Drainless tummy tuck with MR and lipo to flanks

Hey ladies. My story starts out the way most of ours do. Busy mom of 2 tiny humans, good clean diet and plenty of exercise- but nothing is helping with this tummy! At 5'1 and 145 lbs, I carry a lot of my weight in my stomach (& legs and butt...yay me). Before I had my children, I was actually about 60 pounds heavier. 200 lbs was absolutely HUGE for my frame, and my stomach never really recovered. Both my kids were average sized babies...7 ish pounds...and I gained a ton of weight with both pregnancies. I've been hard on my body and it's resisting change, so I'm going to help it along ;) I stumbled on this website and it's been a game changer for me. Like many of the women on here, I am struggling with spending such a huge amount of money on myself and feeling selfish for undergoing a major, tough, and elective surgery just to improve my looks. It feels very vain. However, we practically live outside in the summer. We have a pool and spend almost every weekend at the cottage, and I am tired of missing out and sitting on the side lines while my wonderful kids and man play in the water because I am too self conscious to wear a bathing suit. It's silly and I don't want to do it anymore. Time for a change.
I have my first consult tomorrow with a fabulous doctor in Newmarket, Ontario Canada. This man has wonderful reviews and before/after pictures and I am very excited to meet him. Happy to start documenting my journey. Care to join me? ;)
I WILL add pictures. I will. Soon. Ish. Haha. xx

Hey ladies! SO, consult went really on Saturday. The doctor was fabulous. Very nice with a great bedside manner. He spent almost an hour with me answering questions and gave me a tour of their facility. They do surgery on site and have a beautiful, state of the art clinic. I was very pleased and plan to book with him. HOWEVER, I was surprised to learn that I don't have enough loose skin above my bellybutton (this is a SHOCK. Looks like PLENTY to my unprofessional, untrained, critical eye lol) and will likely need a (hopefully small) vertical incision as well as the traditional horizontal, hip-to-hip cut. Apparently, I don't have enough skin laxity and the old belly button site can not be pulled down far enough to be removed and would have to be stitched closed. The doctor has no way of knowing how long- or where exactly- this incision will end up until I am in surgery. This makes me extremely nervous as it was not something I was expecting. I have looked at thousands of pictures and have not seen much of this at all. I have since googled the heck out of it and have found a lot of support for this and found it is apparently fairly common if the patient does not have enough skin. It's dangerous to pull the skin too tight and can result in tissue death. OBVIOUSLY not worth the risk. The alternative is to make the whole scar higher, but the makes little sense to me. Any of my fellow TT out there have any experience with this??

Hope you're all doing well!

I did it... I booked my appointment and made my deposit. I'm not having surgery until November, so I have pleeeeenty of time to panic ;)

I'm going to post my pics now. Be nice lol.