...not to mention jugs, tatas, and bazongas.
Now look what went and happened while I was gone this weekend. I have to put on another Public Service Announcement show.
[
Please understand and support 'verbally' your understanding of the bravery involved in this difficult and quite revealing post. BRAVERY!]
Someone came here searching for
perky titties.
Let me assure you that this is not the proper residence to find perky titties.
Once in HS on an everything but 4th-base-fling, I was told I had the most
pert breasts he'd ever seen.
Pert.
The guy was a jerk, but I treasure that part.
Pert.
I've had a breast post brewing for a while, say five months. My wounds about the subject were re-opened in June. I was putzing around, I believe, starting from a post at
Truth in Cosmetic Surgery Blog. So many people want bigger breasts. Or, like my sister, want (get) breast reduction. Me, I just want them to point the right direction, sorta upwards would be nice. I guess I'd like a lift.
P sent me a funny t-shirt picture recently. Across the chest it read:
Please tell your boobs to quit staring at my eyes.
Despite the fact that he, lovestruck fool, actually likes my package, I emailed him back:
Whatdya mean? Mine stare at your penis.
So the scoop is out. I have awful breasts. The once
pert ice cream cone (picture the cone attached horizontally to the chest) boobies now have the C-cup cones facing south.
I look like one of those topless starving African women in National Geographic. Except I'm fat now.
I grew up teased by none other than my mother and younger sister. They called my boobs ice cream cones, the sugar cone variety. My mother had big, saggy, heavy breasts that made her bra straps dig into her shoulders and my sister grew to have large, round melons she later had reduced, paid for by insurance b/c they mangled her 95 lb frame. Ma and sis would often come up and poke me on the sternum just b/c there wasn't much more than skin there. My otherwise tiny sister had so much breast flesh that the skin over her sternum had a vertical crease much like the very top of a butt crack. Bony sternum and all, I preferred mine, b/c I mistakenly thought they would be perky longer and less trouble down the road.
The fall happened when I was about 30 during my course of 6 months of depo lupron for endo, followed by 12 months of depo provera, followed by another 12+ months of no menses on bcps. It wracked my body, aged me, added 30ish lbs, and made the cones descend in a major way. And they made me feel unattractive, too. Double, well, triple whammy.
Aside from expensive surgery, the only thing I could do was accept them. Combine their direction with my flattened nipples and my breasts were less than sexual objects. Pumping for 7 months, b/c J would not breastfeed from said flattened nipples (few are actually inverted, contrary to popular opinion), corrected them to where they will generally, but not perfectly, pooch outward and semi-correctly when squeezed, rather than retreating due to the binding adhesions.
Hear that you women having trouble with breastfeeding due to flattened or inverted nipples!!! Pump for months and they will correct themselves if the baby isn't a voractious eater [and painfully yanks them out like my finicky kid would not] and isn't doing the correcting for you!!!! No Lactation Consultant will tell you this b/c they are fucking clueless!!!!(
Visit this surgeon's website for before/after pictures of surgically corrected nipples.)
As an additional aside, while I was trying to get J to breastfeed unsuccessfully, I read everything I could, to include the LLL "classic"
The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. I am not providing a link b/c the book is hooey. I fucking ordered the book and looked up flattened/inverted nipples. They less than a paragraph to it. I was casually told that they must occur b/c
the woman must be lacking in enough breast play with her husband in the bedroom. A woman does something (or not, actually) to deserve this deformity! This load of crap haunted me. According to the author, I guess I should have started breast play before puberty, b/c, fucktard LLL, this was the fucked up way I was born! Just like my mother before me!
Further as I come clean overall about breasts, I feel the same way about the recommended wearing of stupid flying saucer discs providing gentle pressure to the nips to try to correct them. Honey, they need Hoovers to pull them out, not yeast-infecting sweat-causing
breast shells. [Evidently LLL has come out with the
Evert-It Nipple Enhancer in the last 8 years. Doesn't look too effective, tho - a glorified syringe? They also seem to have come to realize that breast shells, the wearing of essentially a jock cup in your bra (yeah, I used to knock on them just the way J and his team mates knock on their cups now), is less than desirable, so they came up with the equally ineffective Soft Shell Breast Shells for Inverted Nipples. Oh, the bullshit advances in breastfeeding technology!]
