Greetings to all, and thank you to the members of this forum who posted their experiences. It gave me the courage to go through with Gyn. I wanted to share my story and hopefully pass on a few tips that have helped me.
I'm from Alberta, Canada and I was referred to Dr. James Kennedy from Calgary, AB by my family doctor. I'm healthy, albeit 40lbs overweight, 36 yr old. These moobs have bugged me my whole life and finally had the courage to talk to my family doctor about it. I've never discussed it with my wife or anyone prior. I just dug my head in the sand and pretended that I didn't have a problem and tried to hide through layered clothing. After discussing with my family doctor and being referred to a surgeon, I finally opened up to my wife about it and she has been unbelievably supportive or me.
Dr. Kennedy met with me for the initial consult and said that I had a severe case of gynecomastia AND psydo-gynecomastia (lots of extra fat around the area). He let me know that there would likely be two surgeries to achieve the results I wanted. The good news is that this was covered under health care.
I had my first surgery 6 weeks ago today and here are my few takeaways:
-Very happy with my doctor. I was very confident in his abilities despite not seeing any before/after photos of his past surgeries.
-The pain was less than expected. Yes, it was painful but manageable through prescribed pain medication. I was very worried about taking a crap and wiping my ass. The good news is that the pain medication clogged me up a bit so I didn't crap for the first 2 days. From there, it was very easy. Just no sudden movements!
-I was hoping that I would not have drains. I did and they very annoying. Had them in for 3 days.
-I thought I would be able to back to work within a few days. Absolutely not, I gave it 6 days before going back to my desk job.
-I kept this a secret from everyone in my life except my immediate family. As luck would have it, many in circle suddenly needed help moving or some type of other physical help.
-My biggest hurdle through the surgery was finding the proper compression vest to wear. I had ordered a post surgical vest prior to the surgery from Veronique (
http://showcase.designveronique.com/designveronique/shop/postsurgical/men-1/adjustable-compression-vest.html). This thing was very painful to wear! It was digging into my skin and causing sores. I struggled with this for first week and went back and forth to bandage compression to the vest. Finally I came up with the idea to wear something UNDERNEATH the compression vest. This was a god-send. I tried a cotton shirt first and this gave me some immediate comfort but grew more uncomfortable as the day went on. My wife then purchased an underarmour compression shirt for me. The underarmour shirt was very snug but didn't bunch up like the cotton shirt. I wore the underarmour shirt in combination with the compression vest and it was absolutely the winning combination for me. My skin irritation and pain was gone. I then moved onto the stage 2 compression vest from Veronique and thank worked great combined with underarmour as well!
So, here we are after 6 weeks and I'm wearing my stage 2 vest for the last time today. Very glad to have through the surgery. The results are not as good as I had hoped for but my wife notices a big difference. I'll now wait for another 5 months or so to see if I need to have 2nd gyn surgery!
Hopefully this post helps someone.
Topic: Surgery completed and six weeks later (Read 2286 times)
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