustier. But when it came to women, the numbers took a nosedive, only 30% felt satisfied with their own sweater puppies. Sad. Moreover, if it wasn’t wanting to get them upgraded, it was a desire to get them lifted, reshaped, reduced, or cosmetically enhanced somehow in order to render them bulletproof man-magnets. Augmentation is three times as popular as reduction, and nearly 300,000 women undergo the enhancement surgery. That’s one woman for every dollar the average plastic surgeon makes in a year.

What’s worse, I’m not the only basket-case considering going under the knife: there are links between women who undergo breast augmentation and depression, as well as several studies that indicate that those who do accrue are twice as likely to commit suicide.

Okay, okay, yeah, fine. I’ve read all the studies about tattoos, too, and yet I risk Hep-C on a regular basis to get inked. I don’t think I’m suddenly going to off myself if I’m more confident taking my top off, but who knows. I keep assuming that women with larger breasts make more money, have more fun, and have less to worry about, as though their floors vacuum themselves simply because they can fill out a B cup. I wouldn’t know. Then again, they don’t know the freedom that comes from racing down a flight of stairs to answer the door. (Or so I hear.)

A few friends have asked me why I can’t just be content with what I have, and I have to explain that I am. I love my body, which is something I can say only after years of abusing it with alcohol, starvation, and reckless sex. (Hooray for being in your twenties!) I’m lucky that not only does my body look half-way okay, but it works. I can dance around like a nutjob, lift fairly heavy objects, and touch my toes on command. I’m a functioning human being, at least in the physical sense, and it’s something that I don’t take for granted. But can I really live my whole life not knowing what it’s like to try on a tank-top and have it actually fit? Or to walk into a room and know I’m not being dismissed as somebody’s little sister? (Or brother?) The idea of getting implants has crept into my mind in a similar way that tattoos did when I was a teenager: can I really not do it? Will I regret it more if it’s simply something I think about, but never do?
Of course I’ve scoured the Innerwebs for some sort of research to support my hankering for something to support. I was hoping to find a definite link between moolah and ta-tas, a study or bar graph that proves that women who have larger breasts also have larger paychecks. But no dice. Instead I found some facts about fake funbags that gave me at least a little bit of pause.

The first point of contention is the price, which is astronomical, until you think of the fact that a) it’s major surgery and b) they’re breasts. On average the surgery costs 4K to 10K, depending on the facility, anesthesiologist, etc. Which means that unless I suddenly become a porn actress and have the whole shebang comped by the studio, I’m looking at forking over just two thousand dollars short of what I made  in total last year. Crazy.

But believe it or not, the amount of bills Bs cost isn’t what really got me. I should preface this by saying that I am a complete pussy when it comes to medical shit. When TLC has surgical specials, it’s my equivalent of an Asian horror movie marathon condensed into thirty minutes of pure squirm-worthy torture. I gagged repeatedly when I simply read about the punch biopsy procedure I had six months ago, and I won’t even get into what happened when I went into the gyno to get it done. (In brief: tears, screaming.) So I’m not the least squeamish of individuals, but that aside, I think that some of the information I found might even make strong stomachs swerve.

When I hear of term "sub-muscular" I think about Arnold Schwarzenegger as a deep sea explorer. Turns out it’s one of four options for "implant pocket placement," each worthy of their own section of the Matthew Barney Cremaster series.  Subglandular is the variety of implant that is often looked at as the most attractive, but it’s also the kind that ripples like a waterbed when a lady lays down. Subfascial implants are placed under the pectoralis muscle much like subglandular implants, only beneath the shudder-inducing " fascia of the pectoralis muscle." Some believe that this makes the implant more stable, which makes sense when you think that you  just stuck it under the majority of your torso’s musculature. Subpectoral, or "dual plane" placement, is the most common technique performed in North America. It includes "releasing the inferior muscle attachments" which allows for more movement of the implants. "Releasing" I think is doctor-speak for "cutting the fuck out of." Submuscular implants involve more reconstruction of the tissue, by sewing certain lateral chest muscles to pectoral muscles, or something like that. Basically turning your chest into Frankenboobs.