There was some good news, tho. My breasts, after giving up the painful yet useful pump, finally became sexual objects when the nips revealed their sensitive selves. Wow! Nips that stick out feel/respond a hell of a lot better than those too shy to be coaxed out. Wow! Nips with personality. Wow!
Nips that could actually stick into the mouth the next baby and not retreat when suckled! Wow!
Obviously that last part has been a very painful part of SIF. I worked so hard on the nips to make them functional to breastfeed the next baby. [
tears] This is a tough SIF side effect that I haven't brought up here before. Tough.
Breasts a big deal to me? Without a doubt, yes.
Add to that the fact that I have not one, but the coveted two,
accessory nipples (mine are faint like the bottom pic -
supposedly one in 18 of us have a 3rd one) and I am over the top on the Deformed Mammaries Scale.
- saggy tube socks
- flattened nipples
- accessory nipples
Lucky freak, yes I am. At least the accessories didn't present themselves when I was pregnant or breastfeeding; I was expecting balloons on my abdomen like a nursing dog.
When I see cute pancake breasts/nips, I cringe. When I see ones that actually curve upwards, I want to cry.
Tube socks and extra freckle-looking things. That's what I have. The tubes are not quite as wrinkly as the old hag in Something About Mary, but just give me some time.
So, as I was web searching in June, I came across something that rocked my world.
What I have his called a tubular or tuberous breast, not a tube sock. It is a birth defect. It must be genetic, b/c I believe my mother has the same. Here are some
definitions:
Tuberous breasts - A breast deformity where the breast is shaped like a tuberous plant such as a potato. It is a form of constricted breast.
Tubular breasts - A breast deformity where the breast and or nipple areola complex has a tubular or cucumber shape as opposed to the conical shape normally seen in a developing breast. It is a form of constricted breast.
Constricted Breasts - A general category of breast defects that share in common a short distance from the areola to the inframammary crease of the breast. This general category of breast deformities also includes tuberous breasts and tubular breasts.
Here are some descriptions.
THE TYPICAL PATIENT- A patient with a small and tight breast that looks abnormal.
- Often associated with large areolae that are puffy and protrude.
- Features of a breast that is not round but narrower from top to bottom and with tight skin especially below the nipple.
And as far as breastfeeding goes, this, below, explains my appearance and my experience of having a hard time having enough milk [I had to pump 45 minutes each time, double pump, miserable]. I disagree, tho, that tubular breasts are caused by a progesterone deficiency. They are congenital. However, if the supposed progesterone deficiency is congenital as well (ha), then maybe I agree.
Tubular hypoplastic breast [I presently resemble the 3rd from the top but with more space between the pair and better symmetry; I've never been so sparce as the one pictured right next to this part of the article.]
There is one exception to the rule about breast size/shape and breastfeeding ability, and that is that some (very few) women have insufficient glandular tissue in their breasts. In other words they simply don't have enough milk producing cells, and these women can then experience milk supply problems. This condition is called breast hypoplasia or hypoplastic breasts.
This kind of breast is underdeveloped (hypoplastic) in terms of the milk glands. They lack normal fullness and may look like 'empty sacks', and may seem bulbous or swollen at the tip. Many times hypoplastic breasts are widely spaced from each other, and narrow at the chest wall. Due to lack of glandular tissue, they have an elongated or tubular form, and often are quite small. The areola can be enlarged.
There may be a significant asymmetry. The breasts don't grow during pregnancy and there is no engorgement when the milk is supposed to come in after giving birth.
Scientists don't yet know for sure the reason for this underdevelopment. One theory is that at least in some women it would be linked to too little progesterone, since progesterone mediates the growth of alveoli (milk making glands).
If you happen to have these tubular hypoplastic (under-developed) breasts, talk to a lactation consultant before giving birth.
