The Painkillers Made Me Write It

Current Mood: Waiting for My Next Dose

If you ever in the future have to get your breast expanders filled, just remember to breathe. Very deeply. It's painful in that invasive, bruisy sort of way. Not the sharp way a needle feels. And then the filling itself is pretty dreadful, but exhilarating at the same time. It's like your chest is a balloon and someone is blowing it up. Except you're not at a party and your plastic surgeon isn't a circus clown trying to make you a crazy hat or something. You're lying on the doctor's table on your back breaking out in hives like the nervous wreck that you are apologizing for things you never really did wrong.

That's me. I'm sorry I'm breaking out in hives right now because you have a giant needle you are about to stab through my skin in order to fill my chest with fluid and stretch my skin and pectoral muscle to places it was never meant to go. What the hell is wrong with me? And of course Renee is there to say that. And Dr. Wu is very kind and warm all of a sudden instead of cut and dry and snippy the way she was before. This may or may not have something to do with her two week trip to Asia that she took like right after my procedure. And of course Renee was there to say the joke that was aching to be told...namely "I guess you needed a vacation after dealing with this one". Where's the guy with the drum when you need him?

But Dr. Wu, luminous and lovely, looked at me and said, "You've handled all of this so well. I knew right away that you would when I saw you the day of the surgery." And honestly, this sort of baffled me, because I distinctly remembered an onslaught of tears that infamous day, tears just rolling down my face and never stopping. And when Dr. Wu came in to take the penultimate "before" picture of my sad, doomed breasts I couldn't help but laugh maniacly, too, through the crying at the ludicrousness of it all. If ever there was an insane person, it was me on that day, with my strange laughter and my sloppy tears standing there naked but for my underwear posing in this bizarre photoshoot.

I wish I could have had a better sense of humor about the whole thing...I mean the situation was begging for a sarcastic supermodel joke, a mug shot joke, or the like. But I was just at such a loss in so many ways. And Dr. Wu said to me with the greatest confidence, "You're going to be okay. You really are." And I believed her. Because she's really pretty. I wouldn't trust a plastic surgeon who wasn't. It's not my only criteria, but damnit if you're responsible to make my breasts beautiful, prove to me that you know what beautiful is to begin with. I wouldn't let a person with a mullet cut my hair.

So I'm sort of in pain, as per fucking usual. I hate pain. I'm sort of unique in the human species that way. But I'm sucking on the teat of sweet, sweet painkillers and Valium, so don't cry for me Argentina. Just validate me, when you have the time. I realize that this is probably the most boring thing you've ever read. But I'm okay with that because I can't always be interesting. I can't be entertaining all the time. I learned in therapy that I use humor as a shield against despair. But sometimes there's just despair and I just let myself have it. I get it out of my system. And then somebody does something really stupid or annoying and I start laughing again and all is right in the world and god is in his heaven. Or however that dumbass saying goes. I don't even know why I am writing this here for public consumption. I just think that all of this is so odd, something rare in the scope of human experience. Don't you think so? I would never want anyone I know to have to live this. But if it has to be someone, then I'm glad that it's me. I'm a big girl. I can take i