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Hey ya'll; is there anyone here who's had top surgery (FtM) and is interested in talking about their experiences? Next month I've got my first appointment with the surgeon who will hopefully preform it; it's just going to be talking and stuff, but I'd like to know what to expect.

 

Also: My insurance will cover the cost of it...but only if it's for physical discomfort, not trans-related reasons, and I don't have the money to pay for it myself. So I'll be pretending to be a cis woman through all this; do ya'll know if that'll effect things much?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey y'all! Had my consultation with the surgeon, and figured I'd drop an update here in case it might help someone else. It went pretty well; I like to think I'm pretty well-informed about the risks of top surgery, so not much of what she warned me about was new (possible loss of sensation, scarring, needing later revisions my insurance probably won't cover, etc.) She didn't question me or argue with me about wanting to have a completely flat chest, which was a relief.

 

I had to have my breasts photographed (just them, not my face thank god) and examined, which kind of sucked but let her confirm that my chronic pain fortunately/unfortunately is caused by them and is severe enough that my insurance is probably going to cover it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

So now I'm waiting to hear back from my insurance company; once I do, I can schedule the surgery.

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I'm four months post-op right now and I'll gladly chat experiences. :) With that broad a topic though, it'd be hard to pin down what to say without creating countless tangents.

 

I went with periareolar top surgery and am overall happy with my results. (Insurance covered it too, but I'm still waiting for my reimbursement.) My chest still feels like it's settling, but I doubt I'll need revisions. Can't say I had an easy recovery though. My left side wouldn't drain properly and I actually went to the ER the first night of recovery because of all the excess bleeding. The surgeon's nurse had to squeeze a lot of the swelling out by hand on more than one occasion. In fact, at my reveal, my left pec looked bigger than it was pre-op from all the swelling, so the nurse spent over an hour squeezing that gunk out of me.

 

Because of all those swelling issues, I got prescribed a second strain of antibiotics out of precaution. A few days after I finished that antibiotic, I had a horrific delayed allergic reaction to the stuff. I was really close to developing Steven-Johnson's Syndrome and found myself going to the ER, spending two days in the hospital, and then returning to the ER mere hours after I was discharged because the damn doctor didn't give me a single prescription despite the fact that I was taking steroids while I was in the hospital. That allergic reaction stayed in my system for over two weeks, and recovering from that was hell. It's all water under the bridge at this point, but the recovery was definitely much harder than it should have been.

 

That said, I would do all this again 10x over if that was what it took to have a flat chest. I notice that the dysphoria was gone the moment I awoke after surgery. I could physically feel that my chest was finally right. No longer having to bind has been so good on my back, and living in a particularly hot environment, no longer needing to wear that extra layer made the summer so much easier to tolerate. Fuck, I can actually enjoy swimming now, even if I'm still wearing swimshirts. I'm waiting until I'm 1 year post-op before I expose my scars to sunlight. Excessive sun can especially darken new scars and I want to minimize what little scarring I have.

 

2 hours ago, Confidential_Con said:

So now I'm waiting to hear back from my insurance company; once I do, I can schedule the surgery.

 

One thing I can recommend is figuring out if your insurance company requires a pre-clearance for surgery. My top surgery got delayed five days over that, and that was after several weeks of scrambling to get through all the red tape. I got mine explicitly covered as a treatment for gender dysphoria, so it'd look different for me than it will for you, but I hope everything goes without a hitch! :) 

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