4.5 years post surgery

[hellooo123]

Hey guys,

I never thought I’d be back here, but I feel I have to share an update on my experience.

A little backstory, I developed gynecomastia as early as middle school, I didn’t get why, but I always felt extremely uncomfortable shirtless. I’m sure you all know the feeling.

It continued to develop until I realized what was going on late in high school.

I suffered with this extreme insecurity and truly body dysphoria my entire college life, I know you can all relate, all the while working very hard to save money so one day I could get the surgery.

Fast forward to 2016, I was 25, my parents were out of the country and I had all the money to get the surgery done.

I was lucky to have a world renowned surgeon in Northern California (I’m sure you’ll know who) right in my city, so I took the plunge and had the surgery.

My recovery was extremely traumatic, though with the help of my life coach/lymphatic drainage massage therapist, I was able to get through it and come out on the other side a year later with THE MOST AMAZING masculine chest I could have ever imagined.

I was thrilled, extremely confident, happy, liberated, free, euphoric... all of that. My life changed for the better for a couple years.

In 2018 after being used to my new chest and body, I got tired of extreme dieting while lifting intense weights, and I let myself eat whatever I wanted and then some, and I was able to increase the intensity of my weightlifting even more.

My weight skyrocketed from 175ish to 210 of both fat and lots of muscle, but I immediately noticed the sides of my chest, going under my armpits to my chest, was very strange looking. The fat was lumpy, I had hard tissue in there (where the lipo was done) and this made me extremely depressed. I tried my hardest to starve and lose the weight again a few times, but I have never been able to look the same since.

Though I’ve gone down to around 175-180 again, my chest never ever looked the same, and it’s only gotten dramatically worse up until today.

Now, I am insecure again, my chest looks deformed, I went from receiving endless compliments on my chest to someone asking if I had a “tummy tuck” on my chest... this was the first time anyone had ever “clocked” my surgery. Needless to say I was devastated and hurt.

As the months go by, my chest only gets worse and worse, despite loosing 30+ pounds again, despite lifting weights very intensely, it just looks deformed. At this point, you can even see it through my clothes. This is how I know for sure it’s getting a lot worse. It was never visible through clothes, and not it’s obviously there are ripples, lumps, just looks horrible.

I don’t even want to show you a picture because it’s that bad. I showed my friend today for the first time and I immediately felt worse for taking a pu fire that showed it in it’s full “glory”. The right side of my chest looks basically like mashed potatoes/cottage cheese/fat roles/creases (the creases I could honestly always see and I know these were from the compression garment that kept folding but since i could only notice it under some lighting, it didn’t really bother me) ... there is no more definition on my pecks, it just goes from pecks to lumps. The left side isn’t as bad, but I have the same problems there plus some uneven fat under below that peck which was mostly not visible when I did extreme dieting.

I don’t know if all of this is fibrosis, lymphatic fluid that accumulated slowly and hardened after stopping lymphatic drainage (did that regularly for a year, but I spent around 3k on it and I couldn’t afford it anymore), or if it’s just fat that shifted, loose skin, scar tissue, I don’t know. All I know is, my results did not last. I’m not blaming my surgeon, he obviously did an amazing job since my results were once nothing short of breathtakingly incredible. But I don’t know what exactly is causing this.

I am devastated, I have been ignoring this for a long time now but I can not anymore. It feels like I literally had my dream come true only for it to be ripped away from me, and then had me thrown into a new nightmare.

While I don’t feel dysphoria anymore, or a disconnect with my body, because fortunately I don’t have boobs anymore, I am back to being insecure, feeling hopeless, working out endlessly for no improvement... I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know if I should seek a revision elsewhere, if I should accept it, keep ignoring it...

As you can imagine, this makes me insecure to the point of wanting to avoid sex again, DEFINITELY avoiding being at the pool or beaches (this was a dream when I was able to do this. I had so many compliments on my body. I felt like an Adonis)... and now, it’s back to being just a fantasy.

