FINAL review

I'm currently at 144 pounds and I stopped in to see Dr. Lacerna to see if I was gaining weight in usable areas, after the second consult I sent in my wish pics. She called me and told me that my wish pics are pretty much all unattainable for my size and that it would be possible to achieve my goals with a revision in 6 months if I gained even more weight. At this point she thinks she'll only be able to get 400 cc to each cheek. I'm feeling discouraged. It really doesn't feel like its worth it to have permanent scars and spend thousands of dollars to only have 400 cc's and possibly look exactly the way I did before I gained weight for the surgery. Oh well I guess I have a month to decide.

The first and last picture are me.

So my surgery is less than 2 weeks away and I am soooooooo huge. I'm at 152 pounds now. I'm so sick of food and shakes now and I have actual fat rolls. My family thinks I look great like this. The only upside is that my boobs look great fat lol. I'm so glad Ritfat and Prettylady had a good experience it makes me feel a little less scared about my surgery. I'm going to try to get my best friend to post some pictures from me since I haven't replaced my broken laptop yet.

Good morning ladies. Sorry it's taken me so long to post but my butt hurts! I have my post op today so maybe I'll get to see it then. I received lipo from under my bra and around to the back and down and also lipo tinth inner and outer thigh. I think the thighs are what's making it so hard for me to walk. I'll post pictures when I can. Thank you ladies for all of your prayers. I can't see your comments to respond individually but I will. Tanks so much ladies for all of your support!

Apparently google chrome and real self don't like each other very much. I'm only able to do updates with safari. I'll rewrite my update later. I'm getting over being sick and I'm still tired.

So I've been busy with work lately but I did want to post about my experience coming back to work. I sometimes work overnight and my first night back I was out of anxiety meds and pain meds and I had gotten something like food poisoning I guess on the Sunday prioir (I went back on Tuesday) and I had diarrhea for a few days. I was worried because I was feeling really sick and I had a sharp pain by he lymph nodes in my pelvic region. I contacted the office and I was told to call he nurse. She pretty much told me that she couldn't do anything for me because the doctor wasn't there and she can't diagnose as a nurse. Which sounded weird to me if she's an ARNP, but I guess that she isn't. She told me to go to the ER and to follow up with them. I ended up going to the ER twice before I felt any better. So 3 days later I called the office because I hadn't called and no one had called me. I asked that Dr. Lacerna call/email/text me because no one had contacted me and I wanted to follow up with her. I know that I can be a high maintenance patient but I don't like that its so difficult to reach her at times. But this is something I somewhat experienced before the surgery so I guess I should have known.

Other than that even with occasionally laying on my butt in the hospital and sitting when I had to(still mostly on my thighs) my measurements are 28.5 waist and 42.5-43 in the hip. My thighs are killing me. Hey really are more painful than my abdomen. I would definitely advise any ladies going back to work to have meds for at lest the first few days just in case your body isn't ready. My body was not.

On a positive note I went to my aunts house and everyone thought my butt looked great and they all notice the difference. I'm now 3 weeks and 5 days post op. so we'llsee how it goes. I can feel lumps in my left cheek if I press down a little. I'm hoping that it isn't fat necrosis.

So I'm 5 weeks post and I have days where I feel like my butt is really small...and then I walk outside and men remind me that it's not lol. My family has been surprisingly and amazingly supportive of my decision to have surgery and that's one thing I'm glad I don't have to think about. I'm not currently dating anyone and I worry that when I do and we become intimate that I may need to explain my surgery scars because my skin hyper pigmented at some of my incision sites. Overall I'm pretty happy with my results so far. My entire left side still feels very swollen. Waist and butt so sometimes that's uncomfortable. I went and had a lymphatic massage finally and I felt so much better after but I was super thirsty. My stomach is feeling more normal now but light touch is still uncomfortable. Wearing jeans is still uncomfortable tho.

So I may just be really in my feelings today but I am feeling a lot less satisfied with my results. I'm 7 weeks post op and the more that the swelling goes down in my abdomen and butt the larger the rest of me looks. During my preop I asked for all of the fat in my midsection to be removed and specifically asked for the bra roll to be lipoed. My areas of concern were my thighs for better contour my waist and my bra roll. Dr. Lacerna only lipoed my waist and lower back and my thighs. I began to notice how large my upper back looked at my last appointment so at about week 3 but it wasn't too bad now I look very oddly proportioned. Even that didn't really have me upset because I spoke to her about it at my last appointment and the price she stated to lipo the area was very reasonable-it actually seemed ridiculously low so I was expecting it to be a little more. I called at the end of last week to schedule my next post op visit and also to schedule an appointment for the revision and the office manager told me the price that I was given before was absolutely no where near accurate and she called me back today to tell me that the surgery would cost 3500 just for the lipo and 4k if I wanted to have more fat transferred. So now my only realistic option is to lose the weight so my upper body doesn't look huge and to just have a small butt again. I'm disappointed to say the least. I'm happy with the areas that she did lipo but because she doesn't put her patients under general anesthesia I feel that she should be more careful about selecting which areas are more significant for harvesting fat. I feel that she's done enough surgeries to know that a small waist with a large fat roll on top of it just looks unnatural and by that logic thighs should have not preceded that area in removing fat. I just don't see myself shelling out another $4000 to have an area lipoed that I asked to be done to begin with. Oh well. As far as my butt is concerned the fat is pretty much all still there but now it's shifting down so the top of my butt is a lot flatter and its starting to look a lot like it did preop. I'm just bigger now.

