I visited my old friend Dr. Plastic this week.  It had been awhile. Except for a brief sighting in the halls of The Brigham last month where I crooned like a fan-girl spotting my favorite rock star before Gina pulled me away (“oh, look…it’s him…”), I hadn’t talked to the good surgeon since last April. That’s when I was convinced that my silicone implant was leaching poison throughout my body slowly killing me or turning me into stone like Joan Rivers’ face.  He assured me that it wasn’t.  At that visit we did discuss the fact that he had made me a tad lopsided and would possibly need to re-do the entire surgery to give me a smaller implant to match my other side.

I don’t get the warm and fuzzy feeling from Dr. Plastic that I used to get.  Maybe it was the drugs they had me on.  Maybe he felt bad for me then. Now I am just another patient to him, one he can’t even really gouge for more surgery as I think these guys are required to perform a certain amount of mastectomies for insurance reasons. I had become an onerous obligation to him.  One he should have been done with already.  Otherwise, his real bread is buttered by the botox, boob-job, and butt-lift crowd.  When I entered the waiting room, he barely looked up from the receptionist desk as he and his gal poured over vacation spots on the internet; “See this one has 4 pools and a walkway to the beach.” Ack.

When he checked out my chest in the office, he was all business. We concluded together that I would not go ahead with replacing the whole breast again.  It would be too much surgery for me and he thought that the next size down would be too small. I have no problem with this since in nature we are all a little lopsided anyway.

“Just see how it goes,” he said as he closed my file and headed for the door.

“Wait.” I said.  “What about the rest of it?  So I don’t have a Barbie-boob anymore.”

“What?  Oh do you want….”

Don’t say it, I thought, not the word….

As many who know me are aware, there are a few words in the English language that I can’t handle. They skeeve me, make my skin crawl, and I have a hard time rolling them off my tongue.  Ointment is one of those words, the way it sounds, the connotation, the word itself.  Chipotle has also become one of my truly despised words.  To me it’s completely made up and you have to actually swallow the word to say it. It gets stuck deep in your throat.  I won’t even take my kids to the restaurant of the same name…and they know it.  “Oh don’t ask Mom to go to Chipotle, she’ll freak out.” Slacks, blouse, bosom, I have quite a few and thanks to my catholic upbringing many of which involve female body parts.  But one of the worst for me is Nipple.

Here  I was, faced with having to not only say this word but ask for a new and improved version of my old one.

“So you want to go ahead with the nipple replacement surgery?” he said.

“I guess so.” I said.  Ew.  Now I just wanted him to go back to his travel-agent secretary and stop thinking about my nipple and fast. But instead he was back sitting down telling me about how they would be taking skin from my ASS and making a, well, you know. And that I would be out of commission for 4 weeks.  Here we go again, I thought, just in time to begin my training for the Pan Mass.

“Schedule it with my secretary for some time in March,” he said, “I will be away in February.”

Ya, I know.

As much as I don’t want another surgery and am actually contemplating pushing it back until next year, I also want this whole thing finished.  I am starting to feel like the Golden Gate Bridge.  By the time they finish putting me back together and painting me up all nice, I will be falling apart and rusting somewhere else.  I also figure the faster I get this done, the faster I can stop having to find ways of avoiding the word I hate so much.  Like when my 16-year-old son asked me yesterday why I was having surgery, I said, “Umm, so they can make me anatomically correct.”   He didn’t ask any more questions.

Surgery is scheduled for March 11th.