Other than the procedure itself giving me the willies, there are the what-ifs, and when it comes to boob jobs, there are a lot of them. Platinum could leak into surrounding tissue, as is often the case, turning the accessories for a gold-digger into an full-metal jacket for her insides. Leakage, complications, and systemic illnesses have all been discussed in the media, from some reality show floozie getting rushed to the ER for a popped socket, to Pam Anderson and the legendary Jenna Jameson discussing waning their watermelons in order to be healthier and happier. My heart might rupture and tears might flow every time I read about Trent Reznor getting married, but my tits shouldn’t rupture because they are filled with bags of salt water.

The two scariest possibilities that have me putting the brakes on my coveted cleavage are the kinds of complications that lead me to believe that elective surgery might be the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. For one, the surgical procedure itself can tug at the nerves, thereby reducing or diminishing nipple sensation. I have mine pierced for the simple fact that I want more sensation, not less. The nightmare of having permanently dead nipples is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, and for all the wrong reasons.

Lastly, there’s this thing called capsular contracture, and it should cause your skin to crawl. See, the body isn’t designed to have foreign objects in it. In fact, it’s a finely tuned instrument that has a keen awareness of when there’s something inside of it that doesn’t belong there (excluding unemployed guitar players and too many pizza bagels.)

Perhaps you were a part of the eyebrow ring craze of the nineties, or had a friend who was. Many people complained that their eye accouterments "grew out." Their corpuses kicked the jewelry to the curb in a way that was similar, but far less grave, than organ donors whose bodies reject their newly-acquired innards. My understanding of this is that the immune system goes a haywire trying to get the things that don’t belong in the body out. Same thing can happen with implanted Ziplocs of saline solution. The body recognizes that these things weren’t there before the traumatic surgery, and it goes a little ballistic trying to protect itself. Because it can’t exactly reject the implant and shove it out of the body slowly, as it did with that lovely 16 gauge bent barbell in your eyebrow, it creates tight collagen fibers around the implant itself in order to shield the rest of your internal organs.

Some capsular contracture is considered normal, as the body is trying to prevent friction and heal, but the fiborous capsule can harden and grow tighter, resulting in a misshapen, dense, and potentially painful ta-ta. A hard breast, hard as a rock. Can you imagine getting to second base and having them feel like baseballs? Unattractive. Scary. And yet a prime example of how the body is a miraculous thing, without the need of enhancement.

5% of patients develop capsular contracture, which is a pretty large auditorium filled with people, if you remember that 300,000 women per year sign up for this surgery. You’d think that with 15,000 chicks complaining of painfully hardened tits there would be a nice and easy procedure to remedy it, right? Wrong.

"Some surgeons still attempt to remedy the problem by squeezing your breast and implant hard to break up the capsule. This can result in a lot of pain, possible deflation of the implant, and minor to major bleeding in the breast."

That’s right. They could squeeze your tit until it hurts, and then until it bleeds. Or, better yet, you could get more surgery.

"Other surgeons prefer a surgical approach and make an incision to reach the capsule. They then lance or score the contracted tissue surrounding the implant to loosen it and break it apart."

I could keep going, but I’ll stop here, as I’d like to eat a meal in the foreseeable future. Doctors are looking out for you, trying to concoct new ways to treat capsular contracture, including ultrasound, corticosteroid injections, and manual compression. (Look that up. It’s WebMD’s version of what happened to me in ’96 outside of a gymnasium with a kid named Dylan, whose nickname was Brace Face.)

Do I really want to put myself in the cross-hairs of capsular contracture, all for the sake of something I find sexy? I wish I could say that all of these possible complications have put me definitively in the anti-implant camp, but if I did I’d be lying. I’m still interested in getting my tits done, though I’m not sure I’m man…er, woman enough to do it. The truth is, when it comes to surgery, it’s better to unclip the Wonderbra and see what’s below it. In the meantime, I’ll start saving my pennies for something truly important and classy, finishing up my tramp stamp.

Tagged as: body image issues, breast implants, breasts, gratuitous mention of Matthew Barney, light as a feather flat as a board, plastic surgery, possibly dangerous things, tits and class

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