So I guess I’m here to tell you guys that you should be aware of what can happen years after surgery, bring it up to your surgeons and see how you can avoid this. Do I regret the surgery? No, because I’d take this any day over what I had before 10000%. but am I still confident? No, I am not confident anymore.

There is a young female doctor I have been following on Instagram for a long time that lives and works in Mexico City, who specializes in smoothing out liposuction complications/localized fat/all kinds of subdermal and dermal scaring and I am considering seeing her. She uses like semi non invasive diode laser technique (I think in English it’s called laser lipolisis?) to break up fibrosis scar tissue and localized fat pockets from liposuction or otherwise, and started using a new tool called Morpheus for skin tightening... I am considering taking a trip in January and having a consultation with her. Only thing is the results are cumulative and I’d need to see her repeatedly... also, I’ve never seen her work on a chest post gynecomastia reduction surgery, most of her work is on the abdomen, neck, legs, back, etc... the “common areas”.

I’m pretty terrified honestly to have another procedure done, since like I said, my recovery was very traumatic and I dont even know if my results would improve. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t feel good.

Maybe my case is unique, hopefully no one else has gone through this or will ever. I’m not sure, but it is a possibility, so I wish I knew ahead of time that this could happen so I could at least be better equipped to try to avoid it somehow.

Best wishes to all.

[MarcoB]

I don’t even want to show you a picture because it’s that bad.

Most who post pictures here won't show their face (myself included).  No one needs to know who you are.  It's like they're all imaginary people who live inside the computer; but we help each other and learn from each other.  If you post a picture, maybe one of the doctors here can make some helpful comments and recommendations.

[hellooo123]

Thank you for that. I guess I’m also terrified of a doctor confirming that I am indeed f*cked and that there is absolutely no good for me. That aside, it just is kind of traumatic to even accept that this is happening to me and immortalizing it in a photo makes it that much harder for me.

I definitely don’t think I can spend another 10k on surgery again and the 3k on lymphatic drainage/counseling again. I honestly almost didn’t make it through the first time if you know what I mean. It was that hard. I don’t regret it, but there were moments I really felt I couldn’t go on. I don’t want to go through that again. Plus, on my surgery day, I had to go under twice as I developed a hematoma in the recovery room. I don’t want to go through the fear and not knowing if I’ll wake up from anesthesia again. Doing that twice in a day was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made, especially because I didn’t tell my parents. I also lost a lot of hair density during recovery due to the stress and I just can’t go through that again.

I feel really bad knowing that I DID have a perfect, beautifully sculpted, tight, sexy, masculine chest that others were envious of. And now I feel deformed, like I had bad surgery (not saying I did, but that’s how it looks) and I feel I have to hide in black clothing and layers again. I recently started feeling like I have to wear a tank top or a shirt under my main shirt again just to hide the deformities on the right side that now show through almost everything I wear. I hadn’t worn anything like that in 3 years. I thought this nightmare was a thing of the past.

[hellooo123]

Hey guys,

So out of desperation I purchased one of those massage things with the ball tip that kind of pounds you really fast (I’m sure you’ve seen it on instagrams ads, meant for athletes and whatnot), just to see if maybe the cottage cheese feeling hardness and lumps where I had lipo might be trapped and hardened lymphatic fluid, since it started happening a while after I stopped lymphatic drainage... so far with only 15ish mins of going over the area, most of the hardness and lumps are not there anymore?? Meaning, when I kneed the area with my hands, it doesn’t feel like these hard stuff under the skin anymore... it’s soft. curious...

Might be a fluke, but I’m going to do this daily for a while and drink lots of water and kind of go back to that self care and see if I see any improvement.

I pray that all I needed was continued lymphatic drainage. Fingers crossed but don’t have my hopes up. I’ll update after a few weeks.

Thanks guys, best of luck to you all.