rats, I am seeing this after I made a PB&J when I could have had 30 or 40 olives instead :(

Hey so, I get you are trying to sound supportive, but let me offer some constructive feed back. (1) referring to someone’s reconstruction as correcting “disfigurement” is tone deaf at best and out right rude at worst. Read the room. (2) You don’t get to decide if a surgery is valid, be it cosmetic or otherwise. Only the person being operated on gets to make that call. You are looking from the outside in with 1% of the information the patient is working with. Your judgement on other peoples medical care is not needed or appreciated.

reminds me of the saying - the difference between wisdom and knowledge is, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

There is a lot of different answers to these questions, I’ll give you the jist, then my specific answer.

Where does the breast tissue come from?

There is two main ways to do reconstruction - the most comment is breast implant. In this case they remove all of the breast tissue and leave just the skin. The remaining space is filled with a implant and the size of the implant is determined by how much skin you have. The second way it can be done is to transplant tissue from another part of your body to the breast area, it is usually from either the belly area (DEIP Flap) or from the back area (TRAM Flap). This type of surgery requires the surgery match up the tissue transplant on a vascular level (vein by vein) to make sure the transplanted tissue does not die.

I had a DEIP flap reconstruction - it requires almost a week hospital stay due to how complex the surgery is and recovery is 6-8 weeks, but honestly its been just about a two years and I am still recovering and also I have an additional revision surgery that I still need because - no I am not even close to being even.

How does one sculpt a nipple?

They typically do not. Normally the nipple is removed entirely. In the reconstruction I have heard of the nipple being rebuild but, its not nipple tissue, so its not the right color and it cannot react to environmental stimuli and from what I’ve seen, gets stuck sort of “hard”. When the nipple is removed most people will opt for a tattoo replacement. They look very very real and you don’t have the issue permanently smuggling raisins around. I was able to keep my nipple, visually it looks like a nipple, but I can no longer feel it.

Are they as sensitive as before?

No they lose all sensation, can’t even feel the skin, so not even like elbow skin, totally numb. They had to rebuild my stomach and belly button, so I also cannot feel anything across my lower abdomen either.

Does having breast cancer on one side automatically increase the chances of cancer on the other side? I would think symmetry isn’t a given?

No, the risk of recurrence is the same. If I was to have the same type of cancer in my other breast it would be a recurrence, not new cancer and after treatment my risk of recurrence is lower than my chance of getting a totally new type of cancer.

Were you able or allowed to choose size and shape? (If so, did you go for the tried and true original?)

Short answer no, long answer I was not very well endowed to begin with and my reconstruction was limited by the amount of tissue I could use for transplanting. So, again no and also they aren’t both the same size anymore, the reconstructed one is quite a bit smaller and not really the right shape, which is what I am going back in for more surgery to fix. If you had way more breast tissue than I did, there is more options for reconstruction, but from the woman I have talked to, most people end up going smaller or staying the same. Going up larger brings in a lot of complication and can only happen if you get a implant reconstruction and not a transplant.

Hope you’re doing well today. Not a question, I just wanted to say (write) it. Live long and prosper.

Thanks I plan on it 🖖

Just want to also point out for readers that this entire comment is only about gender affirming care and has nothing to do with medically treating cancer, but because we are affirming my breasts for my gender as a cis woman, its just healthcare.

My 78 year old uncle feel for an Eastern European woman after his wife passed from COVID in 2021. It started with just chatting online with her, she was a real person, he talked with her on Facetime, this was before AI was so rampant.

Then it progressed to him sending her small amount of money, like 50-100 here and there, not frequently enough for anyone to notice and he didn’t mention it at first. Then it progressed to larger amounts of money, but less frequently. At this point the family was catching on and once his son figured out what was going on, he had been scammed out of just over 50,000.

His son now has full financial power of attorney and that scammer can’t get anymore money. My uncle unfortunately has pretty bad dementia now and he does not remember losing that money.

I had breast cancer. The chemo and mastectomy were cancer care. The reconstruction of my breast is not cancer care, it is gender affirming care, having two breasts affirms my gender as a cis woman.

Reconstruction is not necessary at all for cancer care and in fact causes more surgeries than if I was to just have the cancer removed and go on the rest of my life with one boob.

They just don’t call it “gender affirming” care if you are cis, they just call it healthcare.

There is two people in this thread

1. people who read “bringing your phone in the shower” as having the phone in the same room as the shower.

2. everyone else who seems to think that people are putting their phones directly under the shower nozzle.

They most likely found out about honey extractors (spins uncapped honey frames around very fast to extract honey from the comb) without knowing about how honey extractors actually work (they are spun after the bees have been removed).

Says my worn out poncho to my PS5 that is covered in dust and hasn’t been updated since 2024

“dude” always felt gender neutral to me

You will find out how gender neural “dude” really is when you ask a guy how many dudes he has banged.

I’d love to see this done horizontally

I saw The Chemical Brothers play back in the early 2000’s and they were set up with racks and racks of keyboards surrounding them. They played their electronic music live on the keyboards and watching them blew my mind. Up until this concert I never thought of electronic producers as musicians, this totally changed my perspective.

I did this exactly too, swapped to vaping about 10 years ago and lowered the nic amount to 3mg for years. Finally decided to put it down in 2023, switched to 0 for 2 weeks and quit for ever. I smoked for over 20 years and tried to quit so many times, used everything, gum, mints, patches - vaping was the only thing that helped me. Its a shame that its just the new cigarettes now.

I was a little kid so I didn’t really understand what he was doing at the time. I do know, looking at history, that a lot of the terrible shit happening today can be directly traced back to policies and decisions from that administration.

But I do not remember him being hated or even unpopular. I do remember Bush Jr. being unpopular, but that might be because I was in high school for him and knew more about current events than I did as a child.

its not even selling access to the library tho, its someone standing in front of the library retelling, in their own words, what is in the books and also including things that aren’t in any books or media but sounds like they might be.

Yea, reddit has been a serious habit for me for almost 20 years, never been on Insta or Facebook or any other SM platform like I was on reddit, everyday all day in the background. Its been a hard one to break.

Its not a controversial take, lots of us in the sober community don’t mesh with AA. I would never bash another persons path to sobriety, but the way they look at people who get sober working the steps vs people who chose other paths doesn’t sit great with me. I also don’t like the direction AA steers people to feel helplessness around addiction and giving your recovery to a “higher power”. But like I said - what works for some may not work for others, and I would never stop anyone from finding and walking the right path to recovery from them, as I have for myself.

If you see this and you are looking to experience sobriety and you are not feeling like AA is for you, there is lots of options out there like, Allen Carr’s Easyway, SMART recovery and Recovery Dharma just to name a few. But also please if you are struggling, feel free to DM me. I am always happy to talk.

I joined Lemmy, like 3 years ago I think. But I didn’t start being active until this year. I think there is a lot of people like me, especially now that you have to log in to see old reddit. https://old.lemmy.world/ really tipped me over the edge in to being a regular.

Did the same this weekend, re queued myself because I thought I was going to have more time to scrap together cash before I got the notice.

Doesn’t really feel like an insult anymore right? Its interesting that so many gendered words for women are insulting yet the gender neutral equivalent isn’t.