And the best news, well, almost, is that these hooters can be fixed! I'll give you a few examples.
I resemble her
right breast. With a good surgeon, I could look normal.
She's bigger than I am, but look how beautiful she is now!
To be able to wear cute clothes and go braless in public! To have a positive self image about one thing on my dysmorphic body!
Why, oh, why did I go through
25 years of breast exams and three Lactation Consultants to have to find this out on my own? How hard would it have been for someone to inform me that I have a breast deformity?
Why the fuck did no "professional" tell me? It not only affected my self esteem, it affected my ability to feed my son!
Yes, I've known about the accessory nipples since I was 5; a thorough pediatric allergist found them. Yes, I've known about the flattened nipples forever b/c of my mother's experience; one LC told me that I was the 2nd worse case she'd ever seen.
But why
nada on the tubular or tuberose breasts? From the links and descriptions, I don't think it is
that rare.
For five months now, I've had these print outs next to my bed:
Tuberous Breast Deformity/Modified Mastoplexyand
Tubular Breast Deformity/Breast Corrections [I resemble the first and third.]
For five months, I've realized that my defective breasts have a clinical description, one that was withheld from me. [I'll admit that I cried for a couple days in June knowing that I am physically deformed in yet another way. Wounded. I strongly believe that the breast issues and endo are related - tissue in the wrong places b/c of the 'mixed up conductor' theory in embryology. In fact, I believe that all girls/women who show up with an accessory nipple should be considered to have endo. Sure would help out on a lot of IF diagnoses, too.]
For five months, I have contemplated writing this post to let other Google women know that they're not alone.
Bravery, I tell ya. Feel free to write and pat me on the back. Anytime.
For five months, I've wanted to say how wonderful it is to be able to Google stuff for myself, how wonderful the Internet it, how wonderful it is to blog and force myself to think about stuff I thought was useless to think about.
For five months, I did not know the following site existed. Performing this PSA dog show and researching more sites, I found this:
Breast Reconstruction for Deformities Unrelated to Cancer Treatment by AMERICAN SOCIETY OF PLASTIC SURGEONS
ASPS Recommended Insurance Coverage Criteria for Third-Party Payers
DEFINITION: COSMETIC AND RECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY
For reference, the following definition of cosmetic and reconstructive
surgery was adopted by the American Medical Association, June 1989:
Cosmetic surgery is performed to reshape normal structures of the body
in order to improve the patient's appearance and self-esteem.
Reconstructive surgery is performed on abnormal structures of the body,
caused by congenital defects, developmental abnormalities, trauma,
infection, tumors, or disease. It is generally performed to improve
function, but may also be done to approximate a normal appearance.
Anomalies of breast: Code 757.6
■Tubular breast
■Absent breast or nipple (amastia)
■Breast asymmetry
■Breast hypoplasia/micromastia
■Accessory breast or nipple
■Supernumerary
TREATMENT
A variety of reconstruction techniques are available to accommodate a
wide range of breast defects. The technique(s) selected are dependent on
the nature of the defect, the patient's individual circumstances and the
surgeon's judgment. When developing the surgical plan, the surgeon must
correct underlying deficiencies as well as take into consideration the goal
of achieving bilateral symmetry. Depending on the individual patient
circumstances, surgery on the contralateral breast may be necessary to
achieve symmetry. Surgical procedures on the opposite breast may
include reduction mammaplasty and mastopexy with or without
augmentation.
In other words, THIS SHIT IS COVERED BY INSURANCE.
(.) (.) ----------> (*) (*)
~
See also My popular bosom to understand how many people visit this post daily.
PS: if you've had experience with surgery and tubular breasts (or flattened/inverted nipples) or have been frustrated by this/these defect(s), please speak up about your experience, how you learned your breasts have a diagnosis, how insurance worked for surgery, or why you choose to not have surgery. Be anonymous, if you desire. An awful lot of Googlers will benefit from your response and I would be equally grateful.
hypoplastictubulartuberose