If any Salama patients are willing to sell their post op board let me know. Thanks! Also is it something that can be washed?

So I'm scheduled to have my upper back lipoed on 1/8/12 and I've been meeting with a personal trainer to make sure I get the look that I want. The office and I came to what I believe is a much more reasonable cost for the surgery. I still think that my left cheek is bigger than my right but that cheek is also still swollen in spots so I don't know if it will eventually get smaller too. My butt is definitely smaller than it was the first few weeks post op-as expected. It was also super firm then and now it's jiggly-almost too jiggly lol. It's still much bigger than it was and my measurement has been holding at about 42.5-43 for a while now.
While I was out picking up some post op supplies last night I ended up looking at some frozen food labels and remembered that the post I wrote about weight gain was never posted. I think that was the hardest part of my journey. I really wasn't ready for how taxing it was. My diet was extremely simple but I spent a lot of time researching what I woul base my diet on so that I was consuming food products that provided nutrients and not just empty calories since I still wanted to be healthy for the surgery and I had to be pretty much sedentary to make sure I didn't burn extra calories.
The 2 things I used most were Boost VHC which retails for about $1.80 each on Amazon and Benecalorie which is disgusting and I only recommend if you are really into making your own shakes or plan to cook with it. VHC has 530 calories/8 ounce and has a consistency similar to watery pancake batter. The taste isn't bad but it's not delicious. It doesn't tast like normal Boost drinks. The flavor is a lot stronger. The Benecalorie(360 calories/1 ounce) I used primarily to make "heavy brownies" which pretty much is just a box of brownie mix and it's normal ingredients plus about 2-3 Benecalories and I think a 1/2 cup peanut butter. They taste fine but they're denser than normal brownies and may crumble easier.
My normal diet stayed consistent except when I traveled for work and had to eat out. I would drink high calorie drinks in the am. Like hot chocolate made with milk and actual chocolate. If I was in a time crunch I would eat the highest calorie frozen dinners- like Marie Calender's chicken pot pie-630 calories(I haven't tried this one but it's the best example for calorie density) and I would eat a pint(1100 calorie) of Hagen Dazs butter pecan if I ran short of my calorie goals. My goal was to gain 1-2 pounds a week.

So I planned on taking update pics tonight but I'm tired :/. I'll finish the update tomorrow.

Soooo I haven't been on here in weeks. I hope all of you ladies are doing well. On 1/8/13 I went in to have my upper back lipoed so I'm 2 weeks post now. From that procedure Dr. Lacerna harvested 110 cc's of fat that were healthy for transfer. I think his was each cheek but I'm not sure. I didn't really want to go bigger so I wasn't really too concerned with how much she put in. When we talked at the pre-op we decided to use the harvested fat from the procedure. My butt is currently still measuring the same 43". I'm 32DD/27/43 right now and I'm still swollen. I plan on losing 5 pounds a month over the next few months. I think my final goal weight will be 140.

This round was much easier to recover than the last. I was up and doing normal activities 2 days after the procedure. I have been sitting mostly as normal because I don't really care if the fat from this last time survives. It's not really worth it to me to be uncomfortable again for 6 weeks when I was happy with how my butt looked. For he first 5 days I didn't sit on my butt or lay on my back. I felt fine until I flew out of town and my plane was unable to land so that left me sitting for 4 straight hours instead of the 1 hour I knew that I could handle. Painful doesn't begin to describe the experience.

He worst party with this second round is being swollen and feeling like I'm starting over with wearing my garments. My butt is hard again, tho not anywhere near as hard as the first time because it was such a small amount.
I'm doing pretty well. I don't have any complaints and I'll just be happy when I can stop wearing a garment. Oh yeah I wear my squeem on top of another shirt. Sometimes if I sit for long periods I can see lines that show evidence of uneven compression but if you're wearing your foams-I'm not-you shouldn't get these lines. At least I didn't. If you continue to get the lines and are worried about them I would recommend using a non latex torsette because they are less likely to crease.

So I realized yesterday that I didn't mention that I drove with a boppy for the entire 6 weeks. I didn't drive with it yestarday and realized how uncomfortable it was. I don't have a job thy requires that I sit for long periods of time. So that's not an issue for me. If I had to sit for longer than 30 minutes I used a stool instead of a chair. But at home I sat down unless it was uncomfortable and then I just lay on my sides.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with Dr. Lacerna's work. My butt turned out great. The issues that I had with her were her incision placement because now I have scars in places that are impossible to cover- like the middle of my stomach. I took my pictures down because I was really in my feelings about the scars. A person who knows nothing about surgery probably wouldn't think they were odd but they look bad to me. Dr. Lacerna offered to continue scar treatment for me but I moved out of the state. I received steroid injections while I was still there at her recommendation and now I have 2 hypopigmented scars which look much worse than the hyperpigmented ones. I'm going to start retin-a on the scars. I'll post Finn pics but I never really felt my back fat was effectively addressed. It improved but it was still there. I decided to get another round of lipo after gaining weight in Colombia and I will post a review on that soon.

Almost 3 months post op Sacristan.