Yay! I’m going home to stand in the shower for an hour. At last! All the dressings are off, just have to keep micropore tape over the actual incision lines for a couple more weeks, so the scars stay flat - but I’m allowed to change these myself as and when, so I don’t need to go back to the hospital for a month. Surgeon says he is absolutely delighted with my result to date. I think even leaving my anaesthetic issues out of it, my age and the size of the reduction did cause worries about healing, but everything has gone so well.
I appear also to have two functioning nipples both of which got over enthusiastic at seeing the light of day for the first time in three weeks 🤣. Bruising is still impressive but now multi coloured. Still in a surgical bra 24/7 for another month or three. Given the amount of swelling, consultant still thinks an E cup might be achievable and assured nerve thing does always settle, although can take months. I can also ditch anti embolism stockings next week - would have been allowed to do so today, but have a very long car journey on Monday. Feeling liberated but very vulnerable without all the padding, and with nipples hell bent on climbing out of the bra to see the world through the car window, wave enthusiastically to lorry drivers and shout ‘way hey, over here, look at me!’
All in all, it’s a better outcome that I dared hope for, and worth every penny, even if I do still feel a bit fragile. I still don’t know where I got the courage from to go through with it. And as an unforeseen side benefit, the anaesthetist was so good this time, that I feel I’ve got some closure from my previous two highly traumatic intubations. I don’t expect I will ever be sanguine about an anaesthetic, but it has broken the cycle of each one being worse than the one that preceded it.